Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

withoutmentioning whose, ‘departure to Franzensbad.’9 He sends his adjutant to the railroadstation with roses and a photograph inscribed, ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’ A few days laterhe certainly sees her again in Nuremberg. ‘A visitor from Franzensbad,’ he notes,‘about which I am much pleased.’10 This is the first time that he has passed significant,if camouflaged, comments on a prospective lover in his diary.Lida Baarova will affect him more profoundly than any other woman since Anka.They will bring to each other great happiness: but the ensuing romance, which isalmost entirely platonic, will sweep him to the bring of divorce, self-exile, and evensuicide. As for Lida, she will nobly abstain from the general calumny of him after hisdeath. Legions of obscure actresses will claim, without a shred of evidence, that heforced himself upon them. ‘It would have left him no time for work,’ Lida points out.‘Toward me,’ she still insists, ‘his behaviour was impeccable.’ It is his courtesy andpatience as a suitor that have impressed her. But does she ever truly love him? Evenyears later she cannot be sure. ‘I loved him in my own way,’ she will recollect. ‘I wasvery young and you are very susceptible at that age … He loved me so deeply, that Ifell in love with love itself.’11GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 397AT this Nuremberg rally Hitler announced a four-year plan for Germany. His grandplans on foreign policy came as no surprise Goebbels.12 After sitting in on one conferenceaboard Hitler’s yacht Grille at Kiel in May 1936 he had noted down Hitler’sprophetic vision of a United States of Europe under a German leadership. ‘Years,perhaps even decades of work toward that end,’ commented Goebbels in his diary.‘But what an end!’13 Mussolini’s victory in Abyssinia had seemingly confirmed oneimportant lesson: that might was right. ‘Anything else is nonsense,’ concludedGoebbels.14Clearly at Hitler’s behest he was already gearing up for future hostilities. He establishedclose relations with the Wehrmacht, and had quiet talks with Blomberg aboutbeefing up transmitter powers and mobilizing war reporters.15 ‘The Führer,’ he addedafter another secret meeting with Hitler, Papen, and Ribbentrop, ‘sees a conflictcoming in the Far East. Japan will thrash Russia. And then our great hour will come.Then we shall have to carve off enough territory to last us a hundred years. Let’shope that we’re ready, and that the Führer is still alive.’16 Anticipating that moment,late in November 1936 Hitler signed a deal with the Japanese. Over dinner with thesignatories, Hitler prophetically remarked that it would not bear fruit for anotherfive years. ‘He really is taking the long view in foreign policy,’ marvelled his propagandaminister.17While relations with Göring were strained but stable, a never-ending feud withAlfred Rosenberg had broken out, fuelled by Goebbels’ doctrinaire plans for a 105-member cultural senate and a seventh sub-chamber of the Reich Chamber of Culture.Suffice to say that Rosenberg still claimed culture as his own domain.18 TowardHess as deputy Führer Goebbels preserved a bemused if antiseptic cordiality; intruth he found Hess bourgeois and probably unbalanced. Hess’s business-like chiefof staff Martin Bormann suggested that he had neither imagination nor initiative—and would be proven wrong on both counts five years later.19 Goebbels had alreadyspotted that it could be dangerous to have Bormann himself as an enemy.20 Goebbels’early admiration for Ribbentrop had waned during 1935 and expired entirely afterhe was appointed ambassador in London in August 1936. He then took every oppor-398 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHtunity he could to score off him. When agency photos arrived arrived showingRibbentrop’s seventeen year old son leaving their Eaton Square house in his Westminstercollege uniform of top hat and tails, Goebbels cruelly ensured that theywere printed in every Berlin newspaper that Hitler read.21 Mercy was not a quality inwhich he excelled.IT is mid September 1936 before Magda returns from Dresden to Berlin. She worksoff her rancour on her little husband. ’Magda’s changing,’ he notes self-righteously.It’s sickening!’22 Seeking affection he turns to Lida Baarova, temporarily ensconcedin the Hotel Eden with Fröhlich, to whom she has returned; their two villas onSchwanenwerder are mothballed for the winter. He obtains an advance print ofFröhlich’s latest movie, ‘City of Anatolia,’ and offers to show it to them. The actorswallows the bait and his pride, and brings Lida along. Afterwards Goebbels notesthat Fröhlich’s acting is not all that good; but it is with Fröhlich that Lida nonethelessleaves, bound for Franzensbad.23A grander campaign plan is called for. With some prodding the City of Berlin agreesto give Goebbels for his lifetime a domain in one of its forests on his forthcomingbirthday. He has inspected it with Karl Hanke in mid September; it is near the forestvillage of Lanke, about twenty miles north-east of the capital. Hanke has selected anidyllic location on a little swan lake, the Bogensee, enveloped by groves of fir, beech,and pine. ‘All around, the deepest solitude,’ describes Goebbels. ‘Hanke has done hisstuff well.’ With manpower provided by the labour service, a two-storey woodframedhouse is rapidly erected on an incline at the water’s edge. A tall wire fence will bethrown up around the entire lake to preserve the minister’s privacy.24 (House andfence are still there. The author, visiting it in 1993, found one rusting hook in anearby mildewed tree where once a children’s swing had hung.)Later that month he flies to Greece with Magda, taking in the Acropolis (‘thisnoble temple of Nordic art’) and Parthenon; he meets prime minister JohannisMetaxas, who professes to like the Germans as much as he loathes the Jews andbolsheviks. Then he returns to Berlin and continues furnishing his love nest at Lanke,GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 399including among its accoutrements a special diary—kept just during his visits outhere.25He fantasizes about being out here alone with Lida Baarova. He phones her inPrague, where she is visiting her mother, to ask when she will be back. ‘Quite soon,’she replies guilelessly. ‘Gustl’s staying on at Karlsbad.’He escorts her out frequently in the evenings. On October 5 his diary coyly records‘a little Spazierfahrt,’ a motor outing before he returns late to bed.26 Appeasing Magdahe buys her a costly ring on Hellmut’s first birthday.