people were just envious. They separated that evening ‘half friends again,’ as Goebbels
noted, in which was implicit that they were now half enemies.44
ON March 6, 1931 the gauleiter addressed another huge meeting at the Sport Palace.
His audience greeted Grzesinski’s two police observers with roars of ‘Out!’ lasting
several minutes, and Goebbels heaped his own special kind of ridicule on them. On
the following day Angriff repeated his words verbatim.45 Currying public sympathy,
on the thirteenth he staged a stupid bomb plot: having ordered the S.A. man Eduard
Weiss to open all mail addressed to him at HQ he arranged for a crude home-made
device to be delivered to him there.46 Although there is no doubt as to Goebbels’
authorship of the attack, he lied to his own diary about it.47 More court actions
crowded in on him—eight altogether during March.48 On March 14 the Reichstag
decided that he could be arrested after all. Severing’s ban on the brown shirt uniform
in Prussia was declared unconstitutional.49 On the fifteenth however Grzesinski
repeated the ban, and he imposed a speaking prohibition on Goebbels in Berlin, in
revenge for the Sport Palace episode. He instructed his police to prevent Goebbels
from speaking to transport workers in Hasenheide the next night.50 Hitting back,
Angriff instructed Berlin’s Nazis to wear their uniforms and to sue Grzesinski if he
ordered any arrests. The next day, two Nazis gunned down a communist deputy in
Hamburg. The press called for a general ban on the party, and the speaking ban on
Goebbels was extended to the whole of Prussia.51
After that Brüning’s emergency decrees could no longer contain the rising discontent.
Goebbels arrived at one huge Königsberg rally to find that he had been banned
from even entering the hall, where twelve thousand had gathered to hear him. Thousands
of cheering East Prussians escorted him and Prince August-Wilhelm back to
the railroad station, carrying the little doctor shoulder high up to the platform. As he
climbed onto a bench, a police major ordered truncheons drawn and thirty of his
officers waded in, laying out both Goebbels and the prince.52 The incident was widely
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 225
reported abroad.53 Magda Quandt visited the injured gauleiter upon his return to
Berlin, and her accomplishments in bed that night (‘6, 7’) made up for his bruises. In
his diary he passed over the irritable letters from Hella Koch, from Erika, and from
Charlotte almost without comment. ‘I now love just one,’ he wrote.54
When Hitler now invited him down to the Obersalzberg for Easter, Goebbels
surprisingly turned him down.55 His notes had recently contained several disparaging
references to that ‘damned party home’ the Brown House; to Hitler’s coffeehouse
mentality and milieu; and to his softness and ‘fanatical compromising’ nature.
56 He spent Easter with Magda instead, and added two more notches to the
score, ‘(8, 9)’: nine times in six weeks.57 It was not, perhaps, enough to justify the
jack-rabbit reputation which posterity would endow him with, and which he did
nothing to dispel.
ON March 26, the Reichstag adjourned for nearly seven months. Two days later Brüning
issued an emergency decree allowing his government to ban any meetings, and to
censor the leaflets and posters of any party. ‘And Brüning is Göring’s friend!’ commented
Goebbels sarcastically. He did not mind the ban on speaking. At the big Sport
Palace meeting on March 27 a recording of his latest speech was played. But he did
fear a ban on his newspaper, which was now printing eighty thousand twelve-page
copies a day.58 The supreme court declared Grzesinski’s latest ban illegal. Meanwhile
Hitler appealed to all his followers to avoid being provoked into illegal actions.59
This was particularly addressed to the S.A. The taut relationship between them
and the party overhung Goebbels throughout that spring. He was torn between loyalty
to Hitler, and his gratitude to these long-suffering streetfighters. In Munich Hitler
had confided to him in October 1930 that he was gradually going to reconstruct
the S.A. and recover total control of it.60 But Goebbels found it hard not to sympathise
with the criticisms of Munich voiced by his Berlin S.A. men. Their plight was
unenviable: two-thirds of them were unemployed, including their Oberführer Bruno
Wetzel.61 While in Breslau one S.A. Sturm could not go on parade in the snow because
they had no boots, they heard of the opulence of Hitler’s new HQ in Munich
226 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
and of elite new S.S. units being raised which were no longer subordinate to the S.A.
as they should have been.62
Both Walter Stennes, the supreme S.A. commander in eastern Germany including
Berlin, and his subordinate commanders were already deeply concerned about Munich’s
‘wretched waffling about legality’ and Hitler’s persistent wooing of the bourgeois
parties. When Hitler now demanded that the S.A. membership cough up another
four thousand marks for a painting to go in his study, they were baffled.63
At the end of November 1930 Hitler had revealed to his party lieutenants his latest
plans for the S.A. He was now their commander, with the pallid, flabby Ernst Röhm
as his chief of staff. Goebbels had vaguely known Röhm since 1924 and had read his
memoirs, ‘A Traitor’s Story.’64 After Röhm’s return from Bolivia he had entered in his
diary, ‘He’s nice to me and I like him. An open, upright soldier type.’ Two weeks later
he added, ‘He’s a dear fellow, but no match for Stennes.’65 Stennes however noticed
only that Röhm was a blatant homosexual, who make few friends other than notorious
homosexuals like Karl Ernst and his lover Paul Röhrbein.66 Stennes had nothing
but contempt for Röhm and his unmanly ways.67
Dr Goebbels deduced that Hitler intended to phase out the regional S.A. commanders
like Stennes. He suspected that Stennes was plotting to set up a revolutionary
Freikorps—‘proof,’ he felt, ‘how naïve these fellows are about politics.’68 But
Goebbels was even more naïve. He solemnly tipped off Röhm in January 1931 that
Röhrbein was a homosexual, and noted afterwards that Röhm was ‘very concerned.’69
Only six weeks later did he learn the truth about Röhm from Stennes. ‘Disgusting!’,
he expostulated in his diary—his own sexuality being at last a matter of record.
‘Here too Hitler is paying too little attention. The party must not be allowed to
become a paradise for poofters.’70
Cleverly playing off Goebbels against Göring, Captain Stennes tackled them individually.
Goebbels too played a double game.71 He invited the local S.A. commander
Wetzel and his five Standarte (regiment) commanders round to his apartment at
Steglitz, and using revolutionary language agreed with them that Germany would
never be liberated by the ‘spirit of Munich’ alone. Only the Prussian spirit, the spirit
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 227
of the wars of liberation, would do. But, he warned, his instinct told him that this was
not the time for a confrontation with Hitler. Fearing Stennes’ growing influence
meanwhile, Hitler removed
several S.A. regions (North Saxony, East Prussia, Danzig,
and Mecklenburg) from his control.
Stennes sent a long letter of complaint to Röhm.72 Goebbels wondered if Stennes
was not biting off more than he could chew.73 Röhm personally came to Berlin and
there was a furious row with Stennes which ended with a categorical refusal by
Stennes to swear obedience to Röhm.74
This put Goebbels in a dilemma. Not only did he need the S.A. stormtroopers,
they provided much of the staff of Angriff too. In Munich on March 23 Ernst Röhm
told him he was going to get rid of critics like Captain Stennes.75 Goebbels was
horrified and urged both Hitler and Röhm not to do it. But Hitler’s loyalty was to
Röhm, his old and intimate friend. In his diary, Goebbels began writing alibis: ‘If
there’s got to be a clean break,’ he recorded on March 25, ‘then I’m with Hitler.’ At
the same time he told Stennes’ men that he was with them.76 He had no choice but to
equivocate. The Berlin S.A. was approaching flashpoint. All their hatreds were mirrored
in the sarcastic samisdat newsletters which now began to circulate in Berlin.
One dated March 20 referred mockingly to ‘our own Aryan son Dr Goebbels, whom
race-experts have branded an Israelite,’ and described cruelly how he had left one
meeting early via a back door ‘on account of his aching paw.’77
The tension between Goebbels, other gauleiters, and the S.A. was palpable. Invited
to look over Angriff’s offices at this time Albert Krebs received this tip from
Hamburg’s gauleiter Karl Kaufmann: ‘Whenever Goebbels opens his mouth, he lies.
I know him from Elberfeld.’ At the Hedemann Strasse HQ Krebs found an atmosphere
he could cut with a knife. The S.A. guards on Goebbels’ offices had been replaced
by burly young party men who traded insults with the Brownshirts guarding
their own headquarters next door. In Goebbels’ spacious office, the Berlin gauleiter
told Krebs of the problems with the increasingly rowdy S.A.—he had had to evict
some of them only two days before and he was concerned that the landlords might
revoke their lease. He had just had a serious talk with their commander Captain
228 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Stennes. His own authority appeared shaky: as the pale, nervous Goebbels showed
him around, the gau HQ staff barely heeded them and carried on their conversations
regardless. Once Krebs heard a muttered and disrespectful, ‘Oh, it’s the Doctor!’ It
seemed to him as though an exhausted magician-figure had escaped from an EÊ T A
Hoffmann novel and was nervously flitting around his puppets, terrified that they
would recognize that his powers were waning.
Downstairs in the backyard it was an altogether different picture: around fifty
young Angriff salesmen cheered him as he limped over to his splendid new Mercedes.
In an instant the colour flushed back into his face. He spoke a few words to them
from the car’s running board. On the way to lunch Goebbels asked what Krebs thought
of his car—a gift, he hastily added. Krebs knew what the impoverished streetfighters
were saying about Goebbels’ luxurious apartment, and asked what strings were attached
to the gift. ‘Well,’ retorted Goebbels, annoyed, ‘Jakob Goldschmidt is hardly
going to donate a limousine to me.’ As they parted, he said to Krebs: ‘Take care with
Kaufmann. Whenever he opens his mouth, he lies.’78
This S.A. crisis came to a head in the last week of March 1931. Karl Hanke, the
young and virile commander of Goebbels’ West End district, told him of rumours
that Röhm was about to dismiss Stennes. Fearing this would bring things to a head,
Goebbels said he would fight tooth and claw to prevent it. Stennes had gone to
Pomerania that Tuesday, March 31, ostensibly to cool down S.A. hotheads.79 In his
absence, a telegram arrived in Berlin ordering all his senior officers to Weimar for a
meeting with Hitler. It was clear that he was about to dismiss Stennes. According to
police Intelligence, he also intended to relieve Goebbels as gauleiter.80 Goebbels had
already left to speak in Dresden; from there he drove straight on to Weimar, to see
Hitler. This may be the occasion of which Elsa Bruckmann later related, when Hitler
had planned to sack Goebbels for disloyalty—whereupon the gauleiter threw himself
whining at his feet in a most unworthy manner.81 On balance Hitler decided to
keep Goebbels, but nothing could save Stennes.
Wetzel, the Berlin S.A. commander had already received a phone call at around
8:30 P.M. reporting that Röhm had ordered Stennes’ dismissal.82 Wetzel’s men de-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 229
cided to defy Hitler’s summons to Weimar. At four A.M. Kurt Daluege, the regional
S.S. chief (‘S.S. Oberführer Ost’) typed an urgent warning to Röhm, reporting that
since midnight these local S.A. commanders had been meeting in secret cabal in
Berlin, and that mutiny was once again in the air. Daluege in fact suspected that
Stennes was acting in cahoots with the government, because the mutineers had
learned—perhaps through government wiretaps—of Hitler’s intentions. ‘Jahn has
told them,’ reported Daluege to Röhm, referring to Stennes’ chief of staff, ‘that
Stennes is to be dismissed by our Führer at a meeting in Weimar at midday today
April 1.’ The mutineers, he added, had decided to defy Hitler and send a delegation
to Goebbels in Weimar to win him over for ‘an independent freedom movement.’83
Things were thus in an unholy mess. At about four-thirty A.M. Stennes arrived back
in Berlin from Pomerania. A few hours later he was wakened with news that the
papers were reporting he had been dismissed. He discounted the story and went
back to sleep. Meanwhile his commanders in Berlin went on the rampage, mutinied,
and seized Goebbels’ gau HQ and the Angriff editorial offices in the Hedemann Strasse
building.
Thus the second ‘Stennes putsch’ began. Perhaps this is a misnomer. It was now
April 1, 1931. Stennes himself was still largely in the dark. At two-thirty P.M. he
received, first a registered letter from Röhm dismissing him, then orders from Hitler
to go to Weimar.84 But the fat was already in the fire. This time the S.A.’s political
actions met with active support from both Goebbels’ staff and the Angriff’s employees.
Dr Weissauer published a statement in the newspaper backing Stennes. Whatever
Goebbels’ private feelings, however, he knew which side his bread was buttered.
He wrote unhesitatingly in his diary, ‘I stand loyal to Hitler… The S.A. must
come into line.’ He applied for a court order to evict the S.A. trespassers from the
building. Stennes was still floundering. He sent this telegram to Hitler in Weimar: IS
RÖHM’S DISMISSAL ORDER VALID, I.E. BACKED BY YOU? SIGNED STENNES. Hitler responded
ambiguously: YOU ARE NOT TO ASK QUESTIONS BUT HAVING RECEIVED A PROPER ORDER ARE TO
REPORT TO WEIMAR AT ONCE WITH THE COMMANDERS AS LISTED. SIGNED ADOLF HITLER.
230 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 37