Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 45
They were now far the largest single party, but once again the Centre party, with
seventy-six seats, held the balance. Again Goebbels advised Hitler to hold out for
absolute power, and shun any compromise. ‘Tolerance will be the death of us,’ he
argued. Vacationing briefly with him at Tegernsee, Hitler agonized over his next step—
‘balking,’ jotted Goebbels in his diary, ‘at the really big decisions.’ In ‘Kaiserhof’ he
softened this criticism by applying it to the party as a whole, rather than its Führer.
Leaving Goebbels in Bavaria, Hitler set off for Berlin on August 4, 1932 to state his
demands to Hindenburg: he wanted to be chancellor, with Frick as minister of the
interior, Strasser as minister of labour, Goebbels as minister of ‘Public Education’
(meaning propaganda). and Göring as aviation minister.28 He returned south on the
sixth. Up at his Obersalzberg mountain home he predicted to Goebbels that they
would be taking over office in a week’s time, with Hitler as both chancellor and
prime minister of Prussia, Strasser as minister of the interior, and Goebbels acting as
minister of culture in Prussia and minister of education in the Reich. ‘A Cabinet of
real men,’ approved Goebbels. ‘We shall never give up power. They’ll have to carry
us out feet first. This is going to be a Total Solution.’
He stayed for the next five days at Hitler’s side, nervous in case somebody talked
Hitler into making other dispositions. In Berlin the S.A. under their bullying commander
Helldorff had already begun jostling for power. While Göring conducted the
274 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
political negotiations, Ernst Röhm drew his S.A. army up around the capital to exert
a visible and unsubtle pressure on the chancellor von Papen. Goebbels was bullish
about the outcome of the talks, and stayed up until four A.M. one night discussing
with Hitler the structure of his new ministry. Hitler promised him he would be
running education, films, radio, theatre and propaganda; as if these were not portfolios
enough, Goebbels decided to retain his position as the party’s gauleiter of Berlin
and as Reichsleiter in charge of its national propaganda. (They remained pipedreams,
and nothing about them appeared in ‘Kaiserhof’.)29 Daimler-Benz’s general manager30
came to talk automobiles, and for a day visions of newer and even bigger cars
danced in the Nazi leaders’ heads. But then Schleicher’s man Alvensleben phoned
with news that the regime was still holding out for a horse-trade. Hitler told him
that he was not interested in compromises—‘A total solution,’ as Goebbels put it,
‘or no dice.’31 Not all the Nazis agreed with Hitler’s tough stand. The regime spread
rumours that a split was beginning to show in their ranks, and even that Goebbels
and Strasser were in favour of half-measures. Hitler published a communiqué denying
it.32 He left for Berlin with Goebbels. In the capital unsatisfactory news waited
for them: Papen was still flatly against Hitler becoming chancellor; Röhm and
Schleicher were trying to talk him round, without much success. Pacing the verandah
of the Goebbels’ summer house at Caputh, Hitler discussed this turn of events.
They agreed that if Hitler accepted the vice-chancellorship that was on offer, this
would saddle the Nazi party for all time with a share of the blame for Papen’s failure.
In the government quarter at midday on August 13 both Schleicher and Papen urged
him to accept the position of vice-chancellor. Hitler refused, and Goebbels had to
back him.33 Later Hitler took Frick and Röhm over to see the president; he again left
empty-handed. Frustrated and angry, the Nazi leaders foregathered at Goebbels’
apartment. Typewriters rattled out communiqués. The S.A. commanders were straining
at the bit, they wanted action. Together with Röhm, Hitler briefed them to toe
the line. He left for Bavaria, leaving Goebbels in Berlin.
It was a totally unexpected impasse. The Nazis were the largest party: they had
followed the path of legality until now: yet the System was thwarting them once
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 275
more. Goebbels consoled his embittered lieutenants and left to vacation at
Heiligendamm. Once, the millionaire banker Emil Georg von Stauss of the Deutsche
Bank invited him over to his motor yacht.34 But Goebbels’ mind was in a turmoil. He
feared that the Nazis’ share of the vote had peaked, and might now rapidly decline.
The Reichstag resumed on August 30. Its members elected Hermann Göring as
Speaker, a powerful position indeed. Göring invited Hitler, Röhm, and Goebbels up
to his luxurious new apartment on Kaiserdamm to discuss tactics.35 They agreed that
at the very next Reichstag session on September 12 they must force an immediate
dissolution. The new election would be held on November 6. The party was now in
a precarious position, sliding in the polls and with its campaign coffers dangerously
low. Goebbels ordered Angriff to appear twice daily instead of once. He organized a
consumer boycott of opposition newspapers. He had no mercy on them. When a
newspaper impugned Magda’s honour he sent an S.S. officer to treat the journalist
concerned with a riding whip; in best Prussian style, the S.S. man left his visiting
card on the bleeding offender.
Magda had given birth to their first child on September 1, 1932. She had hoped for
a boy to call Hellmut, to fill the hole left in her heart by her stepson’s tragic death in
Paris years before. But it was a girl, so ‘Hellmut’ became Helga. The infant’s nocturnal
wails kept the household awake. Goebbels, a novice in the art of parenthood,
complained unfeelingly and left Magda in tears.36
COUNT Helldorff took the breakdown of negotiations particularly hard. ‘He’s only
tough,’ observed Goebbels shrewdly, ‘when the going’s good.’37 He moved his gau
HQ for one last time, to a building in Voss Strasse barely three hundred yards from
the Reich Chancellery. He had come a long way since the ‘opium den’ six years
before. He began planning ahead listing whom he would need to take over the radio
system. Hitler again flew a whistlestop tour of fifty cities. Goebbels followed in an
open plane, his face anæsthetised with cold. When his graphic artist Schweitzer
(‘Mjölnir’) showed him his latest poster designs, he felt that he was running out
steam: but then so was everybody. The Goebbels Diary for the last weeks before the
276 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
November 1932 election lacked the sense of urgency and intrigue that had characterized
it in July and August. Only rarely did anything of the old fun element surface in
this campaign. He ordered the less sophisticated marxist districts plastered with stickers
reading simply VOTE LIST 1 AGAIN (‘without stating which party that is’).38 He lured
the German National party (D.N.V.P.) into accepting a public debate with him: in
the hall the opponents provided him with only two hundred tickets, an inconvenience
which Goebbels circumvented with the aid of Angriff’s printers, who turned
out two thousand more. When his opponents arrived, they found his men had taken
over most of the hall.39
On October 20 he or
dered the Jewish problem placed more firmly to the forefront
—citing Papen’s Jewish adviser Jakob Goldschmidt as a case in point.40 In the
Sport Palace four days later he heaped scorn on the D.N.V.P. and immediately issued
throughout Germany a dramatic recording of the two hour speech, complete with
the intervention of Papen’s police and the four-minute ovation by his twenty-thousand
listeners at its end—’the recording,’ he stated, ‘gives an impressive picture of
the forcefulness, strength, and majesty of our movement.’41 He ordered gau officials
to start systematic rumours that Hindenburg had already written off Papen. After
quoting with strange relish from the D.N.V.P.’s organ (‘Goebbels is a male Rosa
Luxemburg—neither a pretty sight; both are of Jewish countenance. He is impelled
by the same burning ambition to incite and to lie’42) he ordered his troops to refrain
from similar personal insults. However, disguised as harmless civilians, his officials
were to cluster around Nazi poster hoardings singing the party’s praises.43
Towards the campaign’s end there was an odd episode: Goebbels decided that his
Nazis were to back a communist organised Berlin transport strike. It was as though
he had lost sight of the Nazi party’s larger election horizon. His men had heavily
infiltrated the B.V.G., the capital’s public transport authority. The transport workers
probably had legitimate grievances, and Goebbels had remained at heart a socialist
agitator. Kampmann, his propaganda chief would claim that the strike was actually
quite popular.44 But the public’s backing of the Nazi party melted away as all the
usual brutish signs of union intimidation appeared, with the pickets this time wear-
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 277
ing Nazi armbands. Together the Nazi and communist strikers terrorized strike breakers,
ripped up tramlines, and wrecked buses. The l;iberal rightwing Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung expressed concern about the spread of class-warfare to the extreme right.45
‘The bourgeois press,’ Goebbels would write in ‘Kaiserhof’, ‘invented the lie that I
instigated this strike without the Führer’s knowledge or consent … although I am in
hourly phone contact with the Führer.’ This self-defence is to be regarded with as
much scepticism as his claim that the Berlin public displayed an ‘admirable solidarity’
with the strikers. Less hollow rings his excuse that to have withheld support from
the strikers would have confounded all their recruiting efforts among Berlin’s workers.
Perhaps Goebbels had seen a chance for the Nazis to seize control of the strike and
shortcut the tedious democratic process by expanding it into a full-blooded coup.
But the strike backfired badly on their election campaign. Nationwide, two million
voters deserted the party, costing them thirty-four of their 230 Reichstag seats. The
communists gained strongly. Reporting to Munich, Leopold Gutterer of the Hanover
gau suggested that the recent membership drives had resulted in poorer calibre
officials; when Goebbels asked him why the communist vote had suffered less than
the bouregois parties, Gutterer hypothesized that with their marxist ideology they
were made of sterner stuff. 46 In Berlin, the Nazi vote slumped from 757,000 (or
28·6 percent) in July to 720,000 (or twenty-six percent) now. The bourgeois press
gloated at this setback. At his Voss Strasse headquarters the next day he found his
party and S.A. officers in ugly mood—‘all ready to strike out again,’ he wrote, a
clear indication that a coup was still on their mind.47 Hitler however ordained, ‘There
will be no negotiating until this regime and the parties backing it have been totally
defeated.’48
In Munich on the eighth Goebbels found him raring for a final showdown with
Papen.
‘A fabulous man,’ he assessed privately after listening to Hitler in his Munich apartment.
‘I would allow myself to be drawn and quartered for him.’
278 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Although the German electorate had confirmed the Nazis as the largest single party,
their opponents still clung on to the chancellorship. Count von Alvensleben reported
that Papen hoped Hitler would come to terms; Gregor Strasser, it seemed, suddenly
agreed and for the first time on November 9 Goebbels recorded real venom about
him. ‘Let’s hope that Fatso Gregor doesn’t put his foot in it. He’s so disloyal… I warn
[Hitler] against Strasser.’49 Hitler wrote to Papen however refusing to do a deal.50
Papen resigned on the sixteenth.51
Now Hindenburg again summoned Hitler to Berlin. Parting the cheering crowds
outside the Kaiserhof, Hitler drove over to the presidential palace in a limousine on
the nineteenth. After a ninety-minute talk, in which he explained his party’s programme
once more to Hindenburg, Hitler assured his henchmen that he still would
not accept any compromise. Hindenburg however wanted to revert to parliamentary
rule. Hitler wrote him on the twenty-first, then took Goebbels to the opera—
Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’ for the nth time.52 When Hindenburg’s reply came, it stated
conditions that Hitler would not accept.53 The press, no longer privy to these
manœuverings, printed fevered descriptions of fistfights between the Nazi factions
in the Kaiserhof. On November 25 the party newspaper issued a statement signed by
Frick, Goebbels, Göring, Röhm and—allegedly—Strasser, odd bedfellows indeed,
denying all these rumours and stating once and for all time that ‘united in unshakeable
fealty to the Führer’ they considered it beneath their dignity to respond to such
lies.54
Hindenburg turned Hitler’s proposals down. Some of Goebbels’ faction urged that
the time had come to seize power, at least in Prussia. For a few days Hitler remained
at the Kaiserhof while Papen and Schleicher vied with each other for the coveted
chancellorship prize. In Weimar on November 30 for the Thuringian election campaign,
Goebbels heard from Hitler that Schleicher had made fresh overtures to him.
Goebbels attended a three hour council of war with Hitler, Frick, Göring and Strasser.
Again Strasser was the only one in favour of a compromise—joining a Cabinet under
Schleicher, failing which the party seemed to be doomed to the political wilderness
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 279
in perpetuity.55 Adamantly seconded by Goebbels, Hitler again refused to consider
accepting the vice-chancellorship.56
That night in Weimar, socialising with the Goebbels’, Hitler also spoke with distaste
about Strasser according to the diary (which may well mean, when the diary is
properly interpreted, that Goebbels expressed the distaste and Hitler nodded.)
General von Schleicher sent a new intermediary, Lieutenant-Colonel Eugen Ott.
The press ached and heaved with curiosity. Hitler stood firm. ‘Follow that man!’
marvelled Goebbels. ‘Then we shall triumph.’ Unable to sway Hitler, on December
2 Hindenburg appointed Schleicher as chancellor.57 Needing to neutralize the Nazi