Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

read that with the com-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 57forting reflection that, yes, things were tough for Wagner. That’s the artist’s lot. “ThankGod it doesn’t go on nowadays”.’45Looking around, he scowled at his smug, shallow-minded, pinstriped contemporaries,their lives dominated by the pay packet, football, and sex, and he understoodwhy the communists hated the bourgeoisie.46 In July 1924 he began holding littlepolitical meetings at his house (in his parents’ absence), and told them about thegreat socialist experiment in Russia— ‘the glow from the east,’ he called it in Latinin his diary: ex oriente lux. Only the Jewish nature of the Bolshevik leadership botheredhim. ‘Men of Russia!’ he wrote, ‘Chase the Jews to the devil and put out yourhand of friendship to Germany!’47He was not however an international socialist. The great Germanic works inspiredhim. He immersed himself in Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘St Matthew’s Passion,’ anddiscovered Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger.’48 His antisemitism was reinforced by readingthe book ‘Prozesse’ (Trials) by Maximilian Harden—he recorded afterwards thatHarden was not a German at all but a Polish Jew, Isidor Witkowski.49 ‘What a hypocriticalSchweinehund this damn’ Jew is,’ he wrote; and then, broadening his aim:‘Rogues, blackguards, traitors: they suck the blood out of our arteries. Vampires!’Harden, he decided, was a dangerous man precisely because he gave his writing allhe had—pungency, a caustic wit, and satire. ‘Typical of how the Jews fight,’ assessedGoebbels.50 From 1908 to 1915 Harden had been the most virulent warmonger;then he had gone to the United States, from where had had reviled Germany. ‘Ourworst enemies in Germany,’ summarized Goebbels, ‘are the Jews.’51Everywhere he detected their baneful influence. If he, Goebbels, were in power hewould pack them all into cattletrucks and ship them out of Germany: so he wrote onJuly 2, 1924. However, reading the prison letters of Rosa Luxemburg52 he was surprisedat the idealism and warmth of this militant leftist’s letters. He sensed thatperhaps he was doing her an injustice. ‘You can’t change your nature,’ he realizedguiltily. ‘And my nature is now rather biased toward the antisemitic.’THE rightwing parties announced a two-day rally to be held at Weimar in mid-August1924 to agree upon strategy for the next elections, due on December 7.58 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHWeimar! What visions of Goethe and Schiller the name evoked. In the privacy ofhis diary Goebbels sometimes seriously compared himself with one or the other,particularly Schiller.53 So when his former schoolfriend Fritz Prang suggested goingto Weimar together he was delighted. It would be his first foray into the heart ofGermany. He was desperate to get out of ‘this miserable hovel’ in Dahlener Strasse.54Prang seems to have become a type familiar in most political movements. ‘He comesin,’ wrote Goebbels after one political soirée, ‘he curses the Jews a bit, smokes a fewcigarettes, draws up grotesque and totally impracticable organisation plans, thrusts apile of newspapers into my hands, and then goes again.’55The Weimar meeting was a milestone in his career.56 He gained immediate inspirationfrom the well-attended rally at the National Theatre and the shouts of Heil. Hesaw for the first time the swastika—this curious four-elbowed symbol—and inked itinto his diary. He spotted his old lecturer Professor Kaerst from Würzburg there, atthe back, wearing a swastika and noted: ‘Et tu, Brute!’ ‘All these young people whoare fighting alongside me,’ he wrote. ‘It does my heart good.’ He saw them sportingthe same swastika emblem on their helmets—Hitler’s elite guard, the Highland League(Bund Oberland)—as they paraded to hear an address by the war hero ErichLudendorff, patron of the folkish movement. Sizing up the others, he saw Albert vonGraefe, a tall gangling ex-major in a black frock coat, as a man of culture, and GregorStrasser as a warm human being. He also found here the Nuremberg Nazi, JuliusStreicher, who had founded his own Party for the Struggle against International Jewry:this fanatic with the pinched lips was too intense for his liking, but he reflected thatevery movement needed the occasional man who ran berserk as well.With Hitler still in prison, the Weimar rally was ‘Hamlet’ without the Prince ofDenmark. Ludendorff was no Führer; he was not the messiah that Goebbels wasseeking. He spent that Sunday on a quiet pilgrimage through the homes of Goetheand Schiller. Sitting in the former’s favourite chair he dashed off a few lines to Elsebefore strolling over to Schiller’s large yellow-ochre house. He gazed silently at thechair where Schiller died, while the noise of rowdy processions drifted up from thestreet. ‘Up here died your forefather, youngsters!’ he admonished in his diary. ‘ThereGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 59are other avenues than the mailed fist.’ That afternoon, still an outsider, he watchedthe flags and swastikas parading—some thirty thousand marching men in his estimate.The tumultuous roars of Heil when Hitler’s name was mentioned made a lastingimpression. For a while he sat with Fritz Prang in a bar, ‘Chemnitius.’ Fritz wantedto relax but Goebbels was so keyed up that he talked only about politics, ignoring thecome-hither glances directed, he claimed in his diary, at him by the girls all around.He had found a new passion. ‘I have begun to think völkisch,’ he wrote. ‘It is aWeltanschauung, a philosphy of life.’Pure chance had decreed that he emerge from his hibernation here on the far right,and not the left. On August 21, 1924, nervous lest the Belgian authorities mightsuddenly show up, he and Prang founded the local (Mönchengladbach) branch ofGraefe’s movement (the prefix ‘National Socialist’ was still forbidden.) Several friendsjoined at once. He made a ninety-minute speech and saw how the eyes of one youngsterin front began to glow.57 These first meetings were held in Batze-Möhn’s historicbeerhall or at Caumann’s in Augustastrasse.58 At least once in 1924 the Belgian occupationauthorities did take him in for questioning. Shown the interrogation recordyears later he would pride himself on his foresight: ‘It’s all just as I think today. Nearlyfifteen years ago, as a little agitator.’59Shortly after, he moved from Rheydt to Elberfeld. He later put it about that theoccupation authorities had expelled him from their zone.60 He began, despite misgivings,to work for Wiegershaus who had been subsidising a political