Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

the young officersbombarded him eagerly with questions. ‘Politically, they are often like children,’ heassessed. ‘But then the politics is up to us.’45General von Blomberg’s war plans, already worked out in some detail, rested onthe assumption that they were confronted by the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, andLithuania.46 The Wehrmacht already attached significant weight to the wartime roleof propaganda. In that autumn’s manœuvres Goebbels’ new propaganda units tookpart for the first time. There was one uncomfortable detail: although Berlin wentinto full black-out, the ‘enemy’ planes still got through and Goebbels’ ministry wasadjudged a blazing ruin by the referees. ‘Let’s hope it’s never for real,’ he gasped inhis diary.47THE Goebbels family spends a few days early in 1937 at Hitler’s Berghof again. Beforeturning in one night, Goebbels speaks for some hours with Magda, now heavily pregnant,about love and marriage. He feels they are drawing closer again, as always‘when nobody comes between us.’48 After a couple of days he leaves his family thereand returns to Berlin. Predatory females cluster around him there.49 He drives outsome frosty nights to the new house at Lanke, explaining to his diary ‘nobody iswaiting for me in Berlin.’50Magda and Hitler return to the capital together on the twenty-third. All this setstongues wagging. Gossip queen Bella Fromm, still holding out in Berlin, recordsprivately that Goebbels has been seen hanging around some pretty low dives, andthat Magda now has a list of more than thirty women he has slept with.51 Magda’scloseness to Hitler also attracts salacious comment, and after Werner Count vonAlvensleben lets slip an incautious remark about her, her children, and her Führer,Goebbels complains to Hitler and has the count, spluttering denials, whisked off toconcentration camp.52 Shortly the police tell Goebbels that his cook Martha has beengossipping too, and she is sacked without notice. ‘Let’s hope she hasn’t done anyharm already,’ he writes, while entrusting no details to his diary.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 403It is of relevance to examine his views on divorce and adultery at this time. Hitlertakes a more liberal view of divorce than Goebbels.53 Goebbels instinctively opposesit, although he feels that most Party wives are ‘too dumb and too thick to hang on totheir husbands.’54 There are strains of catholic puritanism in him. When his youngsister, still in her twenties, begins dating a divorced film producer of forty-five, MaxKimmich, he has detectives discreetly check the man’s background. ‘It’s okay,’ hewrites after hearing their report. ‘Maria can fall in love with him.’55 Finding doublestandards easier than single, he spends nights out at Lanke (‘gossipping and lazing’),and days discussing the new laws with Hitler. He proposes that couples be forced towait a year after filing for divorce—this cooling off period will save many falteringmarriages.56 But in his diary are many unconscious hints at his own activities. Hecriticizes theatre director Eugen Klöpfer for his womanizing: ‘The theatre is not afree-for-all for girl-snatchers,’ he huffs.57 Even more hypocritically he lectures theincorrigible Walter Grantzow for falling in love with ‘some film star’, and now wantingto dump his wife.58 Briefing his new chief of personnel, Goebbels stipulates thathe wants neither over-prudishness in his ministry, nor any hanky-panky either. ‘Hegets my drift,’ records the minister.59His stand on adultery is no less self-serving. When the minister of the interiorWilhelm Frick, a pettifogging lawyer whom Goebbels detests, proposes with almostIslamic fervour ten-year jail terms for adultery, Goebbels snorts: ‘Then let thembegin retroactively with Frick.’ That night he drives scriptwriter Thea von Harbouhome (she was Fritz Lang’s lovely wife); and what right have we to doubt that sheonly ‘tells me of her new film plans’?60 Visiting Magda in the clinic, he discusses theseperennial topics—’marriage, fidelity, etcetera’—and finds her ‘rational.’61 He tellsHitler that neither divorce nor adultery is any concern of the public prosecutor. Thenext days’ entries glimpse Joseph Goebbels driving the two Höpfner sisters out toLanke in the snow: then castigating a chastened actress, Miss Marie-Louise Claudius,for indiscreet remarks: then assisting the beautiful Brigitte Horney with her foreigncurrency problems: then receiving the no less shapely actress Gina Falckenberg for ascript discussion session (‘I can help her too’).62 Hitler promises that he will shoot404 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHdown Frick’s draconic proposals on adultery. At the end of 1937, when adulteryagain comes before the Cabinet, Goebbels is still fighting. ‘Finally,’ he records, ‘weagree: prison sentences only if demanded by the wronged husband and in the publicinterest.’ The same Cabinet session decides that any rape committed by a Jew shall bea capital offence.63After a difficult confinement Magda gives birth on February 19, two monthsprematurely. The gynæcologist says that the sickly little newcomer, another girl, istruly holde, sweet; and they leave her with this name. ‘Just what I wanted,’ criesHelga. ‘It came down from the clouds!’ Magda lies amidst her pillows, tired andhappy, and her large dreamy eyes fill with tears as her cuckolded husband limps in.64NONE of the Goebbels children would be baptized. Goebbels had declared open waron the church. When the devoutly catholic minister of posts, Eltz von Rübenach,turned down Hitler’s gift of Party membership, made to all the non-Party ministerson January 30, 1937, explaining that he could not join a Party that oppressed thechurch, it was Dr Goebbels who indignantly orchestrated his colleagues’ demand forEltz’s resignation.65 Hitler however was one of the few Nazi leaders who still paid theten percent church levy on their income, and he saw no point in stirring up a hornets’nest.66 It was not that he admired the church. He commented to Goebbels thatthey had imbued modern man with a fear of death that his ancestors had never known.67But he was a pragmatist. They had to avoid needless discord within the Reich. Twicein February 1937 he called conferences at the Berghof on the inter-confessional disputes,to which he invited Goebbels along with Frick, Hess, and Himmler. On bothoccasions he explained that discord had to be avoided, since he expected a full-scaleworld war within a few years.68 Goebbels shrewdly proposed the election of a constitutionalsynod, wherein the clerics might stifle themselves in sterile debate and suffocatein democracy while the party and state stood