Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

Streicher, publisher of the crude tabloid Stürmer, is hard to understand. Theparty and Rudolf Hess demanded a ban on the newspaper. But Streicher enjoyedHitler’s personal backing, which gave him immunity from the normal press sanctions—until he published a scurrilous item about Emmy Göring. Then Hitler orderedStürmer’s suspension. ‘At last,’ rejoiced Goebbels.79 But after Streicher delivereda particularly crude speech in the Sport Palace that August he decided thatStreicher was ‘a great guy’ after all. The newspaper was frequently ‘pure porn,’ heagreed, but Streicher himself, gauleiter of Nuremberg, was ‘a character and man ofprinciple.’Stürmer’s favourite ploy was to publish items exposing people who had done littlepersonal favours for Jews.80 If anything redeemed Streicher in Goebbels’ eyes, it was374 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHthis antisemitic crusade. It made him a useful ally at a time when, as the Nazis felt,the Jews were beginning to throw their weight around again. In mid-July 1935 reportsreached him at Heiligendamm that Jews had actually staged a demonstrationoutside a Berlin cinema showing an antisemitic film. In consequence, Jews had beenmanhandled in Kurfürstendamm—the foreign press spoke loosely of a pogrom.81Hitler had long wanted to replace the capital’s police president, Admiral Magnus vonLevetzow. Goebbels suggested that his friend Count von Helldorff replace him.It was a further indication of the decline in his moral probity. By this time theallegations against Helldorff—even within the Nazi party—filled seven pages. Hisgambling debts ran into the hundreds of thousands; he was in arrears with his rent;he had borrowed heavily from Jews; he smoked expensive cigars; he had bought aheavy Mercedes to swan around the countryside with a Mrs von B.; he had beenturfed out of the feudal Union Club for dishonourable conduct.The ugliest allegation concerned the death of the famous Jewish clairvoyant ErikJan Hanussen (alias Steinschneider): late in 1932 Hanussen, currying favour with theNazis, like many Jews, had offered to donate 150 new uniforms, boots, and cash tothe S.A., and he had been seen at Hedemann Strasse early in 1933 handing overmoney to Helldorff. In February 1933 a Berlin gossip columnist reported thatHelldorff had attended a Hanussen séance in full uniform along with Marx, Jewishgeneral manager of the Scala strip-club, and the purported Grand Duchess Anastasia.Helldorff was alleged to have accepted bribes to grant bookmaking concessions to aJewish applicant, Josef Mihlan (he started a libel action, but withdrew). GottliebRösner, who had founded the Berlin S.A., waged a bitter war against Helldorff withoutsuccess. As the count dodged and weaved to evade bankruptcy action, an arrestwarrant was issued. In March 1933 he became police chief of Potsdam. Franticallycovering the tracks of his earlier misdeeds, Helldorff told his twenty-eight year oldchief of staff Karl Ernst to have the Jew Hanussen liquidated.82 The clairvoyant wasarrested late on March 24 and found soon after shot in the back of the head. Thepapers relating to his donations vanished. After Ernst in turn was shot during theRöhm purge a year later police searched his house and found an envelope markedGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 375‘Count Helldorff’ behind a cupboard, containing receipts for the money paid overby Hanussen to Helldorff.83Early in 1935 Berlin’s deputy S.A. commander had discussed the scandal with DrGoebbels. Goebbels ignored what he was told and on July 18 persuaded Hitler topromote Helldorff to be the new police chief of Berlin. The next day S.A. chief Lutzesuspended Helldorff from the S.A. and took away the right to wear its uniform. BothGoebbels and Hitler continued to protect Helldorff however and a few months laterall legal action against him was halted.84What Helldorff had going for him was that he was a vicious antisemite. Summoninghim to Heiligendamm, Goebbels swore that between them they would ‘clean up’the capital. It was time, he announced two weeks later, to tell the Jews ‘thus far andno further.’ In recent months eighteen thousand more Jews had actually poured intoBerlin. Speaking in Essen on August 4, he announced that the Germans had put upwith provocations from their Jewish ‘guests’ for two years. The emigrés abroad retaliatedwith fresh horror stories about persecution. The Manchester Guardian publisheda wholly untrue story about East Prussian mills denying flour to Jewish bakers,and about foodstores and pharmacists refusing to serve Jews. A Warsaw-basedUnited Jewish Committee against Anti-Jewish Persecution in Germany appealed forworld action.85Goebbels plotted his revenge. In his calculus, the Jews and bolsheviks went hand inhand. That August he read fascinated the typescript memoirs written in concentrationcamp by Ernst Torgler. It blew the lid right off bolshevism.86 The revelationscame at an opportune time, because Goebbels had persuaded Hitler to give theupcoming Seventh Nuremberg Party Rally a pronounced anti-communist flavour.Dr Taubert provided both Hitler and Goebbels with the raw information they needed.Goebbels’ great Nuremberg speech, later published as ‘Communism with the MaskOff,’ was a chilling indictment of the Moscow Jews’ methods, which did not stopshort, he alleged, of deliberate starvation and mass murder. The Hungarian communistexile Béla Kun (whom Goebbels ‘unmasked’ as Aaron Cohn) had alone orderedsixty thousand men machine-gunned in the Crimea one year in the nineteen-twen-376 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHties. Among the 1·8 million liquidated by the bolsheviks in the first five years of theirreign had been teachers, doctors, officers, and policemen, and also 815,000 peasants.(In the House of Lords on July 25, 1934,’ Goebbels declared, ‘the Archbishop ofCanterbury said that the number of victims of starvation in Soviet Russia was nearersix million than three’—an interesting early example of his later propaganda techniqueof citing a fact that he had himself planted overseas.) Who was behind thisgenocide of six million? The answer, shrilled Goebbels, was the Jews. ‘Cooperationwith bolshevism,’ he concluded, ‘is possible neither on a political nor on a philosophicalbasis.’FOR the next nine years Goebbels was the motor, goading his reluctant Führer intoever more radical actions against the Jews.87 He sharpened the anti-Jewish provisionsof the Reich Chamber of Culture.88 Meeting in special session at Nuremberg theReichstag that September 1936 passed a set of laws circumscribing the rights of Jewsand half-Jews in Germany. Goebbels took no part in their drafting, but he welcomedthese Nuremberg laws.89 Subsequently he demanded a more rigorous