Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

were Jews. In 1932 no fewer than thirty-one thousand cases offraud, mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews.30Statistical comparisons are of course usually odious, but it was against this backgroundthat Goebbels now started his campaign. He would concentrate initially onthe western boroughs Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg, and Tiergarten,where over half Berlin’s Jews had settled. They had originally populated the dishevelledstreets around the railroad termini of central and north western Berlin wherethey had arrived from the east and from Galicia, but as they had prospered they haddescended on the leafier western boroughs. Over thirteen percent of Wilmersdorf’s196,000 inhabitants were Jews.31His battle against the Jews turned into a battle against one man, the deputy policechief Dr Weiss. The sheer scale of the legal battle fought between them can be judgedfrom the court records. The police targeted the Nazi gauleiter with no fewer thanforty court actions; Weiss himself was involved in twenty-three cases; Hitler cameonly eighth, with sixteen. Goebbels and Weiss would clash head on in four groups oftrials, involving ten specific charges against Goebbels and a score more against hiseditors and journalists. In addition Weiss started nine other court actions, includingthree against Gregor Strasser, for calling him Isidor. Nearly all of these immenselycomplex cases were appealed all the way up the German legal system, but he securedsixty convictions (including nineteen against Dr Goebbels). To non-Germansunfamiliar with the stiffness of Prussia, the pomposity of a civil servant resorting tosuch legal sanctions seems breathtakingly pointless and even self-defeating. His firstaction, in May 1927, was against a Berlin newsvendor who had displayed a VölkischerBeobachter featuring a competent and by no means hostile sketch of Dr Weiss, on hisnewsstand; the unfortunate newsvendor went to jail for a month.32 ‘The mere applicationof the name Isidor, whereas the Police Vice President’s first name is in realityBernhard, was a deliberate and purposeful insult,’ argued Weiss’s superior, Zörgiebel,on June 1, demanding the Völkischer Beobachter editor’s prosecution too.33 In a tellinglapsus linguæ police chief Zörgiebel’s indictment of Goebbels dated March 2, 1928actually accused him of libelling ‘the Polizeiprasident Dr. Weiss’—thus accidentallyGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 97conceding what all Berlin already knew, that it was his deputy who called the shots,and not he.34Tirelessly and at taxpayers’ expense Weiss fought the battles against Goebbels andhis newspaper: the court dockets ooze with his cold fury at irreverent cartoons (Weissasking a policeman who demands the arrest of a communist thug: ‘Ban them? Why—did he attack a Jew?’); at its caricatures (a bespectacled, big-nosed donkey splayleggedon thin ice)35, and even at a crossword puzzle, whose solution turned out tobe: ‘Get out Angriff until Isidor’s defeated.’36ON November 7, 1926 Goebbels arrived in Berlin.37 Dr. Otto Strasser met him at thestation.Goebbels’ own legend, written up as Battle for Berlin, would have him hurryingstraight from the Anhalt station to a packed public meeting. The truth was moreprosaic. The Berlin gau was penniless and in disarray. He made his first public speechat a memorial ceremony organised on the ninth, the anniversary of Hitler’s failedMunich putsch, by the party’s Women’s Order (Frauenorden) in the Veterans’ Building(Kriegervereinshaus) in Chaussée-Strasse. When Otto Strasser expressed irritation thatGoebbels had arrived late, and had squandered money on a taxi, the new gauleiterreplied: ‘On the contrary. I would have arrived in two cars if I could have. Thepeople must see that our firm is up and running.’ In his speech he expressed admirationfor the men who had gunned down the Jewish politician Dr Walther Rathenaufour years earlier. (For this remark he later summoned to police HQ; but the resultingprosecution was subsequently abandoned.38)On the same day he issued a famous Circular No.1 to all gau officials beginning, ‘Asof today I am taking over the Berlin-Brandenburg gau as gauleiter.’ Addressing theunappetizing conditions at the ‘opium den’ in Potsdamer Strasse, he decreed that gauHQ was neither a flop-house nor a waiting room; in future Party members wouldneed an appointment to speak with him. His circular displayed both realism andclever psychology. While appointing the troublesome and ambitious S.A. commanderKurt Daluege—who was twenty-nine—as his deputy, he simultaneously downgraded98 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHthe former Greater Berlin gau to the rank of Ortsgruppe , or local, and downgradedthe present locals to sections.39 This made for a tighter ship and fewer illusions. Definingthe role of the militant S.A. he wrote: ‘S.A. and S.S. are the instruments whereby weshall attain power,’ and he ruled that neither was to appear in public without his priorconsent. He ended the circular with the promise: ‘Adolf Hitler will visit the gau assoon as we have become a united force and one to be reckoned with.’40The Strasser brothers were aghast at Goebbels’ arrival in ‘their’ capital. But overthe coming months he forced a level of activity that Berlin had not seen before; hefounded a Nazi speakers’ school, he developed a constant, intrusive, drum-beatingpropaganda, he provoked clashes with the communists that hit Berlin’s newspaperheadlines time and again. On Sunday November 14 he led a deliberately provocativepropaganda march through the working-class suburb of Neukölln which arousedboth fury and consternation among the local communists; the newspapers reportedthat in the ensuing disorders use was made of ‘missiles, knuckle-dusters, clubs, andeven pistols.’41 Cutting out the dead wood, he threw out half of their members. Tosecure their finances he founded an elitest Freedom League of three or four hundredBerliners pledged to contribute ten percent of their income in return for promisesof later rewards.42 His first imperative was to finance new premises for the gau in thecity centre; his second, to fund a marching band of forty or fifty musicians with a fulltime instructor; his third, to purchase motor transport. ‘Thus,’ summarized Muchow,‘job will follow upon job until the Freedom League is confronted, as Dr Goebbelsputs it, with its ultimate task: the order to occupy and clear out the Reich Chancellery!’At the end of December Goebbels moved into new offices at No.44 LützowStrasse, four office rooms with all mod. cons. and two telephone lines.His tactical object was to capture the communists’ pawns, the unemployed hordesof Berlin. Typical of his S.A. foot soldiers was the young