Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

a cheap opium against thepangs of poverty: his landlord gave him notice to quit his lodgings at No.122 GesundheitStrasse (‘Health Street’) in Elberfeld.30 His parents had sent him 150 marks.31‘Damn and blast!’ he let fly in his diary, and an unkind Fate, hearing him, respondedwith a final tax demand for 150 marks.Once he spoke at Recklinghausen, Anka’s home town, and he half hoped to see hersitting there among his enraptured audience. Those audiences were getting larger.The Völkischer Beobachter (VB) reported regularly on his speeches. Together with ViktorLutze, 34, the region’s S.A. commander, he spoke to three thousand packing the bigconcert hall in Essen. A truckload of young rightwingers known as the Falcons droveGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 69him home.32 Two days later on August 25 the French occupation troops finally pulledout of the Rhineland.The first volume of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ had just been published, and Goebbelsalong with twenty thousand others was dipping into it.33 There was much that hedisagreed with. He learned that on July 12 his gauleiter Ripke had blackened hisname to Hitler as a ‘bolshevist’. Goebbels fought back, accusing Ripke of embezzlingParty funds; this was one offence the Party would not tolerate. On July 12 Hitlercalled all the party’s gauleiters of northern Germany to Weimar, and it was in abeerhall here that he and Goebbels first briefly met that day.34 ‘Ripke is finished,’ hewrote as an internal hearing subsequently began, with Strasser presiding.35 Ripkeresigned leaving Kaufmann, Lutze, and Goebbels in charge.For a while Goebbels and Kaufmann were inseparable. They spent Sunday eveningstogether—in the theatre when they could afford it, or just laughing and drinkingwhen they could not. ‘I am very fond of him,’ Goebbels wrote. Sometimes he sat uplate with Kaufmann and the others at their headquarters in Elberfeld’s Holzer Strasse,arguing by candlelight.One day in mid summer Strasser came to see him. Strasser had earlier been gauleiterof Lower Bavaria, and in the failed 1923 putsch his stormtroopers had held the Isarbridges. With his rough-hewn features, he was the stereotype Bavarian; but he wasshrewd, ambitious, and one of the cleverest in the Nazi hierarchy. Probably he recognizedin Goebbels a useful lieutenant whose politics were similar to his own. Hecertainly won Goebbels over. ‘He has a wonderful sense of humour,’ recorded thelatter after this meeting. ‘Related a lot of sorry things about Munich and about theswine at Party HQ there. Hitler is surrounded by the wrong people; I think HermannEsser [Hitler’s propaganda chief] is his undoing.’36 Strasser revealed that he was planningto consolidate the Party’s organisation in north western Germany, and he wouldwant Goebbels to edit a new journal as a weapon against Munich.This was fighting talk, and Goebbels liked it. For a while he would be Strasser’sman. ‘Strasser is a man of initiative—somebody you can work with and a splendid70 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHcharacter as well.’ Gregor Strasser would become his first real employer: then hissworn rival: and ultimately his mortal enemy.WHEN Strasser’s conclave took place, in the grimy Ruhr town of Hagen on September10, Gregor himself could not attend as his mother was ill.37 But those who did werethe toughest men the Party had in northern Germany including many former FreeCorps officers. Dr Robert Ley, 35, a former aviator and now an industrial chemist,had directed the South Rhineland gau (around Cologne) since mid July; ProfessorTheodor Vahlen, 56, was gauleiter of Pomerania; Hinrich Lohse, a businessman, 28,who headed the northernmost gau, Schleswig-Holstein; Franz von Pfeffer, 37, whohad been condemned to death by the French but escaped, gauleiter of Westphaliasince March; and Ludolf Haase, gauleiter of south Hanover, and his deputy HermannFobke, who had spent some months in Landsberg with Hitler.Fobke’s report is in Party files.38 He felt that the ‘sharp intellect’ of Goebbels,whom he called the gau Führer of the north Rhineland, called for thorough analysis,‘as he does not seem all that trustworthy at first sight.’ Goebbels however was delightedat the outcome, telling his diary: ‘We pulled everything off.’ By that he meantthat the regions of north and west German would henceforth operate as a bloc underStrasser’s centralized command, with his office at Elberfeld and ‘a centralized management(moi).’ Only Ley had quibbled. Speaking that evening, Goebbels banged hisown drum, the need to put socialism before nationalism, particularly here in theindustrial basin. He felt sure Hitler would see things their way—‘Because he is young,and knows all about making sacrifices.’Seventeen days later, on September 27, two hundred men from the Ruhr’s localgroups met at Düsseldorf to decide who should replace Ripke.39 Goebbels hoped thechoice would fall on him. But Kaufmann was ‘unanimously elected’ as gauleiter, withGoebbels merely manager as before.40 He consoled himself that the audience hadborne him out of the hall on their shoulders. He desperately wanted to be loved.41FOR the next thirteen months he was Kaufmann’s roving agitator. Sometimes he feltGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 71ill-used, and cast a jealous, almost womanly eye over all his rivals for the gauleiter’saffection. But editing Gregor Strasser’s influential new fortnightly journal NationalSocialist Letters more than compensated. It enabled his voice to be heard far fromElberfeld. The journal’s masthead proclaimed it as the work of ‘leading members ofthe movement.’42 He would edit the first thirty-nine issues. Its four, or sometimeseight pages sometimes carried contributions by Heinrich Himmler, Franz von Pfeffer,and Strasser’s bombastic younger brother Otto. But above all Goebbels used it as hisplatform to argue his own socialist and antisemitic brand of politics. In the secondissue he published a letter to ‘my friend on the Left,’ arguing: ‘You and I, we fight oneanother although we are not really enemies at all.’43 This was a trenchant theme in allhis writings, as was his somewhat ritualized affection for Russia: in the fourth issuehe addressed a letter to the same imaginary Russian, ‘Ivan Vienurovsky,’ as had figuredin ‘Michael.’ ‘We look to Russia,’ he wrote, ‘because Russia is our natural allyagainst the fiendish contamination and corruption from the west… Because we cansee the commencement of our own national and socialist survival in an alliance witha truly national and socialist Russia.’44 He reverted to