Goebbels5: God Disposes OtherwiseFOR a while Karl Kaufmann was, after Else, the best friend he had. But GregorStrasser was the man he most admired—five years his senior, Strasser waswilling to adopt the radical programme that Goebbels espoused.1 He could use Strasseras a battering ram against Munich. They were not of course fighting Hitler himself,but the toadying parasites surrounding him in Munich and in particular the Party’spropaganda chief Hermann Esser. Munich hinted that Goebbels might like to godown there. The hints fell on deaf ears. Together with Strasser he intended to buildhis power base between the Rhine and Ruhr.2It is legitimate to ask whether his proletarian stance was mere posturing. His privatewritings do show a marked sympathy with the working class. His contempt forthe ‘bourgeois scum’ in the Party, toasting their toes on his radicalism as he engaginglyput it, was genuine. ‘I find it appalling,’ he would write, ‘that we and the communistsare bashing each other’s heads in.’3 When Pfeffer stated in the Letters thatGermany needed a middle class, and avowed that he did not believe in the ‘power ofthe proletariat,’4 Goebbels delivered this stinging rejoinder: ‘We’ll get nowhere ifwe rely on the propertied and educated classes. I believe in socialism and in theproletariat.’He now drew audiences of two and three thousand with ease. Often there were asmany thugs outside, armed with firearms too. At Düsseldorf on October 8, 1925 theGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 77communists for miles around packed in, but within minutes he had silenced themand held them in his grip for two hours.5 He drafted in his own hand a cute pamphletentitled ‘The Little a.b.c. of National Socialism,’ as a catechism for the Party. Hecompleted it on October 26 and his friend Director Arnold, a wealthy Hattingenindustrialist, put up the capital for a first print of ten thousand.6His personal affairs were in chaos. He was living a gypsy existence, changing trainsand lodgings with almost equal frequency.7 He was driving himself to the limit. Hisdiary entries often end with a motif that remains unchanged for years—of droppingoff exhausted to bed, for only a few hours’ sleep. He crisscrossed his tough industrialdomain, in painfully slow local trains, setting eyes also on Lübeck, Hamburg (‘redolentof ocean and America’), the Ruhr cities smouldering in their infernal pollutedsemi-darkness, and Hamburg again (‘German sweat and German enterprise, exploitedby the Jews.’)8He wished he had hearth, home, and family to greet him at Elberfeld; but he foundpermanent relations with women difficult to achieve.9 He placed these remote, cantankerouscreatures on a sort of pedestal. He was not averse to exploiting themhimself, but profoundly indignant when he saw Hamburg’s red-light district aroundthe Reeperbahn, with the half naked hookers standing in their doorways. A localParty official later recalled that one keen young S.A. man asked, ‘Doktor, what’ll wedo with streets like this after the revolution?’, and Goebbels snarled in reply: ‘Weshall sweep them away like the garbage that they are!’ He went on to develop apicture of a Germanic youth elite unexampled in purity and virtuousness since thedays of the crusades and monastic orders.10 ‘I could have wept!’ he noted afterwardsprivately. ‘Can men do that? For money?’ He saw Germany’s blonde girls embracingslit-eyed Chinamen in the street; the police just stood by grinning.11He seldom took his women to his meetings, and no longer sent his writings tothem either. After Else wrote him a despairing letter shortly before Christmas helamented, ‘Why can’t women be like us? Can they be educated? Or are they by theirvery nature inferior? Only in exceptional cases can women be heroines!’12 ‘There is78 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHa curse cast over you and women,’ he told himself piteously five days later. ‘Woebetide those who love you!’13His diaries are still punctuated with wailing references to Anka. But these ululationsare surely no more than an affectation. Anka had joined the Undead. Sometimes hejourneyed through her town, Weimar, but he made no attempt to visit. Once he tookpen and paper and wrote
