If the National Socialist movement in general highlighted the significance of inflammatory speech-making among its propaganda methods, this was especially true of the Berlin NSDAP and its Gauleiter. A naturally gifted orator, during his Berlin years Goebbels perfected his rhetorical abilities; any event in which he was announced as a speaker was sure to see a strong turnout.
Joseph Goebbels’s effect as a speaker was based on a whole package of abilities. Given his slight build, he had a surprisingly deep voice that projected well, one that was carefully articulated but also capable of modulation.56 Even if he made extreme demands on his voice—as we know he often did—he generally avoided making it sound overstretched or perceptibly strained to the listener. As a speaker he commanded a relatively wide register of different styles: sometimes a witty conversational tone; biting irony; furious, even desperate accusation; solemn and triumphal pathos; an obituary oration with his voice almost breaking. He had a rich vocabulary at his disposal (sometimes adopting rare, quaintly old-fashioned phrases) and brought in many historical examples and classical quotations. On the other hand, his arguments were always easy to grasp, intelligible to a broad audience.
Unlike Hitler, as a speaker Goebbels always kept himself well under control at every stage of his address, even when completely exhausted. His acting and gestures, carefully practiced, were almost perfectly suited to the speech at hand, their lively and dramatic quality striking contemporary observers as quite Mediterranean.57 Typical were the light waving motion of his hand that accompanied the expository parts of his speech; the threatening index finger suddenly thrust skyward; the clenched fist, which he moved back and forth to beat his chest to the rhythm of his sentence; the hammering on the lectern; and the posture of arms akimbo, meant to underline the authority of the speaker.
His mildly Rhenish accent reinforced the often measured, solemn tone of his speech. The stretching of certain vowels typical of the Rhineland enabled him to pronounce such key terms as “Führer” or “Deutschland” with particular fervor or to emit with theatrical contempt words such as “Judentum” (Jewry). With his singsong intonation and certain idiosyncratic features of expression and emphasis, he could achieve an effective heightening of his sentence and then bring it to a more or less harmonious conclusion. In short, all this lent Goebbels’s language its own rhythm, giving his sentences an unmistakable “tune,” often reminiscent of the church preacher, a “heartfelt tone,” as one of his later listeners, Victor Klemperer, was to call it.58 However, this tone could very quickly turn into that of a biting attack. It was precisely this flexibility and versatility that made Goebbels so effective as a speaker.
DOMINATING THE STREETS
If the whole object of Goebbels’s highly robust propaganda campaign was to attract attention at any price, he certainly succeeded: “People started talking about us. We could no longer be ignored or passed over in icy contempt. However reluctant and furious they were about it, people couldn’t avoid mentioning us.” The Party was “suddenly at the center of public interest,” and “people now had to decide whether they were for or against.”59
But getting your name known was just the first step. Using a combination of aggressive propaganda and violent action, Goebbels was out to achieve for the Party what he had called, in an article in the summer of 1926, “domination of the streets”: “Anyone who spreads his ideology by terror and brutality against all force will one day gain power and thereby also the right to bring down the state.”60
Goebbels approached this objective by arranging a series of carefully targeted provocations in quick succession. The Party caused violent confrontations on a grand scale, not only drawing attention to itself but also penetrating districts that had until then been the preserve of the workers’ movement.
The first event in this series was a mass meeting in the Seitz ballroom in the red citadel of Spandau. Reportedly, there were five hundred Communist Party (KPD) supporters in the hall, about half of those present. Goebbels himself judged that he spoke “as I’ve never done before in Berlin. The reds are quite bemused.” During the discussion news filtered through that an NSDAP supporter had been knocked down in the street. Goebbels immediately broke off and had his debating opponent forcibly ejected from the building. The National Socialists left in closed ranks. Later there was some brawling with communists on the streets of Spandau.61
A few days later Goebbels appeared at a rally in Cottbus. SA members from throughout the Gau area rounded off the proceedings with a propaganda march through the town, where on the same day—surely no coincidence—a trade union rally and a procession by the Reichsbanner (Reich Banner)*1 were due to take place. The police tried in vain to keep the two groups of supporters apart. The outcome was a pitched battle between the SA and the police.62
On February 11 there was another rally, this time in the Pharus rooms in Wedding, another red stronghold. This occasion was conceived as an “open declaration of war” against the left. Goebbels chose his topic, “The Collapse of the Bourgeois Class System,” with a working-class audience in mind. The Party chronicler Reinhold Muchow, from the Neukölln district branch, commented that “it was all about making it obvious that National Socialism is absolutely determined to use all necessary force to get to the workers.” And it did: During the meeting the SA, clearly in the majority, fought with KPD supporters.63 These riots publicized the NSDAP, but the “struggle” also consolidated Goebbels’s position within the Party: “Quite suddenly these successes secured and established for us the strong, leading authority we had never enjoyed in our Berlin organization,” wrote Goebbels, looking back in his propaganda book Struggle for Berlin.64
On February 15 there was another event in Spandau, where members of the Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Frontline Fighters’ League)*2 were violently evicted from the hall. On the return trip to the city center, a communist counterattack was anticipated: Some of the SA were armed. Goebbels fancied himself in the role of the daredevil revolutionary: “Home! 6 cars. All full of gunners. Along the whole long Heerstrasse. In the dead of night. War! Revolution!” But the attack never came.65
On February 23 Goebbels again arrived in Munich, where “the boss” called on him in person in his hotel the next morning. “I’m terrifically pleased to see him again. He is so good to me. A true Führer and friend!” They went to Hitler’s home, where first of all Goebbels received “a little dressing down” because of an essay he had published a few days earlier openly accusing Wilhelm Frick of jeopardizing National Socialist principles by his politically motivated tactics in the Reichstag.66 “I tolerated it,” Goebbels wrote. But then Hitler suddenly got to his feet. He “gives me both hands, gripping tightly, tears come to his eyes, and then he says: ‘You are right.’ ” Then they discussed a whole series of inner Party figures, and agreed with each other “one hundred percent” on all of them, including their estimation of the Strasser brothers. Together, they went to lunch, to headquarters, to a café, and in the evening to dinner and the theater. They concluded the evening in a pub. On parting, Hitler had said: “You should be with me all the time. […] He expresses my inmost thoughts!”67 Once again, Goebbels succumbed completely to the Hitler charm offensive.
The most serious clash so far instigated by the NSDAP came on March 20, 1927. At a nighttime event in Trebbin, about eighteen miles from Berlin, celebrating the first anniversary of the official existence of the Berlin SA, Goebbels had made an “incendiary speech.” The next day at a rally he raised the temperature still further by making a rabidly anti-Semitic speech from his open car. After a concluding ceremony, as some of the SA contingent were making their way home by train, they came across a troop of Red Frontline Fighters and tried to get access to the communists’ carriage via the footboards and the roof of the train. At every station they threw stones at the car until all the windows were smashed. The confrontation escalated at the Lichterfeld Ost Station: A shot rang out from the communist side, badly wounding an SA man. At this point the SA
tried to storm the carriage, only to be repulsed by further shots from the communists. Two Nazis and fourteen communists were wounded, some of them seriously.68
When Goebbels arrived at the station, having traveled by car, agitated NSDAP supporters were already gathering for a demonstration: “March through the city. Every provocation to be punished with the most extreme severity. Our brave lads pull a Jew down out of a bus. […] The new Germany is demonstrating. I speak in front of 10,000 people in the Wittenbergplatz. With huge success.”69
On their march the Nazis had indeed abused or knocked down passersby they took to be Jewish.70 Two days later the liberal Berliner Tageblatt complained about the total ineffectiveness of the police.71 After this, the police appeared in great strength at two National Socialist meetings and—with some success—searched those present for weapons.72 Goebbels reviewed the situation: “I’m terrifically pleased about one thing: that we managed to irritate this massive city sufficiently to force it to react. […] The Jew [sic] has done me the honor of saying in the B.T. and the News at Eight that I have succeeded in bringing things out into the open here.”73 According to a Berlin criminal police report, not all Party members approved of Goebbels’s brutal methods, but the majority were “in favor of activity.” And in March the number of Party members rose by 400 to about 3,000.74
On May 4 Goebbels spoke again at the Veterans’ Association House. “A fresh heckler was thrown out into the fresh air,” he noted laconically in his diary. “At the end the 3–400 people present were searched by two police companies for weapons. Imagine this lunacy.”75 Somebody had indeed heckled Goebbels during his speech and on a signal from the Gauleiter had been seized by a horde of SA men, brutally manhandled, and thrown down the stairs. A journalist from the Scherl publishing house who was discovered in the hall was subjected to the same treatment. A large contingent of police then sealed off the premises and searched every participant individually for weapons.76
This occurrence—which has to be seen in the context of the provocative tactics pursued by Goebbels since January—led the head of the Berlin police, Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel, to take a drastic step: On May 5, 1927, just seven months after Goebbels became Gauleiter, the Berlin-Brandenburg organization of the NSDAP was declared to have been dissolved. The reasons cited were the acts of violence by the Nazis and a series of pronouncements by Goebbels that made it clear that the Party was proceeding deliberately to fulfill a plan.77 But Goebbels was not in the least abashed. On the contrary, “Dissolved. It shows we’re on the right path. That’s good!” He only narrowly escaped arrest by going to Stuttgart for a while.78
Goebbels’s policy of provocation was certainly not without its detractors in the Party, and the ban on the Party was not universally acclaimed as a success. Even before the passing of the ban, the internal Party opposition had attacked him severely for his ruthless leadership style. On April 27, 1927, a remarkable article had appeared in the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, the Strassers’ newspaper. In it, Party comrade Erich Koch, district leader in Elberfeld, had issued a warning about people who were “marked” by the consequences of miscegenation: “We have enough examples from history in this area. King Richard III of England […] was a model of depravity. […] And there you have it: He was a hunchback with a limp. Like him, the court jester of Francis I of France limped, too; he was notorious, infamous, and hated for his malice, intrigues, and calumnies. […] Talleyrand had a clubfoot. His character is well known.” In short, people of this kind, though “intelligent, were boundlessly ambitious, heartless egoists who have never done their people as a whole anything but harm.”79
Incandescent with rage about these “swine,” Goebbels complained to Hitler about Strasser.80 However, Koch denied that his “clubfoot” remark was in any way aimed at Goebbels.81 For his part, Goebbels assumed that the forces of opposition in the Berlin Party organization had written the article with the agreement of Otto Strasser and that Koch was nothing but a patsy. He demanded a clear declaration of loyalty from Hitler and threatened to resign if the latter chose merely to pass over the incident in silence.82 The difficulty of his relationship with the Strassers was further exacerbated by Goebbels’s plan to bring out a newspaper of his own in Berlin no later than the end of May, thus competing with the Strassers’ Kampf-Verlag. This blatant offensive83 added even more fuel to the rage of the Strasser brothers.84 Before the end of the month he was obliged to give up editing the Nationalsozialistische Briefe. Goebbels’s thoughts turned to revenge.85
The conflict became more acute when criticism of the high-handed Gauleiter, expressed so clearly in the article, increased after the ban on the Party. At a meeting of the Party inner circle in Munich, Goebbels was obliged to defend himself against the Strassers’ charge that he had unnecessarily provoked the authorities’ move by his behavior.86 At the Berlin Party rally of June 10, 1927, Goebbels read the “clubfoot” article aloud and named the Party comrades in Berlin he thought were behind the attack. His misshapen foot, he declared, was “not an innate defect” but the result of an accident. This was one of the very few occasions when he referred to his deformity in public.
Finally, Goebbels consulted Party headquarters about how to handle the affair. The result was that in the Völkischer Beobachter of June 25, Hitler moved to counter the rumors already circulating widely in the Berlin press of “fraternal strife in the house of Hitler.” He reaffirmed that Goebbels enjoyed his full confidence.87 The very fact that Goebbels needed this support from Munich shows how hard it was for him to deal with the internal Party opposition.
The conflict flared up again in September 1927, and Goebbels found himself once more offering Hitler his resignation.88 When Hitler came to Berlin shortly afterward, they again spent a great deal of time together—but without discussing the conflict.89 In the end, with Hitler acting as intermediary, Goebbels in November concluded a “Strasser peace” with the brothers.90 In December he thought he had obtained Hitler’s agreement that the Kampf-Verlag should be moved to Essen.91 But this did not happen. There was peace for a few months, but then the conflict with the Strassers broke out again.
With all these troubles in the Gau, Goebbels’s relations with his friend and landlord, Steiger, had steadily deteriorated.92 Finally, Steiger left Goebbels’s weekly Der Angriff (The Attack), moving to the Strassers’ Arbeiterzeitung. Goebbels thought he saw the “low-bred scoundrel” emerging in Steiger.93 Under these circumstances it was impossible to remain Steiger’s tenant. At the beginning of November he rented an apartment in Friedenau.94
During his first months in Berlin, Goebbels had kept loosely in touch with Else, seeing her—although increasingly rarely—when he happened to go to Rheydt.95 Gradually he began to keep an eye out in Berlin. His eye fell first upon “Fräulein Behr,” who had joined the team at the Gau office in the spring of 1927.96
In spring 1927 he struck up a flirtation with Dora Hentschel, a young woman from Dessau who had just taken up a teaching position in Potsdam.97 But hardly had the relationship begun when Goebbels wanted to end it: “I must not make her unhappy. That’s why I’ve got to stop seeing her.”98 A female acquaintance in whose house he had met Dora strongly advised him to marry, but this advice did not appeal to Goebbels: “What’s the hurry? I replied rather angrily.”99 He began to see less of Dora.100 In December 1927, in a “Russian pub,” he got to know a “wonderful blonde Russian émigrée,” Tamara von Heede.101 They began their affair in February 1928.102
DER ANGRIFF
The strife within the Party and the immobilized Party organization induced Goebbels, who at the end of 1925 had already been pursuing the idea of a national socialist weekly for West Germany, to start up a publication of his own in Berlin, acquiring Hitler’s approval for a weekly paper called Der Angriff (The Attack).103 The first issue, appearing in early July, was preceded by a big advertising campaign. Three posters appeared at an interval of a few days on the Berlin streets. The first simply bore the words “The Attack?” and the se
cond proclaimed, “The Attack begins on July 4”; only by the third poster did the public learn that a new magazine would be appearing on Mondays.104 Goebbels found “many faults” with the first edition.105 He was much happier with subsequent issues.106
Der Angriff projected itself as a modern metropolitan paper taking a shrill, aggressive line. Its slogan, “For the oppressed! Against the exploiters,” suggested a socialist alignment; in many ways, the Strassers’ Berliner Arbeiterzeitung (Berlin Workers’ Newspaper) was the model. But since the paper’s early editions had a modest print run of about two hundred copies, it hardly reached the proletarian masses.
Goebbels regularly wrote the editorials, and his byline was attached to a column called “The Political Diary.” He left the role of editor in chief to Julius Lippert, who had relevant experience in the völkisch press. The distinctive caricatures—featuring mostly powerful-looking SA men—were contributed by Goebbels’s friend Schweitzer/Mjölnir.
In the editorials Goebbels showed himself to be an accomplished stylist. He turned his hand to a variety of genres: satirical, fairy-tale, saga, conversational, or epistolary.107 Goebbels enjoyed writing in the vein of a metropolitan tabloid journalist, with the appropriate aggressive and deliberately overblown formulations aimed at the Republic and its press. So, for example, he called the detective assigned to shadow him a “snout-wipe,” and the chief commissioner of police the current “token goy at Berlin police headquarters.” Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann appeared as “this politicizing dilettante thrown up by a grotesque quirk of fate out of the chocolate trade into high diplomacy,” and the “so-called German Reichstag” was “a pawnbroker tribunal in the service of high finance.”108
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