arisen and is marching past below—workers and citizens and farmers and students
and soldiers… Truly one can say, Germany is awakening.’ Only Munich and Stuttgart
refused to carry the broadcast.10
Chilling news awaiting him on his return home at three A.M. Assassins had gunned
down his twenty-four year old S.A. officer Hans-Eberhard Maikowski and a police
constable.11 Maikowski, a veteran of the Pharus rooms battle, had marched at the
head of his No.33 Sturm in that evening’s parade. Hitler told Goebbels that he wanted
no reprisals. He wanted the Red Terror to ‘burn out first’—a phrase which Goebbels
subtly changed in ‘Kaiserhof’, the published text, to ‘flare up.’ He had six hundred
thousand Berliners line the rain-sodden streets of Berlin for the funeral of Maikowski
and the policeman. The Berlin S.A.’s scoundrelly commander Count von Helldorff
strutted at the head of the parade; he had put all bars off limits to his S.A. as a mark
of respect that day but he himself was sighted that evening in full uniform in a particularly
sleazy Kurfürstendamm bar.12
Still feeble from her illness, Magda came home on February 1. Goebbels broke it
to her that he was not included in Hitler’s Cabinet. ‘I am being frozen out,’ he wrote
in his diary. Although Hitler had mentioned a propaganda ministry several times in
recent months, he had now given to the tedious and narrow-minded ex-schoolteacher
Bernhard Rust the responsibility for culture and higher education in Prussia. Goebbels
heard whispers that he was to be fobbed off with the job of radio commissioner.
‘They’ve stood me in the corner,’ he recorded privately. ‘Fat lot of good Hitler is.’
Hitler did not even plan to take any steps as yet against the press. ‘We want to lull
them into a sense of security,’ mimicked Goebbels. Things got worse. On February 5
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 293
Hitler appointed the financial journalist Walther Funk his state-secretary for ‘press
and propaganda.’ Meanwhile throughout Prussia Göring appointed reliable new police
chiefs, and added to the provisional arrest-lists of communists already prepared
by his predecessors; Göring also banned the police force’s rubber truncheons. A
flurry of bans descended on their enemies—the social democrat newspapers Vorwärts
and Acht Uhr, and ‘all those Jewish organs,’ as Goebbels wrote, ‘that have been such a
pain in our necks.’
The disappointment at being excluded from office gnawed at Goebbels. Never in
robust health, he fell ill, his days and nights troubled by feverish fantasies. ‘I am tired
and disheartened,’ he wrote in mid-February 1933. ‘I have no aim and no longer take
any pleasure in my work.’ The party was in power, and he was an outcast! ‘The Görings
reign supreme,’ he observed ironically. When Karl Hanke, his chief aide, now told
him not to expect any government funds for the coming election battle, Goebbels
scoffed, ‘Then let Fatso Göring do without his caviar for once!’ (He prudently cut
this suggestion out of the published text.) After a week in bed he went to the Sports
Palace with Hitler and listened to His Master’s guttural Voice intoning against marxism,
setting the tenor of the coming final election battle. Hitler actually ended with the
word ‘Amen!’—a brilliant touch in Goebbels’ view.
In the run up to election eve, which Goebbels proclaimed to be the Day of the
Awakening Nation, he developed a propaganda campaign of a depth and breadth
surpassing anything before. Partial control of the radio stations ensured that every
night his or Hitler’s voice was heard. With the Prussian police now in Göring’s hands,
of course, the going was much easier. But the Jews and communists who had fled to
Prague, Paris, and London poured vitriol over the new Hitler government. Irresponsible
foreign journalists did the rest. Even ex-chancellor Brüning, still in Germany,
watched in fury as they filed blatantly untrue stories exaggerating the plight of
the Jews. ‘In the spring of 1933,’ Brüning would write, ‘foreign correspondents reported
that the River Spree was covered with the corpses of murdered Jews.’ At that
time, he pointed out, hardly any Jews had suffered except for the leaders of the
communist party.13
294 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
This year, 1933, was however the year of the Big Lie. On Monday evening February
27 occurred one of the most controversial episodes of the whole era. Hitler had
come to dine with the Goebbels family. Shortly, Goebbels was called away to take a
phone call from Hitler’s friend Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, a well-known prankster.
Hanfstaengl shouted excitedy that the Reichstag building was on fire. Since Goebbels
had twitted him with a phone call only days before, he ignored the call. Hanfstaengl
phoned again, this time to report that he could see flames leaping out of the Reichstag’s
cupola.14 Hitler and Goebbels tried to phone the Reichstag; nobody answered—
small wonder, because a phone call to the Brandenburg Gate police station confirmed
that the Reichstag was on fire. They drove off at top speed down the Charlottenburg
Chaussee.
Afterwards the world’s press clamoured that the Nazis themselves had started the
blaze. With this author’s discovery of the missing Goebbels Diary entries in Moscow,
that version is finally laid to rest. He, Hitler, and Göring were equally stunned by the
news.
Hitler summons me to the Kaiserhof [the unpublished entry begins]. He’s enthusiastic
about my [radio] commentaries. Says Munich and Nuremberg were
really great… Hitler fabulous as always…
Back home to work. Much to do. At nine P.M. Hitler and Auwi come over.
Music and gossip. Then Hanfstaengl phones: says the Reichstag’s burning. What
an imagination! But turns out to be true. Race straight down there with Hitler.
The entire building a mass of flames. [We] go in. Göring follows. Papen, whose
acquaintance I thus make, is also there. Thirty arson sites. Fires set by the communists.
Göring rampant, Hitler raging, Papen clear-headed. The main assembly
chamber a picture of devastation. So take action now! … To work! Hitler consults
with Papen. We meet back at the Kaiserhof. Everybody beaming. This was
the last straw. Now we’re well away. Culprit caught, a twenty-four year old Dutch
communist.15
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 295
‘He’s being interrogated now,’ Göring told them. ‘We decided straight away,’
Goebbels related at the subsequent trial, ‘to ban the communist press and later the
social democrat press too, and to take the top communist officials into custody.’16
Göring ordered the S.A. to stand by in case of an all-out communist uprising.
At midnight Hitler and Goebbels hurried over to the Völkischer Beobachter’s Berlin
office. It took half an hour even to get into the sleeping building, and more time was
wasted while printworkers, compositors and a surly sub-editor were found. There
was no sign of Rosenberg himself, the editor. Devouring the proofs of the next day’s
edition, Hitler finally found the sensational news tucked away in the Berlin in Brief
column (‘Fi
re damage to the Reichstag’). ‘Man, are you mad,’ he shouted at the subeditor.
‘This is an event on a colossal scale!’17
We drove over to the VB [Goebbels’ diary continues]. It is really badly laid out.
Hitler sets to work there straight away. I dictate a new gau poster and a fabulous
article18… During the night all communist party officials are arrested. Entire
communist and social democrat press banned. Good work done… Over to Hitler
at Kaiserhof. He’s delighted with my article. It is half-past five in the morning…
Two S.A. men shot in Berlin. To sleep at seven. Three hours. Then straight
back to work !
The fire was a Godsend to the Nazi radicals. Goebbels was already disquieted by
the speed with which Hitler and even Göring were succumbing to Hindenburg’s
bourgeois spell. This lone communist fire-raiser had rescued the revolution. During
the night he sent for the journalist Alfred-Ingemar Berndt to take down a fiery press
release. (Berndt, twenty-eight, later became one of his most ruthless and accomplished
propaganda tacticians; he had joined the party in 1923, seen the young S.A.
man Werner Doelle shot at his side in 1925, been injured by a chair in the fight that
followed the rowdy debate between Goebbels and Ulbricht in 1931, and repeatedly
sacked by Jewish firms since then.19) Goebbels’ press release announced the sweeping
arrests, and described the Reichstag fire as a communist beacon, a signal for a
marxist insurrection. This was as much a lie as the claim by Jewish and communist
296 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
agencies worldwide that the Nazis had staged the fire. Even the authoritative Manchester
Guardian published a dispatch from an anonymous special correspondent alleging
that Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels had foregathered in Berlin that evening
‘awaiting their fire.’20 The world’s press readily copied this Big Lie, and historians in
time adopted it from them.
Neither Hitler nor Goebbels wanted to believe that the mad Dutch communist
Marinus van der Lubbe had acted alone in torching the Reichstag building. Eight
years later Hitler still suspected that the hand of Ernst Torgler, the communist leader,
had been behind it.21
THE last four days of the election battle were the scheming, marching, speaking, singing,
bell-ringing, tintinnabulating, flagwaving crescendo of Goebbels’ career so far.
On election day itself, March 5, 1933 he and Magda escorted Hitler to a Wagner
opera, then sat up late waiting for the returns. Goebbels found them disappointing.
True, the Nazis had won 43·9 percent, but Hitler was still well short of the absolute
majority he craved; in his own Berlin constituency the Nazis had achieved with 31·3
percent the second lowest vote after Cologne–Aaachen. Goebbels however was now
free to come into the government. Hitler announced at his next Cabinet that the
new Reichstag would be solemnly inaugurated at a session in the famous Garrison
Church at Potsdam, with President Hindenburg in attendance. ‘Now,’ he added, ‘there
must come about a bold operation of propaganda and enlightenment, designed to
forestall any political lethargy. This Public Enlightenment must emanate from a newly
created central authority.’22
Thus Goebbels got his job as Reich minister of propaganda and public enlightenment
—a cumbersome title pressed on him by Hitler.23 He hated that word ‘propaganda’
and went to elaborate lengths over coming years to cleanse it of its negative
hubris.24 As for the ministry, he already had the necessary structure in mind—initially
seven divisions, controlling the radio, press, films, propaganda, and the theatre
as well as legal department and a Defence department (to defend, that is, against
lies). Nobody would ever deny that Goebbels proved a capable minister, and in this
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 297
he was aided by his Staatssekretär Walther Funk. They made an odd couple—the one
a homosexual and bon viveur, the other now notoriously hetero and seemingly ascetic.
Funk later called his minister brilliant but devoid of any scruple and cruelly,
coldly calculating. His conceit led to angry complaints over the years from composer
Richard Strauss, conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, film star Emil Jannings and scores
of others. ‘Goebbels’ treatment of female artistes,’ reminisced Funk irritably, ‘was a
great deal friendlier.’25
Berlin’s Jewish community was stricken by forebodings. Hans Schäffer, Staatssekretär
in the finance ministry and a board-member of the powerful Ullstein newspaper
group, wrote in his well-informed diary: ‘It’s apparently not definite whether Goebbels
will also get the press under him. Hitler and Funk are opposed, as he’d become too
powerful.’26 Bella Fromm, forty-three year old society columnist on an Ullstein newspaper,
noted the club-foot and recalled her grandmother’s advice: ‘Beware of those
who are marked.’27 At a diplomatic reception later that month Goebbels found her at
his table and expatiated rudely against all Jews and communists. The Romanian envoy
soothed him that Jewish though the lovely Bella might be, she was right-wing.
‘Even worse,’ snapped the new minister.28
Initially Schäffer’s minister, the conservative Count Schwerin von Krosigk, refused
even to provide any funds for what he called ‘this [propaganda ministry] nonsense.’29
On the eleventh the Cabinet debated the new ministry and Hitler justified it as being
necessary to prepare public opinion for important government actions—he cited a
harmless sounding agricultural example involving foodstuff policies, then added:
‘The importance of all this in time of war must also be stressed. The government
would act only after the public enlightenment phase had run for some time and
taken hold.’ He would however reserve ultimate control of the press to himself.
Only Hugenberg, a major newspaper owner, expressed qualms.30 Two days later President
Hindenburg signed the decree establishing the propaganda ministry.31
Goebbels, Germany’s youngest-ever minister, addressed his first ministerial press
conference on March 15. ‘The Reich government,’ he told the world’s newspapermen,
‘needs more than fifty-two percent of the whole electorate’ (he had included
298 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the voters of the D.N.V.P., which was in coalition with Hitler) ‘it needs the whole
nation.’32 Nobody ignored him now. The American ambassador warned his new president,
Franklin D Roosevelt, that Goebbels was a master orator—far superior to
Hitler and far cleverer.33
FOR his new ministry Goebbels had been allocated the rambling old Prince-Leopold
Palace on Wilhelms Platz, right across from Hitler’s Chancellery. It was the kind of
listed architecture before which civil servants instinctively genuflected. Its great salons
had been kept permanently locked, the priceless furniture shrouded in dustsheets.
The panelling was dark and musty, the windows narrow and obscured by
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 48