Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

letters to them all. He hated himself as soon as he mailedthe letter to her. She did not reply.14 His diaries did not resist human nature’s tendencyto gild the lily: a riot at one meeting left one injured man, who died in hospital(Goebbels’ diary speaks of two dead.) Two audiences estimated at fifteen hundred bythe VB became ‘three thousand’ in the diary.15 While the newspapers referred to oneshot being fired at an Essen meeting, the diary turned it into ‘shooting’.16 But he waswriting for effect. The early diaries were written in a lively vernacular, often difficultto convey in translation. Most prevalent in their pages was his sense of loneliness, hishappiness when a cheering audience chaired him out onto the street. But one constantin his life was so ever-present that he only rarely referred to it—the pain fromhis crippled foot, which no doctor seemed able to dispel.ON October 12 a letter came from Gregor Strasser reporting that Hitler mistrustedGoebbels and had even cursed his name. Goebbels wondered if he should quit. Heplanned to tackle Hitler about the Party’s programme when he came to Dortmundon October 24. In preparation, he finished reading ‘Mein Kampf.’ ‘Who is this man?’he exclaimed, strangely impressed: ‘Half plebeian, half God. Is he Jesus Christ himselfor just Saint John?’ But it was not easy arranging an appointment with a messiah;Carl Severing, the Prussian minister of the interior17, forbade Hitler to speak anywherein Prussia, so the violent Dortmund meeting went ahead without him. Hitlerattempted to reach Hamm next day but Severing issued an arrest warrant and heturned back. Strasser spoke instead.18When Hitler came to Brunswick, which was outside Prussia, for a regional conventionin November, Goebbels saw him again—this was their second meeting.19 ItGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 79was November 4, 1925. With Bernhard Rust, he secured a six-thirty P.M. appointmentwith Hitler.He’s just having a meal [described Goebbels]. At once he jumps to his feet andshakes my hand like an old friend. And those big blue eyes of his! Like stars! He’spleased to see me. I am in transports of delight. After ten minutes he withdraws.Then he has his speech ready in outline.Meanwhile I am driven over to the meeting, and speak for two hours. Hugeapplause, and then shouts of Heil and applause: he is there. He shakes my hand.He is still completely exhausted after his own great speech. Then he speaks herefor half an hour too. With wit, irony, humour, and sarcasm, with seriousness,with fervour, with passion. This man’s got everything to be a king. The born popularleader! The coming dictator.Afterwards he waited outside Hitler’s door hoping to speak to him, but he wasfobbed off with a handshake.20 This fell some way short of the heart to heart talk hehad planned.The communist violence at his own meetings was getting out of hand. The meetingsoften ended with riots, with shattered beer mugs and splintered furniture. AtChemnitz on November 18 he put his views on Lenin and Hitler to two thousandcommunists, who listened in silence. Then a thousand beer glasses were smashed,150 people were injured and one (or two) men killed.21 Two days later he met Hitleragain, in Saxony. Hitler invited him to speak first (‘How small I feel!’) then presentedhim with his photograph inscribed with greetings to the Rhineland. The framedportrait would remain on Goebbels’ desk until the very hour he died.22ON Thursday November 26, 1925 he arrived in Berlin for the first time. His impressionswere overwhelming. The vast sea of houses and buildings, the polyglot population—179,000 Jews lived here, about one-third of Germany’s Jews—the bustle, thepolice with their helmets and truncheons; Berlin was a ‘sinful Babel’ of brick, stone,and concrete. He addressed that night an audience of thousands—he did not note80 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHhow many or where. Everybody was there including both Strasser brothers (he foundOtto as ‘decent’ as Gregor). Gottfried Feder, the Party’s chief theoretician, and Dr.Wilhelm Frick, the lawyer who had connived at Hitler’s 1923 putsch from withinMunich police HQ. The Nazi Party here in Berlin was weak, probably less than onethousand names. Dr Ernst Schlange, a civil servant, was the local gauleiter. He hadlost an arm and half his face in the war. ‘They say he’s a pacifist,’ commented Goebbelslaconically.23 He later learned that the police once found a bottle of liquor and analarm clock in Schlange’s pockets—the ‘Judenpresse’ laughed that without the onehe could not live and without the other he could not wake out of his stupors.24Visiting the Reichstag building he was repelled by the spectacle of these Parliamentarians(‘Jews and their jackals’) in their natural habitat. He dismissed the politiciansin his diary with an obscenity and purported to feel such nausea that he had to flee.Afterwards he paid a social visit to Helene Bechstein of the millionaire pianomanufacturing family. The Bechstein’s were among Hitler’s earliest backers. A fewdays later the Prussian political police section Ia opened their first dossier on Goebbels.The Albertus Magnus society revalued the ancient debt he owed them and on December7, 1925 mailed a claim for repayment to his old lodgings in Cologne. It wasreturned marked ‘gone away.’ It was not that he was lying low. On November 15 hehad stage-managed the homecoming of the remains of Ludwig Knickmann, a nationalistshot by Belgian occupation troops at Sterkrade in June 1923; he spoke at thefuneral in Knickmann’s native town, Buer.25 Three weeks later he staged an evenbigger ceremony in Leo Schlageter’s honour.26 Not for nothing had he read RichardWagner’s ‘The Art of Directing’.27 Fifteen hundred (Goebbels wrote two thousand)brownshirted S.A. men paraded out to the deserted, snowflecked heathland spotwhere the French had put Schlageter to death. Then, to the throb of muffled drumsthe entire force staged a parade in Düsseldorf’s most expensive boulevard, theKönigsallee.The public acclaim was in sharp contrast to the frosty silence Goebbels met fromhis parents. At Rheydt he found that his father had bought a radio set— ‘the modernmind-narrowing device,’ scoffed his son. ‘Everything piped in! The philistine’s ideal!’28GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 81But Goebbels had a new father figure on his horizon. That