Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

innocent of any consciousness of his own double-standards. He expressedhorror at Stalin’s show trials, although Hitler had not offered his victims even thisformality before shooting them in June 1934. He fiercely protected his ownStaatssekretär, the podgy Walter Funk, even while prosecuting the clergy. When Hitlerforbade further police prying into Funk’s sexual perversions, Goebbels breathedinto his diary: ‘Thank goodness.’51 Lustful in private, he was starkly puritan in public.‘They can have a thousand nude women if they want,’ he pontificated. ‘But withoutthose nasty, smutty jokes.’ He sent for Miss Trude Hesterberg, one of the Scala’slovelier singers, and lectured her on the indecency of her act. After visiting the Scala,a burlesque theatre, he threatened to have it aryanized or even shut down altogether.52But he disowned any aspirations to act as a chastity-overlord: when Heiner Kurzbein,the (unfortunately named) chief of his ministry’s photogrtaphic section, suggestedthey censor some of the more risqué photos of the 1938 film ball, Goebbels would414 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHoverrule him: ‘A dollop of healthy eroticism is not out of place,’ he defined, ‘and farbetter normal than abnormal.’53The aryanization of the sub-chambers of the Chamber of Culture, particularly thechamber of music, would plod on far into 1939.54 Furtwängler kept butting in, intercedingfor individual Jews.55 At his speech to the chamber of culture on November26, 1937 Goebbels would boast of the fact that he had completely eliminated the Jewfrom the artistic life of Germany: ‘Imagine my surprise,’ wrote Louis Lochner privately,‘when the next day Musical American arrives and I read that with the approval ofthe German Government no other person than Yehudi Menuhin, … a Jew, has obtainedthe right to produce the [newly rediscovered] Schumann [violin] concerto in theUSA!’56 Elsewhere Goebbels enacted police ordinances to exclude the Jews fromstage, screen, and concert performances; he also clamped down harder on theirpublishing houses and bookstores.57 When Jews in the United States protested, ledby Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, Goebbels banned Jewish and Zionistcommunal activities in Germany for two months.58 After Nazi hooligans smashed thewindows of Jewish stores in Danzig, the international clamour resumed.59 Goebbelsaryanized Germany’s remaining Jewish-owned theatres and turfed the last Jews outof Germany’s recording industry.60 To break the Jewish near-monopoly on overseasfilm distribution, he arranged with Alfred Hess, Rudolf’s brother, to use the party’sForeign Organisation, the AO, instead.61In March 1937, using precisely the methods that he had previously branded asJewish, Goebbels took over the major Ufa film company for the Reich. As a warningto Ufa he had instructed the press to trash its latest production; the film floppeddisastrously, and the company agreed to sell out.62 ‘Today we buy up Ufa,’ recordedGoebbels, ‘and thus we [the propaganda ministry] are the biggest film, press, theatre,and radio concern in the world.’63 Dismissing the entire Ufa board, he began to intervenein film production at every level, dismissing directors, recommending actresses(like the fiery Spaniard, Imperio Argentina), forcing through innovations like colourcinematography, and rationalizing screen-test facilities for all three major studios,Ufa, Tobis, and Bavaria. 64 Depriving the distributors of any such in such matters heGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 415created instead artistic boards to steer future film production. Suddenly the filmindustry began to surge ahead. Blockbuster films swept the box offices. With a suretouch, Goebbels stopped the production of pure propaganda and party epics, optingfor more subtle messages instead—the wholesome family, the life well spent.Until then the status of the acting progression had been lowly. He changed all that.He converted the old Rathenau villa on Skagerrak Platz into an Artiste’s Club. Itslush furnishings, its dimly lit cocktail bar, and its dance floor made it a popular hauntfor raffishly dressed actors, actresses with plunging necklines, and strutting officialsof the Nazi party. Both Magda and Dr Goebbels often went there—though seldomin each other’s company.ALTHOUGH he strives to conceal it from his diary, Joseph Goebbels’ infatuation withthe ravishingly beautiful Lida Baarova has grown more hopeless. The 1937 diarymentions her name without special emphasis, but he carelessly spills enough cluesaround for the researcher to grasp what is happening. ‘Strolled in the park and talkedwith Magda,’ he writes dutifully. ‘She is so nice and adorable. I have taken her into myheart.’ Then, ‘I drive on out to Bogensee’—the lake at Lanke on which he now hashis isolated little wooden house.65 It is out here, in the depths of the forest, thatsomebody is usually waiting for him. These are, it may be recalled, the very dayswhen Hitler’s Cabinet is solemnly discussing fierce new laws on divorce and adultery.’Out to Bogensee in the afternoon,’ he writes the next day, having again leftMagda in Berlin. ‘Some music, reading, and writing.’ That month he takes a specialinterest in Lida’s latest film, the spy-thriller ‘Patriots,’ being made for Ufa. He reviewsthe screen-tests, discusses the story line with director Karl Ritter (‘It must geta nationalist slant’), and reworks the filmplay himself; on January 25, he goes out toBabelsberg to watch shooting begin.66 Viewing the first takes, he finds Lida’s actingwonderful. ‘The farewell and final scene are deeply touching,’ he writes.67 He becomesaddicted to re-runs of her earlier movies. After watching her and GustavFröhlich in ‘Barcarole’ on February 23—after seeing the very scene in which he andHitler first set eyes on her at the studios—he tells the diary, ‘La Ba[a]rova’s acting is416 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHwonderful, moving, and heart-breaking.’ (Fröhlich however is ‘a little twirp whocan’t act.’)68A few days earlier all three have been involved in a silly incident outside Fröhlich’svilla on Schwanenwerder. With Magda in the maternity clinic since February 2,Goebbels is often lonely in the evenings. Twice that month he drives out to his ownempty villa on the peninsula (the house at Lanke is being ventilated).69 Early on oneof these evenings Lida arrives at Gustav’s villa; later, hearing a limousine, she stepsout into the snow to greet her lover but finds Goebbels inside instead with his chauffeurAlfred Rach at the wheel.‘Hello,’ exclaims the minister. ‘What brings you out in the middle of the night!’She puts one foot on the running board and explains, ‘I’m waiting for Gustl. He’shaving a premiere.’Even as