Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 39
forest house at Pichelsdorf. She pours out her heart about the grief her crazed exlover
has caused her. She answers his reproaches with floods of tears, the last resort
of feminine culpability; but she wishes to spend Saturday with the other man, to say
farewell. She refuses Goebbels’ ultimatum to spend that Saturday with him. ‘Thus it
236 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
is over,’ writes Goebbels. Unconsciously scriptwriting again, he adds: ‘She exits weeping.’
3
ON the twelfth he had returned to gau HQ for the first time since the putsch. Everybody
was very kind to him and the S.A. stood smartly to attention. But there were
problems. The account books showed that Angriff was deep in debt.4 He instructed
Hans Hinkel, Weissauer’s successor, to cut back its size from twelve to eight pages.5
His deputy Mainshausen warned that Göring was double-crossing them. Goebbels
needed few warnings on that score.6
The next morning he was back in court, charged with having said in a speech at the
Veterans’ Building in 1929, ‘We don’t speak of corruption in Berlin or bolshevism at
City Hall. No! We just say Isidor Weiss, and that says it all.’7 He was fined two hundred
marks on one count, fifteen hundred marks for having picked on Weiss ‘because
of his Jewish origins’; still running a high fever, he limped out. He suspected traitors
everywhere. ‘Keep on marching’ he penned into his diary. ‘Don’t look back!’8 There
seemed no end to the court actions. On the seventeenth he was fined two thousand
marks, then five hundred, and finally one hundred more for contempt of court. More
summonses were heaped onto his desk.9 He resolved to take revenge on all the Isidors
of this world when the time came.
A severe depression seized him, a mental crisis which he acknowledged only when
he deemed that it had passed.10 Magda’s shenanigans had triggered it. There was a
‘shadow’ still lurking around her apartment. Apparently she had had a stormier past
than the comparatively innocent Dr Goebbels suspected. Insane with jealousy, he
trusted nobody. The word spies surfaced more often in his diary. He searched for
them at his HQ, he even suspected Hinkel; his political life seemed more arduous
than ever, a constant round of strange hotel beds briefly sighted at three A.M., of six
A.M. railroad platforms for the return to Berlin, of persecution, court hearings, prohibitions,
and the constant fear of violence or even assassination.11
Grzesinski enforced a new three-month ban on Goebbels speaking—which sometimes
meant listening to the pompous and vapid Hermann Göring standing in for
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 237
him. Hitler now entrusted Göring with important missions abroad. In May 1931
Göring visited Rome and returned with a signed photograph of Mussolini for the
Führer. ‘Jack of all trades,’ sniffed Goebbels, meaning: master of none.12
Eight more court appearances faced him late that April. ‘Maddening,’ he recorded.
‘But I’m not going to lose my nerve.’13 At Itzehoe near Hamburg he faced a fourmonth
prison sentence but was acquitted.14 Squirming under Grzesinski’s speaking
ban, on April 25 Goebbels reluctantly signed an undertaking not to make fun of the
police observers assigned to his meetings any more.15 Another hearing was scheduled
at Moabit for April 27. He notified the court however that he could not miss an
important Nazi meeting in Munich. Gregor Strasser would be there, and he hoped
to repair his fraught relationship with the burly politician. Strasser was warmly received
at the Munich conference. Afterwards Hitler proudly showed them both over
his splendid new Brown House headquarters. ‘His big hour,’ mocked Goebbels in his
diary, but conceded that the Senate Chamber was really remarkable.16
While ‘the Chief’ was nice enough in Munich, Goebbels detected a wider hostility
to him. ‘Nobody likes me,’ he realised, and he wondered why. Before travelling down
here he had jotted his thoughts down in his diary: ‘first I act as a backstop for these fat
lumps and then they’d like to send me packing to the wilderness.’ He had toyed with
offering Hitler his resignation. ‘I’m just the sewer cleanser for the party.’17 But when
he raised the question of his future, Hitler reassured him: ‘Berlin belongs to you and
that’s how things must stay.’18
That made him happy; but suddenly his cup of happiness in Munich ran sour. The
Berlin courts had issued a bench warrant after his non-appearance. As he was eating
at the Rose Garden hotel three detectives arrested him and escorted him to the night
train to Berlin. ‘So much for immunity!’ he fumed. ‘With a Barmat, a Sklarek and a
Kutisker,’ declared Angriff that morning, referring to the Jewish racketeers, ‘they
didn’t go to such lengths. But then they weren’t the elected representatives of sixty
thousand Germans —just major embezzlers!’19 Press photographers crowded the platform
as the train arrived back in Berlin. ‘The Judenpresse is howling with joy,’
Goebbels saw. In Room 664 at the Moabit courthouse (Angriff helpfully told its read-
238 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ers where the eight new cases were to be heard) the world’s press awaited him.20 He
told the judges what he thought of them, then sat down and refused to speak another
word. He was given a month’s suspended jail sentence, and heavy fines. Choking
with rage he lodged an appeal.21 To his lawyer he snarled, indicating the prosecutor
Stenig, ‘Let’s make a note of that man for later.’22
May brought still more cases. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote with a martyred air on the
twelfth, ‘sentenced to two months on Isidor’s account.’23 His lawyer Otto Kamecke
lodged an immediate appeal.24 On June 5 there were two more hearings. In the first
he was acquitted, in the second— ‘the police officers uttered perjuries so rotten you
could hear them creak’—fined two hundred marks. ‘They’re trying to wear me out,’
he once again concluded.25 But daylight was filtering into this long dark tunnel of
police harassment. On June 12 he was again acquitted. ‘The courts,’ he gloated, ‘are
getting to whiff of things to come’—a reference to the growing likelihood that
Brüning’s days in office were numbered. ‘Then it’s our turn.’26
KEEPING a tryst with Magda at the five star Kaiserhof hotel, he recognizes that the
other man, the ‘shadow’, is still coming between them.27 Fretting, he spends his
evenings alone at Steglitz fingering his piano keyboard, leafing idly through a book or
fitfully dozing. He phones countless times without reaching her. After one colossal
Sport Palace gathering she invites him back to her own luxurious apartment for the
first time. The Shadow has gone. Her elegant suite of seven rooms includes a music
room, and quarters for her guests and servants. He decides that the worst is over
between them. His diary soon finds him making plans for the future with her: and he
is no longer keeping score.28
Shadows flit in and out from his own past. Magda remains a vexatious enigma still,
often inexplicably unpunctual for their dates. Once she tells him that ‘a stranger’ has
warn
ed her that Dr Goebbels is a Jew, and has shown her an original letter ‘stolen
from the gau HQ files’ written a decade earlier by Goebbels to Director Cohnen, a
family friend at Mönchen Gladbach. Cohnen was the gauleiter’s real father, suggests
the stranger, who also mentions Peter Simons, the husband of Goebbels’ maternal
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 239
aunt Anna. ‘This is what I have to put up with,’ winces Goebbels, puzzling over the
stranger’s identity.29 (The ‘stolen’ document is probably a product of Magda’s own
feline dustbinning around while working in his personal archives, but this evidently
does not occur to him.)
The two spend Whitsun on her ex-husband’s estate Severin in Mecklenburg. Günther
Quandt’s manager, a leading local Nazi, lets them in. Alone at last they iron out their
remaining differences. Sometimes she still wounds him with an ill-considered word,
but the wound soon heals.30 He longs for a hearth and home. He begins talking about
setting up a matrimonial home when victory is theirs; this is comfortingly vague, and
she goes along with that.31 After he returns to Berlin—alone, as she has asked to stay
on for another day in this country idyll—he writes, ‘When we have conquered the
Reich we shall become man and wife.’32 In fact Magda probably entertained little real
ambition to harness her uxorial ambitions to such an uncertain chariot. He writes
her a real love letter—the first such essay in ten years.33 Visiting her to give her a
clock a few days later, he is thunderstruck to find the Shadow still living there; Magda
tells him that since the student will not budge, she is moving out and will have the
police evict the trespasser.34 As a sop to Goebbels, she agrees he shall have the right
to walk young Harald to the Herder school across the square.
After speaking at Erfurt Goebbels meets Anka Stalherm and breaks the news about
Magda to her. He is pleased to see that Anka goes to pieces. She wants not to believe
him, thinks she can hook him back even now. But it is too late—‘I am with Magda,’
he vows to his diary, ‘and shall stay with her.’35 When his latest book ‘Struggle for
Berlin’ appears later in the year, he will have it mailed to Anka with a typed note
(‘Dear Party-member…’) signed by his secretary.36
THE police lifted the speaking ban on May 1, 1931; and how the thousands cheered
when he rose at the Sport Palace that evening. But the ban had hurt. His gau was in
debt.37 He decided on a two-month plan to double membership. By mid June 1931 it
had risen to about twenty thousand.38
240 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Angriff too was entering troubled times. On May 4 the editor Dagobert Dürr had
finally begun serving his two-month sentence for libelling Dr Weiss. Each visit in jail
was a reminder to Goebbels of the volcano rim around which he himself was dancing.
39 He found he had much more in common with the ordinary S.A. men than with
the party’s self-important artistocracy. ‘We are still a worker’s party,’ he wrote. Göring
irritated him the most. At a rally in Saxony he cold-shouldered the former aviator.
‘He’s sick,’ he felt. ‘Looks a wreck.’40 ‘He really does go creeping up Hitler’s arse,’ he
added crudely. ‘Were he not so fat he might succeed, too.’ In Munich for a leadership
conference on June 9 however he found himself arguing alone against this ‘disgusting
… big-mouthed slob.’ ‘I have few friends in the party,’ he realised, yet again. ‘Virtually
just Hitler.’41
AS the recession bit deeper, the central parties in the government flailed at the parties
on the left and right. On Jun 16 Brüning enacted an emergency press decree. Berlin’s
police chief Grzesinski boasted, ‘My powers have been augmented just as I desired.’
The next fourteen days would see the prohibition of Angriff, the VB and a string
of other papers, Nazi and bourgeois alike. The press protested vigorously. When the
Frankfurter Post was banned, the rival Frankfurter Zeitung bravely reprinted the offending
sentences for its readers to judge.42
Angriff reappeared on the nineteenth. That same evening, citing a remark in that
day’s newspaper, Grzesinski maliciously banned the next day’s summer solstice rally
on which Goebbels had vested all his hopes of restoring the gau’s finances. Goebbels
frantically offered to allow the hated red-black-and-gold colours of the Republic to
be flown instead of the Nazi flag, but still failed to get the ban lifted.43 He rejigged the
entire event, organizing simultaneous functions in seven different halls for the Saturday
evening. ‘We escaped,’ he wrote, ‘with just a black eye.’44
Hitler himself started spending more time in Berlin. Police agents sighted him
with Goebbels at the Kaiserhof on May 9.45 Jealous of their intimacy, Goebbels’ rivals
continued to spread rumours of his imminent resignation. He published a defiant
denial.46 That same evening he staged the gau’s annual general meting at the Sport
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 241
Palace—the first time that any party had dared to hire the huge arena for such a
purpose. He blamed Himmler,who had taken over leadership of the S.S. from Heiden,
for the rumours; he found that the S.S. was now spying on his HQ and demanded,
visiting Munich on July 2, that they desist. After speaking to forty thousand at Dresden’s
cycle-racetrack47 he set of on a month’s seaside vacation; he took Magda—‘she
is a lady, a woman, and a lover’—and a secretary Ilsa Bettge whose role was less
clearly defined.
With Goebbels temporarily absent, on August 1 Hitler appointed the virtually
unknown journalist Dr Otto Dietrich as chief of his new Press Office. Dietrich, six
weeks older than Goebbels, had got to know Hitler only recently, while working for
the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung. Goebbels loathed all journalists; but for Dietrich he
would reserve a very special fury until the end.48
THAT July he spends five weeks with Magda in a cottage on the cliffs at Sankt Peter
listening to storm rains pounding the roof while the gray-white waves of the North
Sea lash the rocks below. He makes love to her, he plays the piano, and he begins a
new book, ‘The Struggle for Berlin,’ dictating a new chapter every day or so.
Unemployment has passed the five million mark. Brüning’s miseries are music to
Goebbels’ ears. He bickers sometimes with Magda, probing remorselessly into the
darker crannies of her past. He dredges up noisome episodes, which he attributes to
her wayward manner and tries to forget.49 The more she teases him with stories of
past lovers, the more helplessly jealous he becomes. It seems that some of these old
flames are not extinguished even now.50 No matter how loving Magda is, he cannot
forget that before him she loved another. ‘She has loved too much,’ he writes, ‘and
keeps telling me only the half of it. And I lie awake until the small hours lashed by
jealousy.’51 Driven by these powerful emotional engines he has completed three hundred
pages of the manuscript when he returns to Berlin: he truly loves Magda, but a