Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

one enemy. Late in April he tilted briefly at thecatholic church, warning its functionaries in a speech to eighty thousand people inDüsseldorf: ‘You gentlemen should not believe that you can deceive us by wearingthe mask of piety. We’ve seen right through you.’58 Visiting Hitler with Himmler andGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 331Pfeffer on April 27, Goebbels was interested only in securing decisions in his fightagainst ‘sabotage’ by the church; he got Hitler to authorise a fight against the oppositionEmergency League of Clergymen on Friday May 4.59 But Hitler’s heart was notin it, and when Hindenburg now fell ill he urged Goebbels to go easy on the church,as it would only cost the Nazis public sympathy.60On May 5 however he noted for the first time in his unpublished diary that the S.A.were causing trouble in Berlin and elsewhere. He felt that they lacked a clear objective.61 Visiting Hitler on May 17 to discuss film business, he found himself taken asideto listen to Hitler griping about Röhm and his personnel policies. Hitler mentionedtoo the homosexual scandals. Puzzled by this shift in emphasis to the S.A., Goebbelsnoted afterwards: ‘Disgusting! But why isn’t anything done about it.’ Still floundering,he went on to warn Hitler about monarchists. A few days later Count Helldorffbrought him more worries about the S.A.: ‘Röhm’s not doing too well,’ wroteGoebbels. ‘He’s causing too many conflicts. He’s not on such good terms with theFührer either.’ Goebbels decided—at least for his diary’s eyes—to stand by Hitler:‘He is our bulwark. We must not despair.’ On May 21, 1934 he mentioned his worriesto Magda—‘About the situation and public mood. Neither all that rosy. Magda,’he continued, ‘is very shrewd and loyal to me.’62 Twice in May he had talks withGruppenführer Karl Ernst, the doomed S.A. commander in Berlin: after runninginto him on the seventh he noted, ‘He acts very nice’—the emphasis being on theverb;63 on the twenty-sixth, after Ernst came to complain about friction with theregular armed forces, Goebbels recorded: ‘I don’t trust him any longer. He’s a bittoo friendly.’In Dresden the S.A. had staged a magnificent march past for Hitler and Goebbels.64But Hitler had already resolved to purge the S.A. leadership. On June 1 Goebbelssaw Hitler. ‘He no longer really trusts the S.A. leadership,’ he recorded. ‘We must allbe on our guard. Don’t start feeling too secure. Be prepared at all times. Nothingescapes the Führer’s notice. Even if he doesn’t say anything. Röhm [is] the prisoner ofthe men around him.’65332 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHGoebbels opted for neither side. His own position was precarious. Unlike Himmleror Göring, he had no private army; but he also had no friends. While in 1932, at atypical get-together of battle- and bottle-scarred party veterans in Berlin, Count vonHelldorff’s arrival had been greeted with silence, a ‘storm of applause’ had gone upbefore Goebbels could get inside the hall.66 But his popularity now was substantiallylower. The Nazi minister of agriculture wrote scathingly of him in private as didAlfred Rosenberg, who noticed how the other gauleiters hated the commercial successof Goebbels’ ‘Kaiserhof’.67 Nobody liked Goebbels’ methods. Rosenberg wroteto Hess protesting that Goebbels would not allow him to broadcast, and was musclinginto Culture, which had been Rosenberg’s territory for fourteen years.68 OnMay 1 Hitler upset them both, by appointing the former gauleiter of Hanover, thesuffocatingly narrow-minded Bernhard Rust, as minister for science, culture, andpublic education. Creating such rivalries was precisely the way that Hitler instinctivelyworked.During June the rivals jockeyed for allies. Goebbels made common cause withGöring. He had noted that on New Year’s Day Hitler had not written to the general atall (‘out with him!’ he had gloated.)69 He had also heard Hitler crack jokes at Göring’sexpense behind his back.70 But now Hitler advised him to patch up his differenceswith Göring; he had read the proofs of ‘Kaiserhof,’ and advised Goebbels to tonedown one or two passages and insert a paragraph praising the general: ‘It will beworth your while,’ advised Hitler cynically.71 Evidently touched by the (published)references in ‘Kaiserhof’, Göring now wrote a conciliatory letter to Goebbels, offeringhim his friendship again.A STIFLING grey uniformity had descended by now on the abashed and apprehensiveGerman press. Acres of space were devoted to the obligatory reporting of DrGoebbels’ aimless and opaque speaking campaign during May 1934 against ‘grousersand fault-finders, rumour-mongers and deadbeats, saboteurs and troublemakers.’72Typical of these speeches by Goebbels, flailing against ill-defined enemies, was oneat Gleiwitz on June 6, to fifty thousand Silesians, whinging about the ‘cowardly carpersGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 333at their beer tables,’ and about ‘the heroes who today are too elegant to go marchingwith an S.A. Sturm themselves, but stand on the kerbside registering all their pettymisdemeanours and excesses.’73 Among other specific enemies identified by Goebbelswere the Centre politicians and militant churchmen. The people themselves had totake the law into their own hands, he said: ‘They’re making a big mistake,’ he added,‘if they believe we’d be cowardly enough to call out the police or army against them.’Goebbels’ campaign blundered on toward its climax—coincidentally set for June30. His speeches still ignored the S.A., on the party’s left, and lambasted only thetroublemakers and diehards on the right, the churches, the conservative elite, theexclusive Herrenklub and its principal member the vice-chancellor Baron Franz vonPapen. ‘The Nazis,’ wrote one shrewd American correspondent, seeking to rationalizeGoebbels’ puzzling campaign, ‘know that they cannot stand still. Their movementis like a bicycle—if it stands still it falls.’ He deduced that the Goebbels campaignwas a smoke-screen to cover a gradual cutback in the two million S.A. stormtroopers.74This was close to the mark. By early June Ernst Röhm was fostering talk of a ‘secondrevolution.’Perhaps Goebbels was hedging his bets—half conniving with Röhm, as once hehad with Captain Stennes in Berlin. Hanfstaengel would comment on how Goebbelshad recently declared that the Nazi Revolution was by no means over, and that ‘reactionaries’would be swept away by the will of the masses; that was before he did hisvolte face.75 According to Otto Strasser, never the most reliable of sources, Goebbelshad a private tryst with Röhm in his ‘local’, the Munich