Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

this theme in the seventh issue.‘I have reflected for a long time,’ he recorded after this was published, ‘on the issueof foreign policy. You can’t ignore Russia.’45When Gustav Stresemann signed the Locarno pact he was therefore appalled. Anugly vision seized Goebbels—of Germany’s sons dying in the service of westerncapitalism ‘possibly, even probably, in some “Holy War” against Moscow!’46 ‘We shallbe the mercenaries against Russia,’ he repeated gloomily a week later, ‘on the battlefieldsof capitalism… We’re done for.’47Sophisticated argument like this was anathema to Hitler’s potbellied men in Munich.Rosenberg published one of Goebbels’ essays in the VB but only to tear it apartfor having failed to recognize the Jewish domination lying at the heart of Bolshevism.The Letters were an undeniable success. Goebbels advertised them in other Partypublications, calling upon all National Socialists of west and north Germany to pay a1.50 mark quarterly subscription. ‘Thus,’ he found, ‘we’ve got our hands on a uniqueinstrument of power.’ According to its accountant Paul Schmitz he received 15072 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHmarks a month as editor.48 The Letters gave the Party a sense of direction. In his sixthissue he held forth on the Party’s need to radicalise socialism. He set this out atgreater length in a standard speech, ‘Lenin or Hitler,’ which he first delivered accordingto Prussian police records in Hanover on September 17, 192549; he deliveredit scores of times afterwards, provoking violent clashes in the ‘Red’ cities likeAltona and Chemnitz, and fervent acclaim in Berlin, Dresden, Plauen, Zwickau andelsewhere.50 It was heavy on the theory and history, but still seized the imagination ofhis listeners, said Albert Krebs, a Party official in Hamburg.51 He began with a wordpicture of the German national character Michel dozing behind the stove with hiscap tucked down snugly over his ears, surrounded by mocking enemies who pilferhis last possessions; a friend tries to waken him. ‘When Michel is half awake, he rubshis eyes, lurches grumbling to his feet—and thumps the man who has woken him!’‘We Germans,’ continues Goebbels, ‘are the unluckiest people God’s sun shines upon.Sixty millions of us, surrounded by enemies, bleeding from a thousand wounds, thehardest working nation on earth, and we see our only political exercise as being totear ourselves limb from limb.’ Because their leaders had failed to win over the workingclasses they had been thrown into the arms of the left; and here the ‘systematicunderminer of any true workers’ movement, the marxist Jew,’ had easily led themastray. ‘We allowed ourselves to be humiliated at conference after conference,’ proclaimedGoebbels, ‘in a way we wouldn’t have dared humiliate even a nigger nation,and nobody came and thundered the word No! The Ruhr was occupied: the Germanpeople hid its bourgeois cowardice behind passive resistance. The Ruhr was lost—and Mr Gustav Stresemann espied a “silver lining” on the horizon… Stresemann’s fathand signed everything our grinning enemies laid before him.’ ‘Then,’ he shrieked,‘came Locarno, and Gustav Stresemann trotted off to London and signed that too.’For a mess of pottage Germany sold off all her sovereign rights—her coinmintingrights, her economic rights, her transport rights. We castrated ourselves…Germany has become a colony of World Finance.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 73He talked about the “public opinion factory” which had jollied Stresemann along.“Germany,” he hooted, “disarmed to her last water-pistol, gives security guaranteesto her enemies who are armed to the teeth and lurking rapaciously on her frontiers.’Locarno, he argued, meant not peace but war. He foresaw a gigantic armed struggleagainst the Soviet Union using German blood. ‘And presiding over it all is the Jew,both in the ranks of world capitalism and concealed in Soviet Bolshevism, egging onthe Russians and Germans against eachother … in one last orgy of hostilities.’ ‘Thenext great world struggle is just ahead … and all in the name of freedom, civilisation,and human rights.’He introducing Lenin to his by now seething audiences in terms of surprisingwarmth, as a man who had learned all about social deprivation the hard way. ‘Capitalism,’he defined, ‘is the immoral distribution of capital.’ Nazism made a distinctionbetween creative State capital and a grasping international loan capital. ‘Germanywill become free,’ he promised, ‘at that moment when the thirty millions onthe left and the thirty millions on the right make common cause.’ ‘Only one movementis capable of doing this: National Socialism, embodied in one Führer—AdolfHitler.’1 Diary, Mar 18, 26; Apr 16, 1925.2 Ibid., Apr 2, May 23, 1925.3 Ibid., Aug 17, Sep 7, 1925.4 Ibid., Mar 27, 1925.5 Ibid., Aug 12, Oct 14, 15, 1925; Aug 17, 1925. JG’s original ‘Elberfeld diary’ (Aug 12,1925—Oct 30, 1926) is in the Hoover Library, Stanford, California (Goebbels papers); onmicrofiches in Moscow archives, Goebbels papers, box 2; published by Helmut Heiber (ed.),Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels 1925/26 (Stuttgart, 1961); English translation on NA filmT84, roll 271, 1116–2226 Diary, Apr 14, 1925.7 Ibid., Feb 23, 1925.74 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH8 Ibid., Mar 20, 1925.9 Ibid., Jun 8, Sep 3, 1925. Else survived the war, though her Jewish blood must havecaused her problems. JG wrote cryptically (Diary, Jun 25, 1933) after visiting Rheydt: ‘Iarrange the Else problem with [Mother] alone.’10 Ibid., Apr 18, 1925.11 Ibid., Apr 22, 1925.12 Kaufmann to Otto Strasser, Jun 4, 1927 (BDC file, JG).13 Undated police report in Düsseldorf city archives, cit. Reuth, 87.14 Diary, Mar 26, 1925.15 JG handwritten letter, Apr 3, 1925, photocopy in NSDAP Hauptarchiv (NA film T581,roll 5; BA file NS.26/136; IfZ film MA.735).16 Rheinische Landeszeitung, Sep 1, 1935.17 Diary, Mar 26, 28, 1925.18 Ibid., Mar 18, 26, 30, Apr 7, 28, May 27.19 Ibid., Apr 16, 1925.20 Ibid., Mar 23, 1925.21 Ibid., May 2, 6, 7, 11, 1925.22 Ibid., May 12, 1925.23 Ibid., May 19, 1925.24 Ibid., May 28, 1925.25 Ibid., Jun 9, 1925.26 Ibid., May 22, 27; VB, May 24, 1925.27 Diary, Jun 8, 1925.28 Ibid., Jun 9, 1925.29 Ibid., Aug 12, 1925. I located the rest of the previously missing diary for Jun 9—Sep 10,1925 in box 2 of the Goebbels microfiches in the Moscow archives.30 Diary, Aug 31, Sep 7, 1925.31 Ibid., Aug 14-16, 1925.32 Ibid., Aug 24, 1925.