On July 9, 1929, Alfred Hugenberg, head of the DNVP, Seldte of the Stahlhelm, Hitler, and Privy Councilor Heinrich Class, the leader of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League), set up a “Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition,” actually a comprehensive organization with an administrative network covering the Reich, a common platform for agitation for the whole of the united nationalist right.13 Goebbels—whose Angriff did not deign to notice the setting up of the committee—was less than enthusiastic. “Our job now is to see we’re not swindled and to make sure we’re in charge of the whole caboodle, with the others behind us.”14
Goebbels’s indecent haste, for all his objections, to join the “united front of Dawes patriots” was mainly due to the fact that Hitler had given him to understand that he, Goebbels, was destined to play the part of his closest collaborator and confidant. It flattered Goebbels, too, that Hitler took him into his confidence concerning his plans for the future: On July 5 they had a long discussion “about the coming constitution.” Goebbels’s diary notes for this day are among the rare documents from before 1933 that record Hitler expressing himself on the subject of his plans to structure the state after the proposed “seizure of power.” In general he avoided being prematurely tied down in this respect by public or internal Party pronouncements. What Hitler wanted, according to Goebbels, was a “tripartite” structure: first, an elected parliament that would debate but not make decisions; second, a “senate of about 60–70 members […] to be augmented by co-opting,” where “after clarification in the course of discussion, experts” would make decisions “on their own responsibility”; third, a “corporative parliament for economic questions.” By and large, Goebbels agreed with these plans, although he did have some doubts: “Is the political parliament necessary, should there be general elections to it, won’t the senate eventually become rigid and bloodless?”15
Ultimately, Goebbels’s revised attitude to Hitler’s alliance policy may well have been due to the prospect of becoming head of propaganda for the Reich based in Munich, which Hitler had held out to him around the end of May and again at the beginning of July. It was an appointment about which he had speculated since at least April.
RAPPROCHEMENT WITH STRASSER
Goebbels’s skepticism about the line the Party leadership was taking made it seem expedient in spring 1929 to repair fences with Strasser and the “left” wing of the Party. At the beginning of March he agreed with Strasser that Hitler must be more decisive in his dealings with the SA.16 Moreover, Goebbels criticized Hitler’s leadership style to Party friends and called for the appointment of a deputy as well as other “representatives” of the Party leader who would take some of the burden off his shoulders. In this connection he also gave a glimpse of the way he saw his future in the Party leadership: “My job is propaganda and information. The area of culture and education. That is something which suits me and which I enjoy.”17
At the end of April, on a return trip together by train from Berlin to Dresden, Gregor Strasser and Goebbels took advantage of the opportunity—now in an entirely “friendly” atmosphere—to have a long talk. They came to an understanding on a whole series of political questions, among them the topic of propaganda: “There’s got to be a new appointment in Reich headquarters. I’m the only possible candidate.”18 Strasser’s agreement on this point was particularly important, since the Lower Bavarian National Socialist leader had been responsible for Reich propaganda until the end of 1927, after which he had become chief Party organizer for the Reich. In order to document the rapprochement publicly, Goebbels contributed an article to the Nationalsozialistische Briefe with the title “From Chaos to Form.” He confidently announced in the publication, for which he had not written since 1927, when he was relieved of the editorship: “We are giving the century a meaningful shape.”19
The idea of putting Goebbels in charge of propaganda for the Reich, conceived during the rail trip to Dresden, was adopted by Hitler in the following months as his own. Twice, at the end of May and the beginning of July, he offered to make Goebbels director of propaganda. This offer was linked to the assumption that Goebbels would spend a good deal of his time in Munich, with a second base there. Instead of accepting immediately, though, Goebbels asked for time to think about it.20 By the end of July, however, he was assuming he would in fact be taking over as director of propaganda by September.21 He had also begun to step up the propaganda effort of his own Gau, and in June he created an appropriate local department under Georg Stark.22
During the Weimar Party rally, which stretched across the end of July and the beginning of August, he found that rumors were circulating to the effect that he was going to move to Munich, thus relinquishing his office in Berlin. He immediately suspected that this canard was a ploy on the part of Otto Strasser, who was aiming to disempower him in Berlin. Was it possible that Hitler was behind the maneuver? If so—which he thought unlikely, however—then he was ready to drop “the whole business.”23 But Hitler succeeded in calming him down: There was no question of him giving up his Berlin position. He was eventually placated by an “excellent summary” of his propaganda expertise from the mouth of the Führer. Goebbels, seeing himself already as the “boss” of Party propaganda, conducted himself accordingly at the propagandists’ conference.24 In the same month he wrote a report on the reorganization of the Party’s propaganda apparatus; with regard to the final “decision about Reich propaganda and Berlin,” he expressed himself quite emphatically in writing to Hitler himself.25 However, it was not until October that he reached an agreement with headquarters over the conditions applying to his takeover of the Reich propaganda machine: “The Party are giving me an apartment there, I’ll be going every 2 weeks to Munich, staying for 3 days, and setting up a perfectly functioning office; all propaganda will be centralized and will have a unified style. I’ll then be giving a few more talks in Bavaria. They can do with it. Berlin remains unchanged.”26
In November 1929, Goebbels sat down with Heinrich Himmler, nominally deputy director of Reich propaganda but in practice the acting officeholder, to work out the further details of his future work.27 But his appointment had still not been announced.
AFTER THE SUMMER BREAK, 1929 THE RENEWED STRUGGLE FOR THE STREETS
After the break in summer 1929, Goebbels had resumed his fight for domination of the streets. The SA was again in the news with its violence-prone marches. Der Angriff, feeling that the “final desperate battle” with the communists had arrived,28 declared the working-class districts of Wedding, Neukölln, Friedrichshain, Lichtenberg, and Prenzlauer Berg “main combat zones.”29
On September 7 the SA marched through Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf; during the closing ceremony Goebbels talked himself “hoarse once more.”30 On September 15 there was a propaganda march through Charlottenburg and Moabit, once again capped by a Goebbels speech, this time in the Savignyplatz.31 The following Sunday, September 22, three standards of the SA marched through Kreuzberg and Neukölln. As Goebbels was inspecting the marchers in front of Görlitz Station he was attacked and only just managed to escape to his car; his driver was injured. In an editorial in Der Angriff entitled “On the Front Line,” Goebbels supplied his readers with a dramatic account of this assault.32 And the local news in Der Angriff during those weeks did in fact read like reports from the front. Covering a “large-scale battle on the foremost front line,” for example, its reporter wrote: “If the Fischerkiez [district] can be taken, it will mean that the backbone of the Red Terror in the central area has been broken.”33 A few weeks later the paper published “front-line accounts” from this disputed territory, while it said of Schöneberg that here “the lowest form of sub-humanity […] was hunting down National Socialist workers.”34
In October the Berlin NSDAP planned to hold a grand-scale “Hitler Week” with many meetings and propaganda marches. However, the high point, a big SA parade, was banned on short notice by the police.35 There had been no plans for Hitler to appear at
this event: The Party leader appeared only once in public in Berlin during 1929, at the student rally in July mentioned earlier.
Even if Hitler was rarely present in Berlin and the person of the Party leader did not feature prominently in the day-to-day propaganda work of the NSDAP, Goebbels was nonetheless highly dependent on Hitler—and not just in political terms, either, as shown by the following episode in September 1929. Goebbels happened to be in Breslau when, just before he was due to give a speech that evening, he received a telegram signed by Alfred Rosenberg: Hitler had suffered a fatal accident. “I feel completely numb. I am shaken by paroxysms of weeping. I see chaos ahead of me. I’m standing all alone among strangers. Groping my way in endless loneliness.” A telephone call to Munich established that Hitler was alive and well and that the telegram was a fake.
Goebbels returned to the rally and gave a two-hour speech: “Suffering dreadfully! My greatest feat of oratory yet. Despite my depression, concentration beyond belief.” Then he collapsed, exhausted: “I don’t sleep all night. Only now do I realize what Hitler means to me and the movement. Everything! Everything!”36 The enormous tension took its toll; he was ill for the next three days.37
A NATIONALIST ALLIANCE AND LOCAL ELECTIONS
During the summer of 1929, while he was hoping that Hitler would soon confirm his appointment to the job in Munich, Goebbels had been holding back—despite considerable reservations—from criticizing the Party leader’s unappealing policy of allying with nationalist forces. He does not seem to have realized, or else found too complicated and too troublesome, the twin-track strategy employed by Hitler—as in several other projects—of wooing the nationalist right while at the same time clearly distancing himself from it.
By September the Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition had assembled a bill to put before the Reichstag proposing a plebiscite aimed at preventing the Reich government from taking on any new burdens or commitments under the Versailles Treaty. The government would also be formally obliged to retract the admission of war guilt contained in the treaty, as well as to annul all of the previously accepted commitments arising out of that admission. Government ministers and other representatives of the Reich who ignored these decrees and signed agreements with foreign states could be tried for treason. Goebbels published one of his speeches as a pamphlet, in which agitation against the Young Plan was given a pronounced “socialist” slant: Through reparations the means of production were being expropriated by foreigners, thus making nationalization impossible.38
The collection of signatures in support of a petition calling for a plebiscite on the Young Plan was carried out between October 16 and October 29. This drive was boosted by a smoothly functioning propaganda machine, with contributions not only from the participating organizations—the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, the NSDAP—but also from the press network controlled by Hugenberg, as well as a large amount of assorted propaganda material, together with funding, distributed by the Reich Committee to participating organizations.39
A common perception that this massive propaganda exposure was crucially important for the NSDAP’s transformation into a mass movement does not seem to stand up to scrutiny. The Hugenberg press, for example, was quite reluctant to give the NSDAP space for its propaganda during the referendum drive, and it appears that the Party’s participation in the campaign did little to increase sponsorship from industry.40
In private, Goebbels was skeptical about the whole venture, as his diary indicates. In particular, his entries at the time are full of complaints about inadequate financial support from the Reich Committee.41 Hitler’s willingness to collaborate with the “reactionaries” still rubbed him the wrong way: “Hitler and Hugenberg shared a platform in Munich. Grr! […] Nothing more can be achieved by parliamentary means. The revolution must be on the march!”42
He wavered in his assessment of the outcome of the petition. Around the end of October and the beginning of November, he was sure that the necessary quorum for a petition (10 percent of those eligible to vote) would not be achieved and that the bourgeois parties could be blamed for this defeat.43 However, when the petition barely gained the necessary support—at 10.02 percent of the vote—to stage a plebiscite, he was cheering: “Hurrah! At least all that work wasn’t wasted. So now the dance can continue.” He cast aside his doubts: “We’ll be the winners, come what may.”44
The campaign against the Young Plan merged smoothly into the election campaign, in which the SA, aroused by Goebbels’s call for “mobilization,”45 again took a front-line role.46 In the Prussian local elections on November 17, 1929, the NSDAP in Berlin took 132,000 votes, or 5.8 percent, sending thirteen deputies to the city council. Its greatest successes came in middle-class districts such as Steglitz, Schöneberg, and Zehlendorf, the bastions of the “nationalist” middle class specifically targeted by the anti–Young Plan campaign. It was in proletarian districts such as Wedding, Prenzlauer Berg, and Neukölln that the NSDAP did the worst.47 For almost a year Goebbels took over the leadership of the small NSDAP section in the council, but he did not speak there once, essentially leaving local politics to Julius Lippert.48
On December 22 the plebiscite on the Young Plan bill failed: Despite the huge propaganda effort, no more than 13.8 percent of the vote was in favor.49 But the group that had established the Reich Committee—regarded by Goebbels with the utmost suspicion—did not dissolve it. So he decided to take provocative action that would drive a wedge into the coalition.
On December 29, under the headline “Is Hindenburg Still Alive?,” he mounted an attack in Der Angriff on the eighty-two-year-old president, predicting that in the case of the Young Plan, Hindenburg would once more do what “his Jewish and Marxist advisers prompted him” to do. This was accompanied by a cartoon lampooning the president. Goebbels calculated that, although the nationalists who had launched the plebiscite wanted to pressure the president into refusing to sign the Young Plan even if Parliament accepted it, they would not want to target the World War hero directly in their campaign. The calculation proved correct, as he learned early in January: “The Stahlhelm has us in its sights on account of the Hindenburg article. Hitler is completely with me on this.”50
Relentlessly, Goebbels added fuel to the fire: When the Young Plan was passed into law by the Reichstag on March 12, 1930, and the president immediately added his signature, he asserted in an editorial that “starting now we have a new enemy: Hindenburg.”51 In a speech at the Veteran Soldiers’ House on March 14 he described the president as the “lackey of this crooked government and of crooked politics,”52 and he wrote in the next issue of Der Angriff that “Herr von Hindenburg” had “given himself the stamp of a Young-patriot.”53 For his December 1929 article, the Charlottenburg court of lay assessors fined him 800 marks.54 Goebbels accounted the verdict a moral victory: “A first-class funeral for Hindenburg.”55
DEATH AND THE DEATH CULT
On November 8, 1929, the Berlin Gau staged a commemorative ceremony in the Veteran Soldiers’ House for the dead of the Great War and those of the “movement”: Goebbels and Hermann Göring both gave speeches.56 Two days later there were three further memorial ceremonies, at the graves of Georg Kütemeyer and two other members of the National Socialist movement. “Dr. Goebbels three times made himself the interpreter between the dead and the living,” wrote Der Angriff.57
On these occasions, as so often at that time of year, Goebbels succumbed to melancholy: “It was a bright, sunny autumn day. And a sad sense of mortality came over me.”58
Two weeks later he heard from his eldest brother, Konrad, that their father, whose health had been a cause of concern for some time,59 was terminally ill. He went to Rheydt, where he found the dying man “completely emaciated, reduced to a skeleton, whimpering”: A week later came the news of his death.60 When he saw the dead man laid out, he “wept uncontrollably.” Commenting on the church funeral service, he observed how “empty and colorless […] all these forms” were. He spent two day
s in Rheydt with his family, who tried to console themselves by sharing their memories of the deceased.61
Goebbels brought his father to mind again in the diary: He praised his morality, his sense of duty, and his devotion to principles. It had not been granted to him “to do great service for his country,” but the son found comfort in the thought that his father would “go on living in him and be resurrected in glory,” and this idea helped him to suppress his feelings of guilt—had he returned his love sufficiently? had he been ungrateful?—toward his father.62
Back in Berlin, a few days later he recorded in his diary a “strange dream” that sheds light on his state of mind at the time: He was “in a school, being pursued along wide corridors by a crowd of East Galician rabbis. They kept on shouting their ‘hatred’ at me. I was a few steps ahead of them, shouting the same back at them. So it went on for hours. But they never caught up with me.”63
Repeatedly he had to deliver speeches at commemorative ceremonies: on December 18 at a memorial gathering for the SA man Walter Fischer; a few days later at the same man’s funeral; and on December 28 at the burial of Werner Wessel, brother of the SA leader Horst Wessel, who had died in an accident.64 The concentrated work of mourning in these months may have led him to develop a cult around the dead of the movement, a result of the mounting loss of Party comrades. Early in 1930, the violent clashes in Berlin provided him with a suitable icon for this cult: Horst Wessel. Since the beginning of 1929 Goebbels had often been thrown together with the young SA leader: “A brave lad, student, speaker, SA leader.”65 Raised in a middle-class family, Wessel had abandoned his law studies early, at the age of twenty-two, to devote himself entirely to the National Socialist cause. In May 1929 he had taken charge of an SA troop in the predominantly communist area around the Silesia Station. This troop rapidly evolved into the “SA-Sturm 5,” one of the most feared groups of thugs in the Berlin SA. It paraded with a trademark Schalmei band,*1 which was a particular provocation to the communists, as they had made the Schalmei their own instrument. Wessel also composed song lyrics, including “Die Fahne hoch” (Raise high the flag), a song that was to acquire practically national-anthem status during the Third Reich.66
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