On his birthday at the end of October he drives out to Lanke. It is an idyll, romantic
and tranquil. After that he takes Magda out there on the first day of November.
Alone together in the middle of this autumn forest of yellowing leaves, fog, and rain,
they spend a quiet day hanging pictures, playing the piano and singing Schubert’s
lieder.33 The next day his heavy Horch limousine returns, splashing through the fresh
puddles— ‘all alone,’ he writes, an untruth which his own diary exposes a few lines
later. (He writes, ‘We cook ourselves something.’) This is the occasion that Lida will
later describe, when his manservant Kaiser burns their only provisions, fried potatoes.
Of such tiny episodes romantic memories are made. On November 5 the diary
finds him out at Lanke once more, ‘taking refuge’ from ‘unpleasantness’ at home.
‘She is so fickle,’ he sighs on Magda’s birthday. ‘Sometimes good and sometimes
horrid. But that’s probably just how women are.’34
He has less than nine years left of his allotted span, but he has assembled all the
baggage that go with middle life: a beauteous young mistress; a dissatisfied, nagging
wife; and three angelic infants who thump around the bare floor above him far into
the night. ‘It is music to my ears,’ writes Dr Goebbels, still aged only thirty-nine.35
ONE evening in September 1936 Magda brought Diana Mitford to dinner at Schwanenwerder.
Hearing that Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was
planning to marry Diana in secret, Magda suggested they do it Berlin. Goebbels
didn’t like the idea and harrumphed about it in his diary: Magda was getting too
involved, he felt. He asked to see the three British Union movies that Diana had
brought with her, but they did not impress a minister with the entire German film
industry now at his fingertips; he reflected however that his own beginnings were
equally small.36 Discussing Mosley again, Hitler and Goebbels agreed that he was not
a great man; but Hitler coughed up funds for Diana, according to the diary, when she
visited Berlin at the time of the Edward VIII crisis.37
The secret wedding went ahead in Magda’s drawing room at No.20 Hermann-
Göring Strasse; Magda invited the guests, who included Hitler, out to Schwanenwerder
for lunch. The new Lady Mosley gave Goebbels a blow-by-blow inside account of the
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 401
royal scandal. The new king wanted to marry an American woman, already twice
divorced, she said. Goebbels professed dismay at the depths a proud empire could
sink to; but this was the king who, as Prince of Wales, had openly praised Hitler’s
social programme and they all—Hitler, Goebbels, and Ribbentrop—agreed to do
the decent thing now. As the American and Continental press broke into a raucous
hue-and-cry Dr Goebbels, with Hitler’s approval, forbade the German media to print
one whisper on the scandal. In fact he issued a terse notice saying that Germany
regarded it as a private affair. The Berlin wiretappers heard one British embassy official
commenting that Edward, who had now abdicated and become Duke of Windsor,
would not easily forget Hitler’s restraint.38
Their discretion was poorly rewarded. During 1937 and 1938 the anti-Nazi jibes
from some elements of the British press multiplied. Ribbentrop told Goebbels that
much of it was controlled by the Jews, as were Britain’s cinema chains.39 He suggested
they purchase cinemas in London. Goebbels listened sympathetically. His
ministry was awash with money, and he did use some secret funds to buy up foreign
newspapers as well.40 Like Hitler he regarded Britain as holding the key to Germany’s
future. But how to proceed? Mosley was ‘spending a fortune and getting nowhere,’
he concluded; he had won no seats at all in the municipal elections. ’I think
he’s a busted flush,’ wrote Goebbels after a further panhandling visitation by Lady
Mosley in August 1937.41
HIS admiration of Hitler was now unconditional.42 The Führer confided in Goebbels
regularly. In mid-July 1936 he and Magda had spent three days at the Berghof, Hitler’s
lavish new mountainside domain high above Berchtesgaden. ‘We had a long
parlaver,’ writes Goebbels. ‘The three of us—the Führer, Göring, and I. That’s always
best.’43 They had all shared the annual Wagner experience at Bayreuth that summer.
In October 1936 Hitler had assigned to Goebbels an upstairs room at his own
Berghof, a certain sign of his esteem for him.44
Knowing Hitler’s intentions, Goebbels took a closer interest in their growing armed
forces. In early 1937 he spoke for two hours to selected Wehrmacht commanders
402 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
about propaganda. He found the generals elderly and tedious, but the young officers
bombarded him eagerly with questions. ‘Politically, they are often like children,’ he
assessed. ‘But then the politics is up to us.’45
General von Blomberg’s war plans, already worked out in some detail, rested on
the assumption that they were confronted by the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and
Lithuania.46 The Wehrmacht already attached significant weight to the wartime role
of propaganda. In that autumn’s manœuvres Goebbels’ new propaganda units took
part for the first time. There was one uncomfortable detail: although Berlin went
into full black-out, the ‘enemy’ planes still got through and Goebbels’ ministry was
adjudged a blazing ruin by the referees. ‘Let’s hope it’s never for real,’ he gasped in
his diary.47
THE Goebbels family spends a few days early in 1937 at Hitler’s Berghof again. Before
turning in one night, Goebbels speaks for some hours with Magda, now heavily pregnant,
about love and marriage. He feels they are drawing closer again, as always
‘when nobody comes between us.’48 After a couple of days he leaves his family there
and returns to Berlin. Predatory females cluster around him there.49 He drives out
some frosty nights to the new house at Lanke, explaining to his diary ‘nobody is
waiting for me in Berlin.’50
Magda and Hitler return to the capital together on the twenty-third. All this sets
tongues wagging. Gossip queen Bella Fromm, still holding out in Berlin, records
privately that Goebbels has been seen hanging around some pretty low dives, and
that Magda now has a list of more than thirty women he has slept with.51 Magda’s
closeness to Hitler also attracts salacious comment, and after Werner Count von
Alvensleben lets slip an incautious remark about her, her children, and her Führer,
Goebbels complains to Hitler and has the count, spluttering denials, whisked off to
concentration camp.52 Shortly the police tell Goebbels that his cook Martha has been
gossipping too, and she is sacked without notice. ‘Let’s hope she hasn’t done any
harm already,’ he writes, while entrusting no details to his diary.
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 403
It is of relevance to examine his views on divorce and adultery at this time. Hitler
takes a more liberal view of divorce than Goebbels.53 Goebbels instinctively opposes
it, although he feels that most Party wives are ‘too dumb and too thick to hang on to
; their husbands.’54 There are strains of catholic puritanism in him. When his young
sister, still in her twenties, begins dating a divorced film producer of forty-five, Max
Kimmich, he has detectives discreetly check the man’s background. ‘It’s okay,’ he
writes after hearing their report. ‘Maria can fall in love with him.’55 Finding double
standards easier than single, he spends nights out at Lanke (‘gossipping and lazing’),
and days discussing the new laws with Hitler. He proposes that couples be forced to
wait a year after filing for divorce—this cooling off period will save many faltering
marriages.56 But in his diary are many unconscious hints at his own activities. He
criticizes theatre director Eugen Klöpfer for his womanizing: ‘The theatre is not a
free-for-all for girl-snatchers,’ he huffs.57 Even more hypocritically he lectures the
incorrigible Walter Grantzow for falling in love with ‘some film star’, and now wanting
to dump his wife.58 Briefing his new chief of personnel, Goebbels stipulates that
he wants neither over-prudishness in his ministry, nor any hanky-panky either. ‘He
gets my drift,’ records the minister.59
His stand on adultery is no less self-serving. When the minister of the interior
Wilhelm Frick, a pettifogging lawyer whom Goebbels detests, proposes with almost
Islamic fervour ten-year jail terms for adultery, Goebbels snorts: ‘Then let them
begin retroactively with Frick.’ That night he drives scriptwriter Thea von Harbou
home (she was Fritz Lang’s lovely wife); and what right have we to doubt that she
only ‘tells me of her new film plans’?60 Visiting Magda in the clinic, he discusses these
perennial topics—’marriage, fidelity, etcetera’—and finds her ‘rational.’61 He tells
Hitler that neither divorce nor adultery is any concern of the public prosecutor. The
next days’ entries glimpse Joseph Goebbels driving the two Höpfner sisters out to
Lanke in the snow: then castigating a chastened actress, Miss Marie-Louise Claudius,
for indiscreet remarks: then assisting the beautiful Brigitte Horney with her foreign
currency problems: then receiving the no less shapely actress Gina Falckenberg for a
script discussion session (‘I can help her too’).62 Hitler promises that he will shoot
404 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
down Frick’s draconic proposals on adultery. At the end of 1937, when adultery
again comes before the Cabinet, Goebbels is still fighting. ‘Finally,’ he records, ‘we
agree: prison sentences only if demanded by the wronged husband and in the public
interest.’ The same Cabinet session decides that any rape committed by a Jew shall be
a capital offence.63
After a difficult confinement Magda gives birth on February 19, two months
prematurely. The gynæcologist says that the sickly little newcomer, another girl, is
truly holde, sweet; and they leave her with this name. ‘Just what I wanted,’ cries
Helga. ‘It came down from the clouds!’ Magda lies amidst her pillows, tired and
happy, and her large dreamy eyes fill with tears as her cuckolded husband limps in.64
NONE of the Goebbels children would be baptized. Goebbels had declared open war
on the church. When the devoutly catholic minister of posts, Eltz von Rübenach,
turned down Hitler’s gift of Party membership, made to all the non-Party ministers
on January 30, 1937, explaining that he could not join a Party that oppressed the
church, it was Dr Goebbels who indignantly orchestrated his colleagues’ demand for
Eltz’s resignation.65 Hitler however was one of the few Nazi leaders who still paid the
ten percent church levy on their income, and he saw no point in stirring up a hornets’
nest.66 It was not that he admired the church. He commented to Goebbels that
they had imbued modern man with a fear of death that his ancestors had never known.67
But he was a pragmatist. They had to avoid needless discord within the Reich. Twice
in February 1937 he called conferences at the Berghof on the inter-confessional disputes,
to which he invited Goebbels along with Frick, Hess, and Himmler. On both
occasions he explained that discord had to be avoided, since he expected a full-scale
world war within a few years.68 Goebbels shrewdly proposed the election of a constitutional
synod, wherein the clerics might stifle themselves in sterile debate and suffocate
in democracy while the party and state stood aside. At the second conference
Hitler again predicted ‘a great world conflict’ in five or six years’ time. ‘Germany,’ he
told his colleagues, ‘will prevail in a coming battle, or no longer survive.’
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 405
Thus for the time being Dr Goebbels had to order restraint in the church conflict.
‘What a genius the Führer truly is,’ he wrote, setting all this down for posterity.69
1 ‘Tagebuch für Joseph Goebbels vom 15. September 1936 bis 12. February 1937.’ On
microfiche in Moscow archives, Goebbels papers, box 1.
2 Holde Goebbels was born in Feb 1937 after seven months, i.e. conceived around July. A
sickly, quiet child, she was later spurned by her sisters as ‘slow-witted and boring.’ JG ribbed
her mercilessly and often reduced her to tears (Ebermayer & Meissner, Revue, No.20, May
17, 1952).
3 Based primarily on Lida Baarova: interviewed by myself, Jul 1993; by Ota Filip (transcript
courtesy of R G Reuth); and by Westdeutscher Rundfunk, May 1991 (‘Goebbels through
the eyes of Ufa star Lida Baarova’). See too the articles in Die Wochenpost, Stuttgart, Nov 20,
1949 (IfZ archives) and by Stan Czech (former Ufa employee and historian), in Heim und
Welt, Hanover, No.8 et seq., Feb 1950.
4 Ibid., and JG, Aug 19, 1936.
5 Diary, Sep 1; cf Basil C Newton to Eden, and Wigram to Eden, Aug 1936, in PRO file
FO.371/20417.
6 JG, Der Bolschewismus in Theorie und Praxis (Berlin, 1936). The speech, based on drafts from
Taubert (diary, Sep 2, 4), ran to 64pp. Hitler was delighted (diary, Sep 8); 15pp summary by
B C Newton to Eden, Sep 11, 1936 (PRO file FO.371/19948).
7 Baarova interviews; cf diary, Sep 10, 1936.
8 Diary, Sep 11, 1936.
9 Ibid., Sep 12, 1936.
10 Ibid., Sep 15, 1936.
11 WDR interview. For what it is worth, Julius Schaub later insisted that JG’s affair with
Lida Baarova was the only one he ever had with an actress, and that his reputation resulted
from malicious filmstar gossip: manuscript in Irving collection (IfZ, ED.100/202).
12 Diary, May 12, 1936: lunch with the Führer, who has ‘grandiose plans’ in foreign policy.—
On Nov 30, 1936 JG noted that Hitler was applying his mind to the production of scarce raw
materials like copper and iron ore within Germany.
13 Ibid., May 30, 1936.
14 Ibid., May 3, 1936.
15 Ibid., Apr 15; and see Oct 16, 1936.
16 Ibid., Jun 9, 1936.
17 Ibid., Nov 27, 1936.
18 Ibid., Apr 4, 6, 16, May 11, 9, Jun 17, Jul 14, Aug 1, Oct 6, 21, 1936; correspondence,
Apr 1–Nov 24, 1936 in Rosenberg’s files, NA film T454, roll 74, 0580ff; BA file R56V/102.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 66