Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

(Hans Friedrich Blunck), theatre (Otto Laubinger), music (RichardStrauss),40 the graphic arts (Professor Eugen Hönig),41 film, and radio(Hadamowsky).42 The Chamber of Culture dispensed considerable funds and subsidies,setting up specialist schools, meeting welfare needs, providing legal aid, andconducting professional examinations. Goebbels was its president and Funk vicepresident;but the chamber’s day to day management was in the hands of the ruthless,ambitious and antisemitic Nazi Hans Hinkel, with the equally rabid Nazi lawyerHans Ernst Schmidt-Leonhardt as his legal adviser. Full Jews could not belong; norcould anybody stripped of German citizenship.43 Among the chamber’s records waslater found a blacklist enumerating all those anti-Nazi writers and emigres whosemembership was banned, including Dr Bernhard Weiss, Albert Grzesinski, and ‘NahumGoldmann, eastern Jew, businessman and agitator.’44The Chamber of Culture began operations on September 22. Each of its sub-chamberswas further divided into Fachschaften and Fachgruppen—specialist chapels: theStage had forty thousand members, Dance six thousand, and Light Entertainmentthirteen thousand. Each sub-chamber was empowered to impose fines of up to onehundred thousand marks. Each such penalty was reviewed by its corresponding ministerialsection and by Dr Goebbels himself.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 311Henceforth, German art was to be pure. The chamber of music prohibited theplaying of atonal, ‘Jewish,’ and Negro music; surrealist art, cubism, and dadaismwere among the prohibited genres. At the formal dedication of the Chamber of Culturein mid November in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall Goebbels declared the olddecadent, worm-eaten liberalism finished.45 In an analysis of the ‘ruling trio’ in NaziGermany, American ambassador William E. Dodd had no hesitation in nominatingGoebbels as Hitler’s ‘first lieutenant’ ranking even above Göring. ‘While Hitler is afair orator as German oratory goes,’ stated Dodd, ‘Goebbels is a past master. He …has combined all the newspaper, radio, publications, and art activities of Germanyinto one vast propaganda machine.’46The Press Law (Schriftleitergesetz) enacted on October 4, 1933 abolished the principleof anonymous journalism.47 It made journalists and their editors personallyresponsible for their writings. Henceforth the proper qualifications had to be earnedeither on the shop floor, starting literally as a compositor’s apprentice, or in an approveduniversity course in journalism.48 The editor became a Schriftleiter, a trueGerman word replacing Redakteur which to Goebbels’ ears had a Jewish ring. Jewswere excluded here too. ‘My dear “Poulette”,’ wrote Bella Fromm in her diary, referringto journalist Vera von Huhn, ‘has been so upset, as she’s not wholly Aryan, thatshe has O.D.’d on Veronal. I am at my wit’s end.’49GOEBBELS had always taken a special interest in the film industry, that hotbed of reallifepassions and jealousies. He moved swiftly both to expand it and impose Naziconstraints on its members. In May 1933 he reached agreement with Dr LudwigKlitzsch, general manager of the larger studio, Ufa, about setting up a film creditbank initially financed by the ministry.50 He established a Nazi film chamber in July.Once again no Jews were allowed, and on October 19 the chamber announced thatit would not pass any films on which non-members had worked.51Under his patronage the German film industry bloomed. Forgetting, or perhapsbecause of, the treasures that he and his ministry had lavished on them—the inflatedsalaries, the pensions, and the handouts when they fell on hard times—its members312 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHalmost unanimously heaped calumnies on Goebbels after 1945. Secure in the knowledgethat he was dead, they related bawdy tales of blackmail and rape in the hope ofbeing regarded as the victims, and not the beneficiaries, of the Nazi reign. Cant andcattiness would distort the image of a man who was, admittedly, no saint. Only oneactress, the stunningly beautiful Lida Baarova, would speak well of him (and stilldoes);52 others would spread malicious gossip, charging for example that actress anddirector Leni Riefenstahl ‘only made the grade by going to bed with Goebbels.’ Inself defence Riefenstahl too talked unfavourably about the minister. ‘I always was inbad standing with him,’ she would confide to her captors. ‘He was cold and forbiddingtoward me. I almost hated him.’53Five years younger that Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl was at this time a woman ofthirty. She specialised in snow-capped mountain dramas. By her account Goebbels,freshly arrived as gauleiter in Berlin, had hung around the 1926 premiere of her film‘The Sacred Mountain’ hoping for a glimpse of her; by his own diary’s testimony, hesaw her in 1929 starring in the mountaineering film ‘Piz Palü’, and found her a‘delightful child’.54 He probably met her at Magda’s society gatherings at ReichskanzlerPlatz in the autumn of 1932. In her memoirs she relates sharing a train journey toMunich with him in November 1932; he talked for hours of power struggles andhomosexuality, before taking her along to see Hitler speak the next day. In his diary,Goebbels wrote of this train journey: ‘Long talk with Mr Schnee … He travelled toMunich with me and wants to speak with Hitler here. Arrived dead tired.’ It is probablynot too fanciful to suspect that his ‘Mr Snow’ was none other than LeniRiefenstahl.55Whatever ardour may have existed then faded rapidly. In her 1987 memoirs sheprovided a lurid description of Dr Goebbels visiting her late in 1932 and forcing hisattentions on her—of him kneeling before her weeping, of her crying out, ‘Go, HerrDoktor, go!’56 On Christmas Eve, so her narrative continues, Goebbels arrived unannouncedwith two gifts for her—a red leatherbound first edition of ‘Mein Kampf’and a bronze Goebbels medallion. ‘I am so lonely,’ he moans, explaining that Magdahad just been rushed to the clinic: ‘I fear for her life.’57GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 313Human memory of course plays harmless tricks. It suppresses, elides, compressesand inflates. But there was more. In May 1933, her memoirs relate, Goebbels persuadedher to drive him deep into the Grunewald woods, where he showed her hispistol (‘I don’t leave home without it’) and then made a pass at her as she drove hercar in a slippery slalom around the rain-lashed trees; as he put his arm around herwaist, the car hit a hummock and slithered to a halt, its wheels spinning. What had heintended? What indeed had she? The vehicle now immobilized, he limped off distraughtin one direction, suggesting she head in the other.58The Goebbels