After their nocturnal meeting in the Kaiserhof, Hitler and Goebbels went to the editorial office of the Völkischer Beobachter, where Hitler personally recast the next morning’s edition. Goebbels then returned to the Gau headquarters, designed a poster, and wrote a “fabulous article” to appear in the next day’s Angriff: “Time to make a radical end! What more are we waiting for? A twenty-four-year-old foreign communist acting for Russian and German agents of this world pestilence setting fire to the Reichstag!”33
That same night there was a wave of arrests of communist functionaries. The entire left-wing press was banned, and before the day was over a cabinet meeting chaired by Hitler passed a decree, endorsed by the president, “for the protection of people and state.” The decree suspended the fundamental rights of the Weimar constitution, enabled the Reich government to seize the reins of power in the various states in the case of serious disturbance to public order and security, and imposed heavy penalties for contraventions.34
ELECTION DAY
The peak of the National Socialist election campaign was reached on March 4, which was designated “the day of national uprising.” The great event was completely focused on Hitler personally, who was now presented with almost religious fervor as the savior of the nation. The radio transmitted a speech given by Hitler in Königsberg, once again introduced by Goebbels.35 The plan for the spectacle had been announced to Angriff readers a week earlier: “From our suffering Eastern Frontier the gospel of a reawakened Germany will be proclaimed, and the whole German people will be aural witnesses to this unique, unprecedented mass event.”36
The speech was not only broadcast but also conveyed by loudspeakers distributed throughout the Reich; they were placed in fourteen city squares in Berlin alone, to which the ranks of uniformed NSDAP members marched to take up their positions. The population had been exhorted to decorate their homes with flags. To “issue a wake-up call to the sluggish and the indecisive,” as the Völkischer Beobachter described Nazi intimidation, “Hitler Youth and SA men” patrolled the streets. Bonfires were lit all over the Reich. After Hitler’s speech his audience in Königsberg sang the famous “Niederländisches Dankgebet” (Dutch Thanksgiving Prayer), while the crowds listening to the broadcast transmitted over loudspeakers joined in with the singing.37
It is difficult to imagine anything more emotionally overblown than Goebbels’s introduction to Hitler’s appearance: “Throughout East Prussia the bells are ringing from church towers across the broad fields, over the great silent woods and the mysterious stillness of the Masurian Lakes. […] From the Maas to the Memel, from the Etsch [Adige, South Tyrol] to the Great Belt, all of Germany is now bathed in the light of the fire of freedom. The day of national uprising has arrived. The people arise, the storm breaks forth.”*, 38
After such all-out preparations, on election day Goebbels was full of confidence: “It will be a great victory.”39 Indeed, the NSDAP and the new government really had pulled out all the stops to ensure success—and not only with a massive propaganda effort. The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung described the situation in the capital as follows:
Today there were hardly any black-red-gold flags to be seen in the Reich capital, no red ones, none with the symbol of the three arrows [flag of the antifascist organization Iron Front]. KPD and SPD flags were not allowed. […] The intensive propaganda of the right had succeeded in creating a nervous, feverish atmosphere. Nonsensical rumors were flying around. Auxiliary police were deployed (a measure never before needed on election days), a signal to the population that danger must be in the air: Every policeman on watch on Sunday was armed with a carbine. The feeling of oppression among the population was great.40
With all these advantages, the National Socialists succeeded in gaining 43.9 percent of the ballot. Together with their allies, the DNVP, campaigning as the “Black-White-Red Fighting Front,” they formed a majority of nearly 52 percent.
The outcome was certainly a considerable success for the National Socialists, but taking into account the huge obstacles placed in the way of the left, the high level of support the Nazis enjoyed from powerful financiers, and the Nazis’ hold on broadcasting, the increase of six and a half points over the previous record result of July 1931 was hardly sensational. The landslide expected and publicized in advance by the Party leadership did not materialize. In its triumphalist tone, Goebbels’s diary entry on the evening of election day seems to betray a need to talk up the victory—especially given that in Berlin, with 34.6 percent, his performance was once again substantially below the Reich average.41
MINISTERIAL APPOINTMENT
After the election Goebbels was mainly preoccupied with the question of whether and in what way Hitler would keep his preelection promise of government office. At the beginning of March the difficulties involved in building up the promised ministry loomed so large that he felt like abandoning the whole project.42
On the day after the Reichstag election, when Hitler again talked over “his” ministry with him, he still “had his doubts,” because he wanted “the whole thing. Press, radio, film, propaganda.” With Funk, his future state secretary, he visited the Reich government press office on the Wilhelmsplatz, where he was soon to be installed: “Wonderful Schinkel building.” In the days that followed, progress was made with planning for the new ministry, and in order to lighten his load as Gauleiter Goebbels appointed a deputy, the former Gau business manager Artur Görlitzer.43 On March 11 the cabinet agreed to form a Reich ministry for popular enlightenment and propaganda.44 “I’m so happy. What a [career] path! Minister at 35. Unimaginable.”45
Meanwhile the new rulers were getting on with their “cold revolution,” Goebbels’s term for the coup d’état by which the regime was displacing other political institutions. As the new jargon had it, the latter were being “coordinated” or brought into line.46 From the beginning, the Reichstag fire emergency decree was applied very widely; governors were dispatched to the different states, most crucially to the second-largest state, Bavaria.47 There were local elections in Prussia on March 12. The NSDAP48 in Berlin, with the benefit of massive state backing, achieved 38.2 percent of the vote and became the largest party, slightly ahead of the DNVP.
On the same day, in connection with National Remembrance Day, Goebbels took part in a memorial ceremony at the Linden Opera, where, he proudly remarked, he was already allowed to sit “among the ministers”—although he did not feel exactly positive about the event: “To me Hindenburg is like a mythical monument. Almost unreal. Next to him Hitler seems like a boy.” He disliked the order of ceremony: “I’ll do all this much better later on.”49
On March 14 he received via the state secretary in the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the announcement of his appointment as a minister of the Reich. The next step was an appointment with the “Old Gentleman.” The swearing-in ceremony was followed by a conversation with Hindenburg, who said “flattering things about my work.”50 He joined his first cabinet meeting the next day. “Everybody is very nice to me,” he commented in his diary, but he did not have much of a clue about the content of the session.51
The following day he addressed the press in Berlin, explaining the duties of the new ministry. The creation of his department, he expounded, “was a revolutionary act of government, in that the new government intends no longer to leave people to their own devices. This government is a people’s government in the truest sense of the word.” The ministry would forge “active contact between the national government as the expression of the people’s will and the people themselves,” which for Goebbels clearly amounted to a “coordinating of the government and the people.” He explained the title of his ministry as follows: “Popular education is essentially passive, while propaganda is active. We can’t stop at telling the people what we want to do and informing them about how we’re doing it. This information must be accompanied by active propaganda on the part of the government, propaganda aimed at winning people over.” The plan was to “
work on people until they accept our influence, until they begin to grasp in terms of ideas that what is taking place in Germany does not just have to be accepted but that they can accept it.”52
POTSDAM DAY AND THE ENABLING LAW
The new government now proceeded to expand its power base in a relatively rapid series of steps, with the rank and file of the Party staging great spectacles and mass actions as an introduction to carefully targeted government measures. Goebbels was to play a central part in this gradual escalation of the regime’s power and the process of “coordination.”
His first great undertaking as head of propaganda for the regime was to make the arrangements for March 21, the ceremonial opening of the Reichstag. While the date of this event related to the anniversary of the opening of Parliament in 1871, the site of the ceremony, Potsdam, had special associations with Prussian monarchical and military traditions. In the Potsdam Garrison Church two Prussian kings, Frederick William I and Frederick II (the Great), were interred, and until the end of the First World War it was here that the flags and battle standards captured by the Prussian army from the Wars of Liberation onward were displayed. Here the alliance between National Socialists and national conservatives was to be valorized and celebrated. This was to be expressed above all by a solemn handshake between chancellor and president, where Hitler, in dark morning suit and top hat, would bow deeply to Hindenburg, wearing the uniform of a field marshal of the Kaiser’s army. Accordingly, Goebbels’s plan was that the formalities should be “grand and classical.”53
One day before the event, however, Hitler and Goebbels decided not to attend the church service in Potsdam the next morning, opting instead to make a pointed statement by visiting the graves of SA members in the Luisenstadt cemetery in Berlin. The ostensible justification for this was that the two Catholics were both regarded by their church as “apostates.” As a result, they arrived in Potsdam around half past eleven.54
Everything there was “hustle and bustle,” Goebbels noted. Hindenburg seemed to him “almost like a stone monument.” Goebbels was carried away by the show he himself had staged: “Then Hitler speaks. His best speech. At the end everybody very moved. I have tears in my eyes. This is how history is made. […] Army, S.A., and Stahlhelm march. The old gentleman stands and salutes. Sheer ecstasy at the end.”55
Immediately after the Potsdam ceremony, Hitler’s ministers agreed on further emergency laws. They concerned the creation of special courts, prosecutions to deal with “treacherous” attacks on the new government, and a further penalty that Goebbels was particularly eager to see. Goebbels commented, “I act as a firebrand. String ’em up, string ’em up!”56
Two days later he attended the Reichstag session held in the Kroll Opera House, which had been turned into a temporary parliament and was now surrounded and sealed off by SA guards. The session opened with a speech by Hitler in which he gave a preview of the work of the government. But the main object was to force through the Enabling Law. The required two-thirds majority was achieved only because the Communist Party members had been arrested, and great pressure was put on members of the bourgeois centrist parties to vote in favor.
When the leader of the Social Democrats, Otto Wels, set out the reasons why his party had voted against the Enabling Law and voiced a challenge to this burgeoning dictatorship, Hitler made another speech, a direct response to Wels. By Goebbels’s account, he “gave Wels a fierce lambasting. You don’t often see such a slaughter. Hitler in full force. And a huge success.”57
FIRST STEPS AS PROPAGANDA MINISTER
Later in March Goebbels took further preliminary steps as propaganda minister. He appeared at a series of press conferences, always presenting different angles: On the one hand he left no doubt about the Nazis’ claim to power, not stopping at open threats; but on the other hand, by his apparent openness to unconventional ideas, he gave the impression that he was opposed to a stupid media dictatorship.
On March 25 he addressed three hundred broadcasting employees and then the directors of radio: “Some of them have got to go,” was his diary comment on his audience.58 Presenting himself as a “passionate lover of radio,” he told the assembled mass media employees that their main task in future would be “intellectual mobilization.” “The first rule” of their work must be “not to become boring.” Radio must be close to the people, he said, and as an example of a successful impact on the people Goebbels “Potsdam Day.” In short, those in charge of radio had to occupy “the same ideological ground” as the government.59
At an evening event he spoke to representatives of the film industry. Contrary to what is recorded in the diary, the text of his speech shows that he did not “develop a program” on this occasion. He did no more than issue a series of hints, warnings, and exhortations to the “film creators” concerning their future work.
Once again Goebbels introduced himself as someone who was “passionate”—this time about the cinematic arts. He himself had sat “with the Reich chancellor on many an evening in the cinema during the recent days of enervating struggle and found relaxation there.” The present crisis of the cinema, said Goebbels, was an “intellectual one”; it could be overcome only by a “root and branch reform of German film.” The film industry had better get used to the idea that the reign of the present rulers will be a good deal longer than those of the Weimar governments, because “we’re here to stay!”
Goebbels then talked about some films that had made an “indelible impression” on him. The first movie mentioned was Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary classic Battleship Potemkin: “Anyone without a solid ideology might be converted to Bolshevism by this film.” Secondly, he praised Garbo’s Anna Karenina as an example of “distinctly cinematic art.” He moved on to Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, which was so “modern, so contemporary, so topical” that it had “profoundly moved those fighting for the National Socialist movement.” Another positive example was Luis Trenker’s film The Rebel. On the other hand, he criticized “colorless and shapeless works,” and he wanted German film to have stronger “völkisch outlines.” At the moment it lacked realism, it had “no connection with what was actually going on among the people.” But dealing artistically with the current upheavals would only work if “you have put down roots in National Socialist soil.”
An unambiguous warning followed: “We have absolutely no intention of allowing ideas that have been totally eradicated from the new Germany to be reintroduced by film, whether openly or in disguise.” But he rejected “doctrinaire authoritarianism.” And Goebbels acknowledged that there would still be room for pure entertainment in film: “Neither do we want to stop anyone […] from making even the slightest little divertissement. You shouldn’t live your principles from morning till night.”60
Just a few hours before this meeting Goebbels had in fact made an example of the Fritz Lang film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, banning it because, he said, it was a “practical guide to committing crime.”61 But his intention was not to exclude the director from making films; on the contrary, he picked him to make a film along lines laid down by himself.62 However, Lang declined the offer, preferring instead to leave Germany. He did not do so instantly, as the director later claimed, but only after a few months. Lang may have heightened the drama in his encounter with Goebbels and the immediate aftermath, but the original version of the Goebbels diary does at least prove the meeting actually took place, something film historians have long doubted. It also shows that Goebbels was very accommodating toward the director. His Jewish origins were either unknown to Goebbels, or else Goebbels was prepared to turn a blind eye. In October, when Goebbels again refused to release a Lang film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, it was not because of reservations about Lang himself but on the grounds that this was another “guide to crime.”63 Goebbels simply disliked crime films.
On March 29 he held a reception for newspaper publishers and representatives of the German Press Association. In his address to them he declared that the press s
hould “not only inform but also instruct.” In particular, the “explicitly nationalist press” should surely “perceive that it was an ideal state of affairs” if “the press […] is like a piano in the hands of the government, on which the government can play.”64
On April 6 Goebbels appeared with Hitler before the Berlin correspondents of the German press. On this occasion Goebbels gave a talk on the topic of “The Press and National Discipline,” which many have seen as the final swan song of press freedom. He stressed that “public opinion is made, and those who work at forming public opinion take upon themselves an enormous responsibility before the nation and the whole people.” From this responsibility there arose for the press the requirement that any criticism should be kept “within the framework of a general intellectual national discipline.”
And he threatened that those who set their minds against this requirement could expect “to be excluded from the community of those forces prepared to do the work of construction and to be considered unworthy to collaborate in forming the public opinion of the German people.” Goebbels also announced there would be a new press law and came up with the motto that the future would be about “uniformity […] of principles but multiformity […] of nuances.”65
ANTI-SEMITIC BOYCOTT
Between his two speeches to the press, the new propaganda minister was preoccupied mainly with the growing criticism from abroad, where there was concern about the increasing violence of the Nazis and signs of lawlessness under the new regime. The regime in its turn blamed international Jewish circles. It was not long after the election that Nazi activists in many towns were calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses. What was really happening was that potential customers were being deterred from entering Jewish shops by the threat of violence. Until the opening of the Reichstag, the regime had kept this wave of anti-Semitism under control. But now it seemed opportune to the Party leadership, backed by an anti-Semitic campaign authorized from “above,” to let the Party’s activist wing have its head, at the same time subjecting German Jews to great intimidation, with a view to silencing international Jewry’s propaganda campaign against German “atrocities.”
Goebbels: A Biography Page 27