Goebbels: A Biography

by Peter Longerich

  For Goebbels, the next few days were filled with the direct repercussions of the purge: The impact abroad was disastrous, but the reaction of the German population was restrained. Relieved, Goebbels noted that Hindenburg had provided a convenient screen for the proceedings. Finally, he heard that Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf had taken control of the Berlin SA again, in place of Karl Ernst, another victim of the purge. Goebbels had not been consulted about this appointment.

  At the first cabinet meeting after the murders, on July 3, Hitler was giving a detailed report when von Papen suddenly appeared, looking “completely broken.” To Goebbels, von Papen’s resignation now seemed inevitable, given that many supporters of his were among the victims, such as Edgar Julius Jung, who had organized von Papen’s address in Marburg, and von Papen’s adviser Herbert Bose. Even Goebbels found it sheer mockery when the cabinet continued with “business as usual” in these circumstances, passing thirty-two new laws.86

  PUTSCH IN AUSTRIA

  On July 15, obviously acting on a spontaneous decision, Hitler, Goebbels, and Magda went off to Heiligendamm. Goebbels had to leave his vacation home again the next day for a trip to Mannheim and Heidelberg, leaving Magda and Hitler there alone.87

  On July 22, during the Bayreuth Festival, Goebbels took part in a discussion with Hitler. Also in attendance were the NSDAP superintendent for Austria, Theodor Habicht, whom Goebbels regarded as a “bonehead”;88 the head of the Austrian SA, Hermann Reschny; and Pfeffer, the former SA chief of staff who was now employed on the liaison staff of the Berlin NSDAP. Goebbels noted: “Austrian question. Will it work? I’m very skeptical.”89

  Goebbels’s brief note is clear proof (so far not provided by any other source) that the putsch mounted by the Austrian Nazis a few days later had the personal blessing of the Party’s highest authority in Germany. Goebbels’s note also shows that Superintendent Habicht and SA Chief of Staff Reschny had discussed the forthcoming putsch with Hitler. We can therefore absolutely refute the often-heard assumption that the distrust arising from the “Röhm affair” prevented any collusion with SA leaders over plans for the putsch. Goebbels’s diary entry does shed light on the puzzle of the background to the putsch.90 Goebbels’s entry for July 24 also reveals that his old crony Pfeffer, whose role in the Third Reich has previously remained rather shadowy, quite clearly played a key role in the backing given to the Austrian putsch conspiracy by German Party headquarters; as it happens, Goebbels had been for a spin in his boat with Pfeffer two weeks before the putsch.91

  What is more, it also emerges from this short diary note of Goebbels’s that on July 22 Hitler had received Major-General Walther von Reichenau, head of the Wehrmacht Office in the War Ministry. This visit had taken place immediately before his talks with Habicht, Reschny, and Pfeffer. So it would appear that the army service chiefs had been informed about the undertaking, at least in broad outline. This too was completely unknown until now.92

  July 25 was the actual day of the putsch attempt. Members of an SS standard, mostly ex-Austrian army men, occupied the Austrian Radio transmitter building and the federal chancellor’s office, murdering Federal Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, the head of government.93 In the course of the day, Goebbels, still in Bayreuth and waiting nervously, began to hear the first optimistic reports of the putsch.94 But the situation changed quickly: By the same evening the Austrian government managed to suppress the revolt in the capital.95 The uprising, which had spread to many parts of Austria on July 25, was soon quickly and thoroughly crushed everywhere.96

  The next day, Habicht and Pfeffer turned up in Bayreuth to report. Habicht was forced to resign, and a few days later the Austrian headquarters of the Party was closed down. Hitler also decided to make von Papen German ambassador in Vienna. An international crisis was in the offing. Even if only temporarily, Goebbels thought that there was a “danger that the great powers would step in.”97 The decisive factor in the failure of the putsch was that Mussolini had immediately lent his support to the Austrian government.98 If Hitler had deduced from his discussions with Mussolini in Venice that the latter would approve of a German intervention against Dollfuss, then this was a miscalculation.99 All that Mussolini had agreed to was the ousting of Dollfuss and Austrian Nazi participation in government, not a putsch and the cold-blooded murder of the head of state.

  Goebbels was particularly angered by the sharply polemical stance of the Italian press toward the attempted putsch. Obviously seeking a scapegoat to blame for an undertaking about which he had completely miscalculated, Hitler declared to Goebbels that he had now “broken with Rome for good and all” and was looking for “stronger support from Yugoslavia.”100 In the following months he maintained his negative attitude toward the Italians; in October Goebbels learned that the dictator was now counting on a Berlin-Belgrade-Warsaw axis.101

  DEATH OF HINDENBURG, AND ELECTIONS

  His health deteriorating, Hindenburg had withdrawn to his Neudeck estate at the beginning of June, and by the end of July his condition had worsened further. The Nazi leadership were agreed on their course of action: Immediately after Hindenburg’s death, the Führer was to be named as his successor.102 When the bulletins from Neudeck became increasingly grave, Hitler left for East Prussia on August 1 and was in time to see Hindenburg alive. Meanwhile, in Berlin Goebbels was making preparations for the funeral.103 On the evening of August 1, Goebbels attended a cabinet session in which an act was passed whereby, on the death of the Reich president, his office should be merged with that of the Reich chancellor. At this session, moreover, Blomberg announced that after Hindenburg’s death, he would have members of the armed forces swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler personally.104

  On Thursday, August 2, the president’s death was reported: “At 9:45 I put out the report on all stations. Broadcasting silence for half an hour. Then new laws announced. The whole city covered in flags of mourning.”105 The cabinet reconvened in the evening to settle the details of the funeral ceremony. Hitler proposed a referendum for August 19 in order to confirm his succession, which had already been legislated for.106 Hitler’s position as the omnipotent Führer of Germany was to be further secured by a plebiscite.

  Goebbels not only took part in the obsequies in the Reichstag, he also attended the ceremony at the Tannenberg memorial the following day. For him the meaning of this farewell had a much deeper import; it was a leave-taking from the old Germany. Impressed as he was by the ceremony, he found the funeral address of Dohrmann, Bishop to the Forces, insupportable: “I’m never going to have any parson talking at my graveside.”107

  There was some agitation around the subject of Hindenburg’s political testament,108 which had been inspired by von Papen, who had informed Hitler of its existence in May. The concern was exacerbated by the fact that its contents were unknown and the fact that the document could not immediately be located.109 Hitler tasked von Papen with acquiring the ominous testament from Neudeck. When he received it, to his and Goebbels’s relief it transpired that the dreaded recommendation to restore the monarchy, which von Papen had tried to persuade the president to make, was not contained in this document. It was only present in a letter dated July 14 and addressed by Hindenburg to Hitler. Hitler ordered the testament to be published in the daily press but of course kept the letter to himself.110

  Immediately after the cabinet resolution, Goebbels began preparing for the August 19 referendum, which Hitler intended would confirm him in office as Reich president. Goebbels spoke at mass meetings in Berlin, Hamburg, Essen, and again in Berlin; finally he accompanied Hitler to the main rally of the campaign, which took place in Hamburg.111

  Despite all these efforts, however, for the Nazis the result of the ballot was on the disappointing side. Only 89.9 percent of valid votes were for “yes”; taking into account all those who had not yielded to the pressure to vote, along with the invalid ballot papers, only 84.5 percent of those entitled to vote had submitted their approval, a little over five percentage points lower than
in autumn 1933. This relative drop in positive votes—the numbers of which, as with all ballots in the Nazi period, were massaged upward in every possible way—was a clear indication that compared to the year before, the approval rating of the regime had plainly slipped.112

  Disappointed, Goebbels wrote that he had expected more; Catholics had withheld their support. He also blamed his arch-rival Rosenberg and his neo-heathen masquerade: “Führer agrees with me it’s time to get rid of this intellectual claptrap.”113 But it was not only Catholic areas that returned disappointing results. The same was true of many large cities, formerly bastions of the working-class movement, including Berlin. In the capital, only 81.2 percent of valid ballot papers recorded a “yes” vote; if invalid ballots were deducted, as well as the figures for those who had abstained from voting, the proportion of positive votes left was only 76.3 percent.114 Goebbels called the Berlin result “very bad. Partly our own fault.” First and foremost he blamed the deputy Gauleiter, Artur Görlitzer.115

  At the usual lunchtime gathering of Hitler’s court there was a postmortem on this “failure.” Goebbels ascribed it to the ongoing dispute with the religious denominations, the lack of contact with the people, corruption, and laxity toward “enemies of the state.” Referring to the widely used sanction of concentration camp sentences, he added: “Konzi [concentration camp] no picnic.”116 But the propaganda minister was clear that terror and repression were not enough by themselves to get the regime out of this crisis. Through the purge of June 30 and his usurping of the presidential office, Hitler had certainly succeeded in consolidating his rule and installing a “Führer state,” but none of this had made the regime any more popular.

  * * *

  *1 Translators’ note: A reference to the Herrenklub, an exclusive club for aristocrats, leading officials, and industrialists.

  *2 Translators’ note: Erich Klausener (1885-1934) was the head of Catholic Action and a close associate of von Papen.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Taking Firm Control of the Inner Discipline of a People”

  Propaganda and Manipulation of the Public Sphere

  Credit 13.1

  By means of mass events, such as this harvest festival on the Bückeberg hill near Hamelin (September 1934), the regime found many effective ways of staging the solidarity of the “national community” for the public.

  In the months following the evisceration of the SA, Hitler’s assumption of the presidency in succession to Hindenburg, and the election, the regime consolidated its power in every way it could. One of the most important ways was a new series of mass meetings and campaigns designed to demonstrate unbridled self-confidence and the unity of the “national community.” It was now up to Goebbels to show off the extent to which Party and state were able to dominate the public sphere of the Third Reich by means of National Socialist symbols, rituals, propaganda, and rhetoric.

  Together with Hitler, Goebbels on August 26 opened a Saarland exhibition in Cologne, accompanying the leader afterward to a mass rally on the Ehrenbreitstein in Koblenz. After a short stay in Berlin, Magda and Goebbels flew with their daughter Helga to the Obersalzberg for a few days.1 There they once again discussed with Hitler whether they should acquire a plot of land on the Obersalzberg in order to have a convenient second home there, like other top Nazis.2

  Goebbels traveled on September 4 from the Obersalzberg to the annual Nuremberg Party rally, which featured parades, marching columns, roll calls, torchlight processions, military displays by the Wehrmacht, and endless speeches. Goebbels gave his usual address to the Reich propaganda chiefs and expressed his thanks to workers of the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization involved in the Winter Relief effort.3 However, the Reich propaganda minister essentially took no part in organizing the rally, nor in the media presentation of the Nuremberg spectacle after the event. Organization was the job of Nazi headquarters in Munich, while it was not Goebbels who became famous for making propaganda use of the rally but Leni Riefenstahl, for whom he had come to have no high regard.

  It was in spring 1934 that Hitler once again asked Riefenstahl to film the rally in September. This time the film was financed from Party funds and not by the Propaganda Ministry, and an administrative strategy was devised whereby Riefenstahl would avoid interference from the Reich propaganda office. It is not surprising that Goebbels, thus circumvented, was lukewarm about the venture. Before filming began he predicted morosely: “Not much will come of it. She’s too flighty.”4

  The result, under the title The Triumph of the Will, was to become the Nazi regime’s best-known propaganda film, and it differed from conventional documentaries not only in its highly mobile use of the camera and unusual, even spectacular camera angles but also in its cutting technique, which was more like that of a feature film. The film was technically perfect but also presented to perfection the sequence of events at the rally. In contrast to Riefenstahl’s first Nuremberg film, here the whole ceremonial of the rally appears orderly, centering on the figure of Hitler. The “ornamentation of the masses” under National Socialism was surely nowhere more impressively displayed than in Riefenstahl’s film.

  The premiere of the film, presented with much fanfare, was attended by Goebbels and Hitler on March 28, 1935, at the Ufa Picture Palace in Berlin, which had been specially refurbished by Albert Speer himself. Goebbels’s comments on the screening were terse. He did acknowledge “Leni’s great success” but thought the film had its longueurs. “Brilliant reviews, naturally.”5

  The rally in 1934 was rapidly followed by a series of other large-scale events. By the second year of Nazi rule, the “National Socialist calendar” was already firmly established, including the harvest festival on the Bückeberg,6 the big collecting drives for Winter Relief,7 the ceremony commemorating the ill-fated Nazi putsch in November,8 and public gift exchange at Christmas.9

  In the autumn and winter months the public arena of the Third Reich was again dominated by huge publicity around the Winter Relief drive and its many volunteers out on the streets with their collection boxes. Goebbels ordered the Reich propaganda office to support the efforts of Winter Relief with a series of meetings. It speaks volumes that the Reich propaganda office put out a warning to Party comrades not on any account to use “coercion or force” to make the public attend “any of the planned tens and hundreds of thousands of meetings.”10 Mild pressure was usually enough to ensure full houses, however. As with the intensive action against “grumblers and faultfinders,” it was hard for the average citizen to evade the Party’s gentle persuasion.11

  Although it was likewise difficult to resist the eager street collectors’ boxes—contributors were rewarded with various badges, making non-donors highly visible—the sums collected were claimed by propaganda as evidence of a functioning “national community” and of general agreement with the policies of the regime. Goebbels’s diaries reveal, however, that these results—a few million more donated than in the previous year—were achieved only by sustained appeals for volunteers at the end of October to redouble the intensity of the collecting drive.12

  On October 25 Goebbels took part in a Gauleiter conference in Munich. Reform of the Reich was the focus of the meeting this time, but Goebbels again found the debate quite unproductive: “They all go on warming up their stale ideas. […] Theorizers and romantics! No élan, no enthusiasm. Plodders!”13

  Goebbels’s comments give the impression that these sessions, which Hitler had introduced to inform the Gauleiters about his policy initiatives, had set into a rigid routine: There seem to have been six such meetings in 1933, and this one was already the eighth of 1934. It was not as though the Gauleiters really learned anything about Hitler’s political plans, and neither did the meetings have a direct influence on government policy: They were not even particularly useful for coordinating the policies of the Gauleiters and the Reich governors in the federal states. Their only point seems to have been the opportunity to pool information and experience. In Octo
ber 1936 Hitler finally declared to Goebbels that the “Gauleiter parliaments have got to go.”14 The Führer appeared increasingly rarely at the meetings. All the same, they went on taking place.

  Strangely enough, the Goebbels diaries are the only extant written source reflecting meetings of the Party elite—leaving aside independent meetings of the Reich leaders and the joint meetings of leaders and Gauleiters—from 1933 until the end of the Third Reich as a series of more or less regular events. All other relevant information is very fragmentary. It is almost exclusively thanks to Goebbels’s account that we know the topics of the talks delivered there; the tone and content of Hitler’s addresses to these gatherings; the mood of those assembled; and indeed in many cases that these meetings happened at all.

  MANAGING THE PUBLIC SPHERE

  The lavish festivities, mass meetings, and propaganda drives continuously staged by the regime were designed to demonstrate the high degree of enthusiasm allegedly felt by the great majority of the population for the regime’s policies. Moreover, by its second year in power the regime had succeeded to a large extent in making the everyday scene in the Third Reich systematically conform to Nazi precepts.

  In particular, the Nazis had very largely managed to impose their rituals and symbols on the public sphere. We might think of the ubiquitous posters and banners; the showcases in which were displayed the Party’s “saying of the week” and copies of Der Stürmer; the decorating of entire streets for big events; the renaming of roads and squares; the infiltrating of stereotypical Nazi terms into everyday language, which was so acutely described by Victor Klemperer;15 the “managing” of large masses of people into marching columns and serried ranks for roll calls and parades; but also the complete makeover of public spaces by means of imposing and dominating architecture, designed to form a suitable “thousand-year” backdrop for the molding of the masses.16 This dominance over the public sphere can also be seen in relatively nonpolitical areas, for example in the Nazi motifs permeating advertising, ordinary window displays, and graphic art.17 Efforts were also made—albeit relatively unsuccessfully—to promote a fashion for “aryanizing”—that is, removing all “un-German” influences.18