Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

as the first reports came in from Vienna. Things weresoon going badly wrong just as he had feared: ‘Big rumpus. Colossal tension. Awfulwait. I’m still sceptical. Pfeffer more optimistic. Habicht too. Wait and see!’The word was that Habicht’s Nazis had seized Dollfuss and his minister of theinterior Emil Fey in a scuffle. Hitler put through endless phone calls to Berlin, becauselines to Vienna were dead. At three P.M. he phoned General Adam: ‘Everythingis going according to plan in Vienna,’ he lied. ‘The government building is in ourhands. Dollfuss has been injured—the rest of the news is confused as yet. I’ll phoneagain.’ He never did; he and Goebbels listened to Wagner’s ‘Rhinegold’ that afternoonwith only half an ear. Then came uglier news: Dollfuss had been shot dead, andGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 351the rebels were pulling out. ‘Habicht was all talk,’ decided an outraged Goebbels. ‘Ijust manage to suppress a crazy communiqué by Pfeffer.’Pfeffer and Habicht were very mute after this. Goebbels switched the propagandaministry over to emergency damage control. The foreign ministry blamed the Germanambassador and recalled him. ‘Führer remains quite calm,’ observed Goebbels.‘Casting new plans. Dollfuss is out: that’s a serious blow to the Austrian regime.’They tore up their remaining Wagner tickets and returned to Berlin the next day.41Mussolini—who had secretly approved the idea of ousting Dollfuss—was furiousat the murder, and sent his army to the Austrian frontier. The Italian press waded intothe Nazis. Goebbels ordered his press to hit back. Hitler was angry that Mussolinihad changed his tune. ‘It’s all over with Italy,’ Goebbels decided. ‘The same old disloyalty.The Führer has washed his hands of them.’42 As a bloodbath began in Austria,he persuaded Hitler to dismiss the bungling, cynical dilettante Habicht if not actuallyshoot him; Papen was sent as special ambassador to Austria. Late on July 27 Hitlerspoke to Goebbels about the future: ‘He has a prophetic vision,’ wrote the minister.‘Germany as master of the world. Job for a century.’43 The assassins were publiclyhanged in Vienna.LATE on July 30 word came that President Hindenburg was dying. Hitler and Goebbelsdiscussed what to do. ‘Immediately he dies,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘R.W. [armed forces]and cabinet will appoint the Führer as successor. Then Führer will appeal to thepublic.’44 The Cabinet agreed this late on August 1; Goebbels co-signed the decree.45Early that day Hitler had gone to take leave of the aged field marshal and he hadphoned that afternoon as Goebbels was planning the state funeral. He had foundHindenburg still alive—the president had recognized the chancellor, spoken of hisgratitude and affection, then mistaken him for the Kaiser and addressed him as ‘yourreverent and humble subject’.46 Goebbels broadcast Hindenburg’s death on August2.47 Listening to the chaplain’s endless eulogy at the funeral ceremony in Tannenberg,Goebbels decided: ‘No parson will ever speak at my grave.’48352 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHHitler’s appointment was to be confirmed by a plebiscite on the nineteenth.Goebbels revelled in controlling the giant new propaganda machine, but found theresults disappointing. Some thirty-eight million Germans, just under ninety percentnationwide, with rather less in Berlin, had endorsed Hitler as head of state.49 Thecatholics had let them down; he blamed Rosenberg and his tactless anti-catholic effusionsof late.50 In his imagination Goebbels saw the ‘missing ten percent’ glaring athim, and for the next three months he dinned into his staff the need to win them overtoo—all, that is, except the ‘anti-social dregs and professional bleaters’ who wereincurably hostile to the regime anyway.51 He quoted to them Martin Luther’s adviceon rhetoric: ‘If you want the people’s ears, watch their lips!’ ‘Propaganda,’ he declared,‘is not a set of hard and fast rules, but the product of a lively and activeimagination.’ If Friedrich Schiller were still alive, he claimed in Weimar, he wouldwithout doubt be one of the great literary champions of the Nazi revolution.52Broad sections of the S.A. were deeply disaffected by what Hitler had done. S.A.brigadier Richard Fiedler, Horst Wessel’s old comrade in arms, pleaded that theparty had got the S.A. all wrong.53 Goebbels stabbed them in the back. Twice thatsummer, addressing them in Berlin, he justified the ‘radical cure,’54 the ‘purgative’55which had been necessary among their leaders. ‘Let nobody come to me,’ he shrilledto twelve thousand Brownshirts drawn up before him in the Lustgarten on August25, ‘and say: “The S.A. has served its purpose—it’s got nothing left to do.” Close toten percent of our poulation still has to be won over.’ Speaking in September tothirty thousand S.A. men he unfeelingly commended to them this quotation fromNietzsche: ‘That which does not slay us makes us even stronger!’56 According toHanfstaengl, Goebbels was booed several times during Berlin meetings over the nexttwo years.57Both Goebbels and Hitler were long racked by remorse after the massacre. Hitlersuffered from insomnia and a ringing in his ears which he attributed to that origin,and ordered generous pensions for the purged men’s next of kin.58 Goebbels took upthe cause of the S.A. men who had died in earlier years, protesting to Martin Bormann,who ran the party’s benevolent fund, that some S.A. men’s widows were drawingGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 353pensions of only seventeen marks (four dollars) per month, while Geyer’s widowhad received nothing at all.59His own finances were in better shape. At the end of October 1934 he paid cash fora swanky new five-litre Daimler-Benz tourer.60 His ministry’s budget for fiscal 1934projected a revenue of 22,341,250 marks from radio licence fees, against outgoingsof 27,545,300 marks. His own pre-tax salary and allowances would total 72,900marks (around $18,000).61 And why not? he had worked hard that autumn, limpingaround the country addressing uniformed farmers (seven hundred thousand of themarrayed like soldier-ants on the slopes of the Bückeberg for the Nazi annual harvestfestival), uniformed roadbuilders (who serenaded him with their specially composedBallad of the Spade), uniformed Hitler Youth, and uniformed Nazi maidens withblonde pigtails and uniformly glistening eyes.62In Hitler’s new Reich everything was uniform, especially the press, and Goebbelsknew it. Lecturing journalists in November he mocked at their monotonous outputand lack of courage, as though he himself were in no way to blame.63 Captain WilhelmWeiss, deputy editor of