Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

Rally,’ a torchlight parade just outside the cityin Potsdam. The police file shows that he called for the destruction of the presentstate. The Berliners roared approval. ‘You yourself will have noticed,’ Schmiedickeencouraged him in a letter, ‘how very keenly every member of the Party in Berlinwants you as their leader.’17 His mind already made up, Goebbels told Schmiedickethat the stumbling block was financial: if the terms were right he would accept thejob.18 When he returned to Berlin a week later—as much to see Josephine, ‘thispurest picture of a girl,’ as anything—a further flattering letter awaited him fromSchmiedicke. ‘Only a towering personality,’ he wrote, could take command here;the Berlin gau would collapse if Goebbels did not take over on November 1 at thelatest. ‘Your financial desiderata for working in the Greater Berlin gau will be met asfrom November 1, 1926.’Berlin with its five million people packed into a relatively small area undoubtedlyoffers the most fertile soil for the growth of our movement, and it is also mydeepest personal conviction that you are the appointed leader for Berlin.19While Goebbels even now delayed announcing his decision, the infighting in Berlinincreased. Schmiedicke had to reassure officials that Goebbels’ salary would bepaid by Munich, not Berlin. There were ugly scenes. Hauenstein thumped OttoStrasser. Strasser challenged somebody else to a duel. finally Goebbels took the milestonedecision to accept Berlin’s offer. Back in Elberfeld on October 17 he broke thenews to Lutze and Kaufmann, and noted in his diary, ‘Off to Berlin at last on November1. Berlin is the focal point,’ he reasoned, ‘for us too.’20 The formal appointmentwas dated October 26, and announced in the Völkischer Beobachter two days later.On November 1 the N.S. Letters published his farewell to the Ruhr. ‘And now,’ hewrote, ‘it’s full steam ahead into the great asphalt jungle Berlin.’94 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHHE who held Berlin held Germany. Winning the ‘Red city’ was the task that confrontedDr Goebbels. Hitler gave him authority to rule the gau with an iron fist.‘November 5,’ recorded Goebbels. ‘Hitler. Munich. Signs my terms.’21The Reich capital was like no other city in Europe—over-populated, throbbingwith life twenty-four hours a day. It was an international hodgepodge of races, thecollision point of western and eastern cultures. This gigantic, sprawling heap of bricksand stone and asphalt was divided into twenty boroughs varying in size from wealthyZehlendorf, with 470,000 inhabitants, to the proletarian slum Kreuzberg with370,000. Politically the city was a red stronghold like the towns all around—Oranienburg, Nauen, Fürstenwalde, and Zossen. Goebbels would find only a fewhundred paid up Nazis in Berlin; in the whole Reich there were still only forty-ninethousand. In the March 1925 presidential election 308,591 Berliners had voted forthe communist (K.P.D.) candidate Ernst ‘Teddy’ Thälmann. In the municipal electionthat October, 52.2 percent had voted for the marxist parties, the K.P.D. increasingits vote to 347,382. Its front organisations like the Red League of CombatVeterans (Frontkämpferbund) and the Central Office of Red Aid (Zentralstelle der RotenHilfe) were funded by the Soviet embassy and trade mission.Thus Goebbels had a highly visible opponent. Besides, he would be doing battle forthe first time with the Jews. ‘Berlin,’ Muchow observed, ‘is Red and Jewish in equalmeasure.’22 In 1816 there had been only 3,400 Jews, but this figure had swollen to36,500 by 1871, and to one hundred thousand at the turn of the century. By the timeof Goebbels’ arrival, one-third of Germany’s half-million Jews were concentrated inthe city.23 They made up 4.3 percent of its population: but they provided over halfBerlin’s lawyers, fifteen percent of the real estate agents, and nearly eleven percentof the doctors; they dominated the wealthy ranks of Berlin’s dentists, pharmacists,judges, public prosecutors, and academics, and maintained a near stranglehold onthe world of the arts. While Mosse’s Berliner Tageblatt would become one of Goebbels’principal enemies, he would lump all the bourgeois newspapers into the generalcategory of ‘Judenpresse.’GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 95When he said that the real power was in Jewish hands there was a grain of truth init. Dr Heinrich Brüning, Chancellor of the Reich from 1930 to 1932, could find onlyone bank not controlled by them. After ordering a government inquiry, he directedthat its findings be kept secret for fear of provoking anti-Semitic riots.24 A series ofscandals surrounding Jewish swindlers like Kutisker, Sklarek, and the Barmat brothers,paraded through the courts.25 Many of the judges and public prosecutors in Berlinwere Jewish. Goebbels would portray the Berlin police as largely Jewish controlled;in fact of the top officials only the powerful vice-police chief (Vize-Polizeipräsident)who directed section Ia, the three hundred man political police force, forerunner ofthe Gestapo, was a Jew.He was not just any Jew. Forty-six years old, the son of a millionaire grain merchant,Dr Bernhard Weiss had served like his three brothers with distinction in thewar, won the Iron Cross and become the first Jew ever to be accepted for the Prussianhigher civil service.26 His army personnel file speaks of his highly developedsense of honour but also his over-developed ambition, conceit, immodesty, and ‘apowerful over-sensitivity tending to cloud his clarity of judgement.’27 Appointeddeputy police chief on March 17, 1927 in the red brick police HQ on AlexanderPlatz, the diminutive (five-foot-four) Bernhard Weiss would become Goebbels’ swornenemy—not just because of the rigour with which he deployed his fourteen thousandtruncheon-wielding uniformed police in the struggle for the streets of Berlin,but because he was a Jew and even his best friends said he looked like a caricature ofone.28Dr Goebbels would shun no libel to blacken his name. Instinctively carrying on anancient tradition of name-calling, he seized on his nickname of ‘Isidor’ and commissioneda scurrilous Nazi marching song about him.29 He would highlight every malfeasanceof the criminal demimonde and identify it as Jewish. In the Weimar republic,he was unfortunately not always wrong. In 1930 Jews would be convicted inforty-two of 210 known narcotics smuggling cases; in 1932 sixty-nine of the 272known international narcotics dealers were Jewish. Jews were arrested in over sixtypercent of the cases of running illegal gambling dens; 193 of the 411 pickpockets96 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHarrested in 1932