Goebbels27: The Round TableHE was now in his fortieth year. The three years before war broke out wouldshow him at his most innovative as minister. He laid the foundations of animaginative welfare scheme for Germany’s elderly stars of stage and screen.1 He puthis ministry’s top officials into blue-collar jobs for two months to gain experience inindustry.2 He created the hugely successful travelling exhibition of degenerate worksof art confiscate from galleries and museums. Despite Hitler’s strictures he initiateda pitiless campaign of legal repression against church officials, and he maintained hisvery personal vendetta against the Jews. He bought up Germany’s biggest film studiosin a determined attempt to take on Hollywood. He consolidated his hold on theprinted and broadcast word, though he never truly controlled the newspapers. Andall the time he fine-tuned the propaganda weapon for Hitler’s coming wars of conquest.His was the sharpest tongue in town. ‘I’ve got three men,’ Hitler would say, ‘whojust can’t stop laughing when they’re sitting down together.’3 He was referring toHoffmann, Amann, and Goebbels. At the chancellery’s round table the propagandaminister, whom he dubbed the ‘chief jester’ of the Third Reich, usually sat directlyopposite him.4 Only Goebbels had the nerve and wit to interrupt Hitler’s monologues.5 Confident of his personal status, he was merciless toward the other guests.‘Well, Tiny,’ he would greet Winifred Wagner’s oafish daughter Friedelind, ‘as fat anddumb and lazy and gluttonous as ever?’6 When the malodorous Otto Dietrich re-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 409marked that the best ideas always came to him in the bath-tub, Goebbels piped up:‘Then you must have good ideas more often, Dr Dietrich!’7 Once, Viktoria vonDirksen, outraged at a Goebbels barb, appealed: ‘Mein Führer, tell your minister toshut up!’ (Hitler lapsed into Viennese dialect, grinned, and directed Goebbels tochange the subject.)8 Magda, the common object of their affections, winced at hiscruel wit.9 After ordering the summary arrest of all astrologers, magnetopaths, andother occultists he would scoff: ‘Remarkably enough not one of these clairvoyantsforesaw that he was about to be arrested.’10Those of his victims who fought back lived to regret it. Once ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaenglread out to the round table a Goebbels press announcement praising ‘the eternalimmortality of the German people.’ ‘Don’t you worry about my style,’ snappedGoebbels. ‘With my style I have conquered Germany.’ Hanfstaengl retorted that hehad always thought the Führer’s style had done that.11 Hitler, put up to it by Goebbels,despatched Hanfstaengl on a fake ‘parachute mission behind the lines to GeneralFranco’ in February 1937: terrified for his life, Hanfstaengl absconded to London.12It was here at this round table that Hitler and Goebbels plotted the special editionof a counterfeit Völkischer Beobachter in which their self-important radio chief EugenHadamowsky could learn that he had been awarded the Goethe Prize (he had not.)They ushered him out onto the balcony to take the plaudits of the Wilhelm Strassecrowds; once out there, he found the street bare.13The two Nazis had each other’s measure. Goebbels joked once that PresidentRoosevelt had written inviting him to become propaganda secretary in Washington.‘A tough choice, dear Doktor,’ replied Hitler smoothly. ‘Let me know how you decide.’14 Hitler would recall the election meeting at Stetting where Goebbels, replacinghim at short notice, found the ticket price slashed from 60 to 25 pfennigs. ‘Remembernow,’ he would chide Goebbels. ‘You’re not worth half as much as I.’15Goebbels needed public adulation as a vampire feeds on blood.16 The British governmentdecided in June 1937 that he was out of favour, and losing influence in thecountry.17 Like many small men he was sensitive to criticism, and swooned with rageat foreign caricatures that highlighted his physical deformity. He had a youth who410 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHcalled him a Jesuit catspaw sentenced to three months.18 The mayor of Halle earnedlow marks for recommending in an article that promotions depend on physique. Yetthe women around Hitler adored him. Hitler’s junior secretaries would rush to thewindows whenever Goebbels walked by. ‘If you only knew what eyes he has,’ theyenthused to a new colleague, ‘and how captivatingly he laughs.’19 Hitler would alsomention that laugh, telling Streicher after Goebbels had spent a week at the Berghof.‘Anybody who can laugh as loudly as this man, whom Nature has so cruelly afflicted,cannot be all bad.’20 Streicher told him that Hitler had said he could not get alongwithout Goebbels.21 The other top Nazis were less easily captivated. Darré wrote ofthe minister as a ‘mongrel apeman.’22 At one training course at Vogelsang, the Nazistaff college, the eight hundred district leaders (Kreisleiter) by unspoken consentgreeted both Goebbels’ appearance and his speech with total silence. One participantsaw beads of perspiration trickle down his face before he furiously stalked off thestage.23His own self-image was of a family man and Hitler’s most universally popular minister.24 Once that summer he decided to walk to the ministry in future. Two adjutantsfetched him from the villa in Hermann-Göring Strasse the next morning. None ofthe thousands of passers-by took any notice, and he never did it again. He preferredstaged photo-opportunities, like the annual first day of the Winter Relief collection,when he would face the photographers with his wife and children, all holding collectingboxes. ‘What good fortune,’ he marvelled, ‘to be so loved by one’s people.’25His postbag
