Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

marriage and family.’55One Tuesday a month later the same diary glimpses Miss Jugo wailing that one of herlesser films is likely to be canned. On Wednesday he confers with her. ‘Perhaps herfilm can still be saved,’ he records afterwards.His lifestyle is decorated, if not enriched, by this chattering throng of womenpassing through his portals, not all of whom are even pretty. ‘A young poetess KätheSummer,’ he remarks to his diary after she leaves, adding the scandalous generalization:‘Why do brainy women all have to be so plain?’56 Of his own good looks he hasGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 371no doubt. He willingly allows photographers, artists, and sculptors to portray, paint,and cast his own frail, 110 pound, five-foot four frame, immaculately uniformed, forposterity.57Image is everything and Goebbels, the only Nazi leader with a family, workes hardon his. It is his daughter Helga who hands Hitler the posy of flowers on his birthday.Twice in 1935 she is cover girl on illustrated magazines. A week after Hellmut’s birthGoebbels speaks at the Harvest thanksgiving festival at Bückeberg in the Harz. Threehundred thousand farmers’ throats roar their congratulations—or so it seems to hisdiary.58 Less cordial receptions are not recorded for posterity. Invited to meet him atthe Friedrichshain halls, scene of many a pitched battle, he finds himself booed andhissed by Berlin’s discarded S.A. veterans. He begins jovially, ‘I hope I’ve not blunderedinto a meeting of emigrés by mistake—’ but the whistling only gets worse andhe orders the radio microphones switched off.59Shining through his diary’s pages is his affection for his eldest daughter Helga.December 1935 finds them both rattling Winter Relief collection boxes for the assembledmedia outside the Adlon Hotel.60 He dutifully spends Christmas with thefamily at the Oberhof ski paradise; he does not omit to send gifts to Anka, but increasinglyhe prefers escorting more exotic women like Hela Strehl, Ello Quandt,and Jenny Jugo to the opera and theatre.61 In January 1936 he makes this note: ‘Iwant to find a role for Miss [Ilse] Stobrowa’—an up and coming Berlin actress. Theseare trivial and no doubt innocent pursuits, but they bring problems in train which hetalks over exhaustively with Magda.62 There is a clue to what kind of problems whenhe complains to Hitler about Himmler’s secret police: ‘This loathsome snooping hasgot to stop,’ he writes. ‘Above all into ones most private affairs.’63Hitler promises to ask the minister of posts whether any Reich ministers arebeing wiretapped, against his orders, and to prohibit check-ups on hotel rooms.64But it will make more than the Gestapo to stay Goebbels’ roving eye. A batch ofnew secretaries is introduced to him that March. ‘One of them,’ he adds laconically,‘is usable.’65372 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHA LENGTHY midlife crisis was beginning. One day in 1935 death knocked loudly on hisdoor. At midday on August 20 he heard a rumble from where a subway tunnel wasbeing excavated just outside his villa in Hermann-Göring Strasse (as the street wasnow called.) Before his eyes the crane and several trees on the far side began to sinkout of sight and the excavation caved in amidst blues flashes from short-circuitingcables. Goebbels phoned Hitler and had the site managers arrested. He spent manyhours watching the rescue operations and brooding about the nineteen missing men,trapped ‘cold and rigid’ below ground. Several of the bodies were laid out in hisgarden—a sight he would not easily forget.66He asked Göring to look into his own pension rights. Looking at the cracks wroughtby the cave-in in his own walls, he had seen the first fissures in his own immortality.67He had continued his point-scoring over General Göring throughout 1935. Listeningto his speech on Hitler’s birthday, diplomats had noticed his emphasis on theFührer’s austere and unostentatious life style and interpreted it as a sly dig at Göring.68With the opening in November of Goebbels’ rebuilt Opera House in Charlottenburgthe rivalry moved onto a new plane, because as prime minister of Prussia Göringcontrolled the no less magnificent Prussian State Theatre, and under GustavGründgens’ inspired direction it became a mecca for all the fine performers seekingto escape Goebbels’ cultural straitjacket. He directed Hans Hinkel to savage theState Theatre’s ‘Hamlet’ as a ‘typically Jewish’ production. Göring telephonedGoebbels in a rage. The minister reminded him of who controlled Germany’s newspapersnow. ‘With Göring,’ he now found, ‘I no longer have any sources of friction.’69Nevertheless he continued to pick fights with the general. He remarked at Hitler’stable in January 1936 that fellow lunch-guest Göring’s annual opera ball had just costthree hundred thousand marks to stage. ‘How can you square that with our NationalSocialism?’ he challenged in his diary.70 Minister and general continued to skirt warilyaround each other. ‘Göring [was] very nice to me,’ he wrote that autumn. ‘He’dlike a word in my ear soon.’71GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 373BY no means above reproach himself, he adopted a Puritan stance in his office and athome.72 He pounced on any corruption in his gau HQ or ministry.Huge sums of money were at his disposal. The ministry’s revenues were now boostedby the box office receipts from the Opera House.73 He took a firmer hand in thestruggling film industry and particularly in expanding its domestic market. Film exportshad previously covered forty percent of production costs, but now, with theincreasingly effective worldwide Jewish boycott, barely seven percent.74 He acceptedwithout rancour that American productions were often superior. The Americans hadGreta Garbo, and his passion for her had not dimmed. But he now had directors likeLeni Riefenstahl— ‘A woman,’ he gasped, reeling from their latest encounter, ‘whoknows what she wants!’75 Her international award-winning documentary of the chilling,spectacular, drum-thumping 1934 party rally, ‘Triumph of the Will,’ had beenpremiered in Munich in March and would go on to become one of the greatestpropaganda films of all time.76 Goebbels set aside 1·5 million marks to finance aRiefenstahl epic on the approaching Olympic Games. The 1936 Games, he decided,should become a show-case for National Socialism.77His propaganda techniques were subtle and oblique. ‘Operate seemingly withoutpurpose,’ he directed Hadamowsky, criticising the government radio’s obtrusivepoliticking: ‘That’s far more compelling.’78 This being so, his continued indulgence ofJulius