Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

found it aimless and inconsistent.11 Goebbels now seemedto be trying to conjure up a British ‘bogey’—evidently an echo of Hitler’s gloomyreview of foreign policy to him while at the Berghof on October 23.He had sidelined the party’s propaganda directorate (the Reichspropagandaleitung,based in Munich) by setting up local offices under his direct ministerial control, andthrough these channels he often dictated policy to the party itself. His direct and evilinfluence as gauleiter on the Berlin police has already been noted.Nationwide, his anti-Jewish campaign gathered momentum. Göring was alreadypurging the Jews from the business sector with a verve paralleled by Goebbels’ sweepin the chamber of culture.12 Count Helldorff liaised closely with Goebbels on thecontinuing and orchestrated police harassment of the Jews that had begun in June.13Moreover Warsaw and Prague were following suit. ‘The Jews are being driven fromcountry to country,’ observed Goebbels, ‘reaping the fruits of their eternal intrigues,hate campaigns, and dirty tricks.’14 Poland announced steps designed to keep theseventy thousand Polish Jews living abroad from returning; to forestall this ban, onOctober 28 the German police rounded up fifteen thousand Polish Jews and shuntedthem back across the border into Poland.15490 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHThis operation indirectly triggered the events that now followed, although there issome frail evidence that LICA, the Paris-based International League against Antisemitismwhich had lurked behind the 1936 assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff, also had a handin them. On November 7 a seventeen year old wastrel, a penniless illegal immigrantof Jewish-Polish extraction, pumped several bullets into a German diplomat in Paris,and Goebbels’ life suddenly had meaning again.16 Somehow this lad, HerschelGrynszpan, had found the money to check into an expensive hotel one block awayfrom LICA’s HQ and to purchase the pistol with which he gunned down the Germanofficial, Counsellor Ernst vom Rath. Even before news of the attack leaked out,LICA’s attorney Moro Giafferi arrived to represent him.At first Goebbels had overlooked the news from Paris. He had risen early on November6 at Schwanenwerder to go to Fürstenberg to visit an NSV (National SocialistWelfare) home for mothers and infants from Berlin. ‘I think Magda’s glad to seethe back of me,’ he wrote, still licking the emotional wounds sustained in the prolongedfray with Magda. Back in Berlin he went out with ‘some people’ to ErichCarow’s Laugh-in, one of the premier cabarets in the city, and laughed himself sick—according to his doubtful diary—at a sketch titled ‘Family Idyll’. There is little doubtwho was its butt.17On November 7, as he and Helldorff took the morning train to Munich, he orderedthe Paris shooting given only two inches on the Völkischer Beobachter ’s secondpage.18 Far more important was the solemn anniversary of the November 9, 1923putsch, now a pivot of the Nazi calendar with speeches by Hitler and a midnightswearing-in ceremony for the S.S. His diary shows him conferring on the way downto Munich with his new chef de bureau Dr Werner Naumann (‘a decent chap’),Minister of the Interior Dr Wilhelm Frick on Reich reform, and Wilhelm Fanderl,editor of Berlin’s 12 Uhr Blatt. In Munich he found the public ‘very nice’ towardsthem, and commented: ‘I’m now pretty well versed about such things.’ He attendeda reception given by Hess, he decided to appoint Karl Böhm to the Dresden opera(Böhm was one of the many top Nazi musicians who would effortlessly perform theGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 491volte face necessary to stay at the top after the coming war); and he agreed withForster, gauleiter of Danzig, that Poland ‘must soon relinquish the Danzig province.’THEN however Ernst vom Rath’s condition took a turn for the worse. Hitler orderedhis promotion—an ominous sign that he was not expected to live. Hitler’s attitudewas one of laissez-faire; Goebbels however saw his chance. As surgeons battled tosave the shooting victim, he swore to take revenge. He ordered press and radio toblame the outrage on the ‘international criminal Jewish rabble.’19 Angriff publishedphotographs of Frankfurter, killer of Gustloff, and Grynszpan, Vom Rath’s attacker,with pictures of the British politicians Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and DuffCooper scurrilously captioned ‘Jewish murderers and those who put them up to it.’On the morning of November 9 the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published awhole page on the Paris murder attempt. Summarizing recent days’ events, Goebbelswrote (possibly after the news of Rath’s death) on the ninth:The Führer’s Weimar speech [on November 6] was another powerful attack onthe warmongers in London and Paris… Churchill makes a quite stupid and unsubstantiatedresponse. Superannuated and useless. We’re now attacking the warmongerswithout respite, to disqualify them from government…In Paris [ON NOVEMBER 7] a Polish Jew Grynspan [sic] has shot at the Germandiplomat vom Rath and seriously wounded him. Taking revenge for the Jews. Butnow [NOVEMBER 8] the German press makes itself heard. And now we’re usingplain talk. Major antisemitic demonstrations in Hesse. The synagogues are burneddown. If only one could now give free rein to the public’s rage!20On November 8 he conferred with propaganda officials. According to his diary thetopic was merely the Sudeten gau election campaign, but in the light of antisemiticoutbreaks in Hesse, Anhalt, and Saxony on that day and the next it certainly cannotbe ruled out that he discussed reprisals for the Paris outrage too. He then spent theafternoon working on his new Hitler book. In the evening Hitler spoke in theBürgerbräu to the party veterans, viciously attacking Churchill, Eden, and Duff492 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHCooper until tears of laughter streamed down every cheek. ‘He’s rendering thesethree incapable of taking up government office,’ wrote Goebbels, explaining Hitler’sintent, ‘and a good job too.’ Afterwards he invited Hitler to his regular café, the CaféHoch on the Marienplatz, facing the city hall. Until three A.M. they talked abouthorses, the Romanian monarchy, punishments for reckless driving, and their futureplans for Germany’s screen and stage. After that Goebbels carried on working backin his hotel, tired but unable to sleep.21The diary for the next day, the ninth, ‘a grey November day,’ opened with thetraditional march to the Feldherrnhalle watched by immense crowds. Goebbels listenedto Robert Ley griping that he now seldom got near the Führer, and to S.A.chief