Goebbels: A Biography
Page 20
DISPUTES WITHIN THE PARTY
After the elections of September 1930, Goebbels had set about seriously expanding the Reich propaganda machine in Munich. In November 1930 he acquired a deputy there, Heinz Franke, who soon had a staff of around ten. The propaganda department’s activities included, among other things, putting out a series of publications, organizing school events, and producing films and gramophone records.115
In a circular of January 1931 Goebbels expressed himself highly dissatisfied with the performance of the Gau propaganda offices: “The aim of the Reich propaganda office is to create a first-class apparatus functioning in accordance with headquarters directives like a flawless precision engine, and the Reich office does not intend to allow itself to be diverted from this goal by recalcitrant or incompetent Gau propaganda sections.”116
After a press and propaganda conference117 in Munich on April 26, 1931, Goebbels published “Guidelines for NSDAP Propaganda Management” in Wille und Weg (Will and Way), the Reich propaganda office’s newly founded newsletter. In particular, he described in detail the responsibility of Gau propaganda directors, who “in practical terms” were subordinate to the Reich propaganda office, and he gave instructions for the conduct of meetings, sending Party speakers out to the Party organization around the country, and producing leaflets.118 His self-confident manner here hardly endeared him to the Party. It was nothing new for him to find at the conference that he had not exactly gone over well among the Party’s more senior functionaries, and that he had been the subject of malicious gossip: “Nobody likes me.”119
After the Munich conference he had a long talk with Hitler. Hitler declared that he was “completely free of suspicion about me, and condemns in the sharpest terms all the agitation against me in the Party. I ask him if he has full confidence in me, and he comes out wholeheartedly on my side. ‘Berlin belongs to you, and that’s how it will stay!’ ”120
In the following weeks critical remarks about Hitler abounded in his diary. While he considered Mein Kampf “honest and courageous,” he also found “the style […] sometimes unbearable.” Furthermore: “You’ve got to be tolerant. He writes the way he talks. The effect is direct, but often also inept.” Commenting on a meeting with Hitler in the Kaiserhof Hotel a few days later, he wrote: “He hates Berlin and loves Munich. […] But why Munich, exactly? I don’t understand it.”121
In May 1931 the Stennes trial took place, threatening to plunge Hitler into considerable difficulties thanks to a statement Goebbels had made some years earlier. The danger avoided at the Leipzig Treason Trial now appeared to rear its ugly head again. So it was not surprising that Goebbels anticipated Hitler’s testimony “with a racing pulse.”122 The situation was that members of the infamous SA Stormtroop 33 were on trial once more; this time the charge was attempted homicide. The secondary charge maintained that the SA violence was systematic and that the leadership of the SA and the Party were ultimately behind it. Among those subpoenaed were Stennes, who was now sidelined, but who had been in charge of the SA in eastern Germany at the time of the assaults in question; and Hitler, as head of the whole Party.
To Goebbels’s surprise, Stennes claimed in court that in his time the Party had followed a strictly legal course. Hitler, who gave his evidence quite tamely, was confronted with a passage from Der Nazi-Sozi, a leaflet written by Goebbels, stating that the National Socialists wanted “revolution”: “Then we’ll send Parliament to hell and found the state on German muscle and German brain-power!”123 Goebbels’s radicalism made Hitler uncomfortable: “I did not have all the contents of the leaflet in mind at the time I appointed Goebbels,” he responded. “In any case, today he is strictly required to follow the line laid down by me and nobody but me.”124 In the evening when they were sitting together in the Kaiserhof, Goebbels remembered that he had cut the offending passage out of the second edition. “Hitler positively dances with joy. That vindicates us.” For the time being, the danger that Goebbels might be called as a “witness for the Crown” against Hitler’s claim to pursue a law-abiding policy had been averted.125
On June 9 Goebbels participated in an NSDAP leadership conference at the Brown House in Munich, which also included Frick and the “revolting Göring.” The potential for conflict was substantial: “Strasser opens the attack on Hitler. He wants a General Secretary—Strasser himself, naturally—to be appointed. He would be in charge of organization and propaganda. Party to be divided into three areas: S.A., state (Hierl), and fighting movement (Strasser). Plus a commissar in Prussia. So they want to make the boss honorary chairman and sideline me.” Göring and Hierl had supported Strasser, but Hitler had defended himself “cleverly and emphatically” and “rejected the move on its face.” Goebbels kept his head down during this attack and stayed silent, reasoning that “I haven’t got many friends in the Party. Practically no one apart from Hitler. They all envy me my success and my popularity.” After the conference, Hitler assured him that he was completely behind him.
At the behest of Göring’s wife, Carin, the two rivals met in June and agreed to a kind of ceasefire.126 But Goebbels was reminded in the following weeks how insecure his position was within the Party. At the end of June rumors reached him that Hitler wished to replace him as Gauleiter of Berlin. He suspected the source was somebody in Munich headquarters.127 Finally, he published in Der Angriff a short notice in which he confirmed in ironic fashion his intention of staying in Berlin for the duration: “I am not ill. I could become so by laughing myself sick over the unholy amount of activity being put into kindly talking me away from Berlin.”128
In July he stumbled upon evidence of a “widespread conspiracy”: “S.S. (Himmler) maintains a spy bureau here in Berlin to keep me under surveillance. They are putting out the craziest rumors. I think it’s an agent provocateur operation.” He decided to try to bring down Himmler, “that crafty swine.”129 A few days later he found an opportunity to bring the affair to Hitler’s attention. The latter reacted “with horror” and ordered an “immediate end” to the bureau, not without “assuring [Goebbels] of his full confidence.”130 That seemed to put an end to the rumors of his removal from Berlin. He was clearly not willing to entertain the fairly obvious idea that in spying on him Himmler might be doing the Party leadership’s bidding.
In all these disputes it became clear how small Goebbels’s power base within the Party actually was during this phase of the NSDAP’s rapid expansion into a mass movement. In Berlin he had to appear as a radical hothead in order to keep the SA on board, but this in turn created tensions around his attitude to the “legal” course chosen by the Party leader, upon whose support he was so highly dependent. The conflicts he had to endure with leading Party comrades such as Göring, Strasser, and Himmler showed the danger he ran of isolating himself within the Party.
MAGDA
In the meantime, great changes were occurring in Goebbels’s private life. After several affairs, he had at last found a partner he thought worthy of comparison with Anka.
The first mention of her in the diary came on November 7, 1930: “A lovely woman called Quandt is reorganizing my private papers.” But it was more than three months, during which Goebbels was involved in a whole series of other affairs, before the couple got closer to each other. On February 15, 1932, he wrote in the diary: “Magda Quandt comes in the evening. And stays for a very long time. And blossoms into an enchanting blond sweetness. You really are my queen.” He added a little “1” in brackets, which we can take to indicate that this was the first time he slept with Magda.131
Magda Quandt, twenty-nine years old at this point, was a cultivated and well-educated young woman of elegant appearance, self-assured and completely independent. Her mother had divorced her husband, the Berlin building developer Oskar Ritschel, in 1905, and married the leather-goods magnate Richard Friedländer, who adopted Magda. In 1920 Magda met the industrialist Günther Quandt, who was nearly twice her age. The ill-matched pair were married in 1921.132
After Quandt discovered that Magda was having an affair with a student, he separated from her, and in 1929 she succeeded in obtaining a financially advantageous divorce. It was agreed that Harald should live with his mother until he was fourteen, and then—as the future heir to a business empire—live with his father.134
The divorcée Frau Quandt had begun to take an interest in the NSDAP in the summer of 1930, had joined the Party, and was looking for some practical activity within the Berlin Gau. Taking over responsibility for the Gauleiter’s private papers seemed to her a highly suitable occupation. On February 21 Goebbels took his new lover and a group of other acquaintances on a short trip to Weimar, of all places, where he had an engagement to keep; they stayed for two days. It is no wonder that his brief meeting with Anka during this time in Weimar was a very chilly occasion.135 Not long afterward, when Magda was visiting him again, they had their “first argument,” caused by a “careless word” from him and ending with her leaving his apartment in tears. But they made up the next day.136 She now visited him often, and the numbers he gives in brackets beneath the dates of her visits show that their evenings together went off very successfully from his point of view: “She goes home late (2:3),” “Magda in the evening (4:5),” “Magda (6:7).”137
The relationship was not trouble-free; they often argued, but the new stimulus that had entered his life seemed to suit Goebbels, although he often had to remind himself that this new bond must not be allowed to jeopardize his real mission: “Then Magda came, there was love, an argument, and then love again (8:9). She is a fabulous child. However, I must not lose myself in her. But the work is too great and too momentous for that.”138 It was clear to him: “The Party comes first, then Magda.”139 He got to know her son Harald, and he took her with him on an Easter trip to Munich, where among other things she met Hitler.140
In April there was the first serious crisis in their relationship. For days on end he tried in vain to get through to her by telephone. When she finally answered, Goebbels was to discover that her former lover had by no means disappeared from her life: “The man she was in love with before me has shot and seriously injured her in her apartment. Now she’s completely finished. I can tell from her voice that I’m going to lose her. I’m plunged into the deepest despair. I see from this how deeply I love Magda.”141 In reality, either Magda had overdramatized the situation or Goebbels’s nerves had gotten the better of him. Magda had not suffered any bullet wound. But even so, the next few days were sheer agony for Goebbels:142 “There is something unspoken between us. I think it’s the other man, her former lover. She disputes this. Our arguments are becoming fiercer.” She would not let him forbid her to make a farewell visit to her ex-lover, and she left his apartment in tears.143 But a few days later all was sweetness and light again.144
The couple spent Whitsun in Severin, a country estate in Mecklenburg owned by Magda’s ex-husband.145 Eventually the two of them began to make plans for the future: “We have made a solemn vow to each other: When we have conquered the Reich, we will become man and wife. I am very happy.”146
Anka, informed by him in June about the new relationship, was “quite shattered […] and refuses to believe it. So she thinks she can win me back again. But it’s all too late. I am with Magda, and I’m staying with her.”147
* * *
*1 Translators’ note: A reference to a line in a Kurt Tucholsky poem of 1928: “Due to bad weather, the revolution will be held indoors.”
*2 Translators’ note: Paragraph 175 was the section of the German Criminal Code relating to homosexuality.
CHAPTER 8
“Now We Must Gain Power…One Way or Another!”
A Share of Government?
Credit 8.1
A picnic in summer 1931. In the foreground, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, behind them Julius Schaub, Adolf Hitler, Erna Hoffmann, and Johanna Wolff. Shortly after Goebbels had introduced Magda to Hitler’s court, the latter confessed to him that he had fallen in love with Magda. Eventually a solution to the problem was found that was acceptable to all three parties.
Goebbels and Magda spent July 1931 as guests of Magda’s grandmother at her house in the Schleswig-Holstein seaside resort of St. Peter-Ording.1 “Magda is like a mother and a lover to me,”2 he wrote. “She loves as only a great woman can.”3 He was enjoying himself: “Work, love, sun, and happiness. What more do I want?” But there was a “shadow” over all of this happiness: “Magda loved somebody else before me. That pains me and tortures me.”4
The man in question was certainly not her ex-husband, Günther Quandt, but Magda’s lover from the last years of her marriage. When Magda told him about her past love life, he found her “heartless” and was regularly overcome by fits of jealousy: an argument always ensued.5 His trust in her was “shaken,” he confided to his diary: “She has loved too much and only told me some fragments of it. And now I lie here until the early hours racked by jealousy.”6 He found consolation in his work on Battle for Berlin, in which he set out to tell the story of his early years in the capital.7
By the beginning of August he was back in Berlin, to find that publication of Der Angriff, which had already been halted by the authorities for a week while he was on vacation, was now prohibited once again. Although the ban was lifted the next day, by the end of the month there followed yet another prohibition lasting a further week.8 The frequent bans were a clear indication that his radical line was meeting with resistance from the state, and this was significant for the future policy of the wider Party beyond Berlin.
Once Goebbels had found his footing as chief of propaganda for the Reich, there began for him—about a year after the landslide electoral success of the NSDAP—a phase in which his focus increasingly shifted from Berlin affairs to the policy of the Party as a whole. This is particularly reflected in his diaries. After autumn 1931, for Goebbels and the Party elite, the question of participating in government or even of seizing power altogether moved into the realm of the politically possible. Even though, until January 1933, Goebbels was not directly involved in the negotiations that were to bring the NSDAP to power (for this purpose, Hitler preferred to be accompanied by Göring, Frick, Röhm, and Strasser), as Gauleiter of Berlin he usually received firsthand information about the outcome of discussions.
The diaries record the tactical maneuvers of the NSDAP leaders at this time, and they reveal above all how much direct and indirect influence the Party exerted on the policies of the presidential cabinets in the final phase of the Brüning government. But they also show how, as Goebbels saw it, increasing proximity to power revealed potential internal divisions within the Party. In particular he was worried that Hitler might be drawn too close to his potential allies in the conservative camp, an orientation that would lead to open conflict within Party ranks. Goebbels therefore continued to profile himself as the representative of a radical course, thereby setting himself against Hitler’s emphasis on a “law-abiding” strategy. However, he always managed to survive inner Party conflicts by his ostentatious deference to the Party leader and his vows of personal loyalty to him.
REFERENDUM IN PRUSSIA
In August an important decision was imminent: a referendum in Prussia following the so-called Stahlhelm petition, which the NSDAP supported, if half-heartedly. Goebbels disliked collaborating with bourgeois elements. The referendum concerned the dissolution of the Prussian Landtag, which was dominated by a “Weimar coalition” consisting of the SPD, the Center Party, and the DVP. The aim was
ultimately to make the Brüning government’s position untenable. A petition in April proposing dissolution had only just achieved the necessary quorum. After the initiative had been rejected by the Prussian Landtag, a referendum (obligatory under the Prussian constitution if a petition was voted down by Parliament) was set to take place on August 9. In addition to the NSDAP, the project was supported by the DVP, the DNVP, and the KPD.9
But the referendum failed: Only 36.8 percent of voters on the register were in favor of an early dissolution of the Landtag (50 percent was the required level of support for the project to become law over the head of the Parliament). Goebbels saw this as a “heavy defeat” into which “the Stahlhelm have dragged us.” The conclusion he drew—and immediately communicated to Hitler by telephone—was: “So: enough of this bourgeois pap. We must be masterful and more rigorous. National Socialists. There lies redemption.” He doubted whether power could be obtained “quite so legally.”10 In Der Angriff he declared that “after an action initiated by others which was tactically inept and which therefore failed,” the NSDAP must set about “making clear—publicly, not just internally—the factors that led to this debacle.”11
When he traveled to Munich shortly afterward to check up on things there, he was still fuming about the Party leadership: “This rabble. They’ve got no initiative in Munich. Party bureaucracy. Without the boss [Hitler was away] a dead torso without a head.” By contrast, his discussions with Max Amann, head of the Eher Verlag, had an extremely gratifying outcome: Amann offered him—voluntarily, as Goebbels took the trouble to emphasize—an advance of 3,000 marks for his Battle for Berlin. A new publishing contract for Der Angriff was also agreed on, which reinforced Goebbels’s authority.12