Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

Opium DenSHOULD he accept the job as the new gauleiter of Berlin? It was no sinecure. Witharound ten thousand supporters the communist party was aggressively in theascendant. The N.S.D.A.P.’s Berlin gau had been founded in February 1925 and hadattracted only 137 votes in the municipal elections that October. The present gauleiterhad lost his stomach for the fight. He was however one of the joint backers of theStrasser brothers’ Kampf Verlag publishing house, which had begun issuing a proletariannewspaper, the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, in March 1926; this sold some threethousand copies each week.1Unable to contain the snarling militancy of the Berlin S.A. under Kurt Daluege,Dr Schlange retired on June 20. Deputizing for him, Erich Schmiedicke called ameeting of the district officers in Gregor Strasser’s presence and secured a unanimousvote that they should invite Dr Goebbels to come from the Ruhr to take over.The Berlin political police, who had agents planted in the Nazi party, recorded prematurelyon July 29 that he had been offered the gau but turned it down.2 Goebbelswrote to Otto Strasser on August 3 that he was still undecided: ‘Should I, or shouldI not? Probably not.’The rumours of his probable defection from Strasser’s to Hitler’s camp led torumbles of discontent. Gregor Strasser, who had set the wheels in motion to lurehim to Berlin, later remarked ruefully in his Franconian dialect, ‘A saublöder Obernarrbin i’ g’wesen!—What a bloody fool I’ve been.’ ‘Friend Gregor Strasser is pretty jealousof me,’ observed Goebbels. Lying to his own diary, he denied a few days later thathe was selling out to Hitler. He blamed Karl Kaufmann’s men for starting the ‘leg-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 91end,’ and the Strasser brothers for giving it wider currency. ‘I’ll teach the lot ofthem!’ he added darkly.3He had already acquired a taste for the rough and tumble of radical politics. He leda raiding party on a theatre staging an award-winning but anti-German play by CarlZuckmayer. Goebbels’ Nazis hurled stink bombs into the audience and he wasdisappointed that only five women swooned.4 In his final week of office in the Ruhrhe and Kaufmann would hijack a meeting that their Social Democrat opponents hadstaged as the highlight of a recruiting week in Hattingen. When the meeting beganthe S.A. filled two-thirds of the seats. Goebbels and Kaufmann made the only speeches,and their followers responded with three Heils for Hitler. ‘A jolly good show,’ chuckledGoebbels.5In Berlin, the battles would be uglier. Here the ramshackle and impoverished localParty was in crisis. On August 26 there was a rowdy gathering of its officials, around120 people according to the police. Schmiedicke, standing in as gauleiter, was hooteddown by the S.A. The chief of the Berlin S.S.—the Schutzstaffel, an elite emergingwithin the stormtroopers—shouted that he had just spoken by phone with Hitler inperson and been given full powers, which he promptly used to ‘dismiss’ Schmiedicke.6The next day Munich formally asked Goebbels to take over in Berlin, but only as astop-gap.He was still in two minds. Playing for time, he sent what he called a ‘semi-refusal’to Hitler.7HE spends a weekend at Bayreuth in September 1926. Here he falls briefly in lovewith Winifred Wagner’s young and vivacious daughters, romps around in the haywith the youngest of them (‘the sweetest little brat’) for an hour and then purpleswith embarrassment before the others.8 ‘I often wish I had such a darling Germanfemale around,’ he laments—then remembers young Josephine von Behr in Berlin.The prospect of seeing her excites him, and he returns there in mid September.9In Berlin he spends an evening alone with Dr Schlange and Schmiedicke. Both menplead with him to take over.10 In two minds still, he visits the Party’s primitive HQ at92 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHNo.189 Potsdamer Strasse. It is housed in a gloomy downstairs room at the rear—awindowless vault lit only by a naked bulb, he will later describe, in which Schmiedickesits hunched over his cash ledger struggling to make ends meet.11 A cloud of stale airand tobacco smoke hits him as he goes in. Newspapers are stacked around the walls.Out of work Party members are loitering around—there are 270,000 unemployedin Berlin alone—chain smoking and tittle-tattling. They called it the ‘opium den.’He is glad to get out to Potsdam with Josephine that evening. They reverently treadthe same sod as Frederick the Great and stroll around Sanssouci park where he spentthirty-eight of his summers, soaking up the history of Prussia in the Garrison Churchwhere his bones lie surrounded by the sleeping flags of famous guards regiments.Goebbels wants to hold Josephine’s hand, but lacks the courage to try.12The affair with Else is over. They meet one Sunday in Cologne and trade insults,and she writes him another farewell letter. Goebbels sends his sister Maria over tofetch her on Monday morning for one final scene. With tear-streaked face, Else accompanieshim in the drizzle to the train. For some reasons Goebbels dramatizestheir final parting in his diary:The train draws away. Else turns around and weeps. I close the window. Rain isfalling on the coach roof. I have gone out of her life. My heart is broken.13AMPLIFYING Goebbels’ own unpublished diaries, the Nazi Party’s archives acquired afile of vivid monthly resumés on the Berlin gau written by a young activist ReinholdMuchow who had joined aged twenty in December 1925.14 These reports show themethods to which the Party resorted, including a barrage of defamatory propaganda,ceaseless rowdy demonstrations, mindless provocations, and violence for its ownsake. The Party already had three ‘martyrs’ in Berlin—Willi Dreyer killed in 1924,Werner Doelle in 1925, and now on September 26, 1926 the forty-four year oldHarry Anderssen, murdered by a communist gang in Kreuzberg.15 It was a tragedyfor the Berlin gau, recorded Muchow in October 1926, that it had never had a realleader. Dr Schlange had made no headway against the internal bickering. Schmiedickeproved even less capable. The opposition—Kurt Daluege and the S.A.—had putGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 93forward their own candidate as gauleiter, Oskar Hauenstein. Every top level meetingended with a row.16Goebbels began feeling his way into Berlin. October 9 found him speaking at theParty’s ‘Mark Brandenburg Freedom