Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

the right formula. He claimed that anonymous benefactors donated afour-seater Benz motor car to the gau, but ‘Isidor’ Weiss determined that this vehicle,licence tag 26637-IA, had previously belonged to a merchant bank, Grundman& Co., that the two thousand marks purchase price had come from the FreedomLeague, and that it was registered in Goebbels’ own name.55 By late February treasurerFranz Wilke could report that the gau now had eight to ten thousand marks incash and assets.56 Lecturing the Freedom League, his cash cows, on ‘My PoliticalAwakening’ on the fifteenth the gauleiter again claimed to have been plotting clandestinelywith Hitler in Munich as early as 1919, and to have fought in the resistanceagainst the French and Belgians occupying the Ruhr.57102 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHJust four days after the Pharus rooms fight, Goebbels and his S.A. hooligans filledall fifteen hundred seats at a hall in Spandau. The left, still reeling, stayed away. Theirnewspapers uttered dire warnings to the workers to keep their eyes on this unexpected‘fascist menace’. The police watched with mounting fury as control of thestreets passed into the hands of the political mobs.A perverted sense of pride seized the S.A. Chronicler Reinhold Muchow doubtedthat the brownshirts of Stuttgart, Weimar, or Hamburg could have survived suchbattles. Now, he observed, the Berlin Jews saw the writing on the wall. More printingink would flow against the Party during February 1927 than in all three monthsbefore.A high water mark in this carnage came on March, just three days after ‘Isidor’s’appointment. Goebbels had ordered a nighttime function of the Berlin S.A. to bestaged at Trebbin, a little town twenty miles away. About seven hundred S.A. menproudly wearing their uniform of jackboots, flat caps, breeches and brown shirtsmade their way to Trebbin: a bonfire blazed on the hillside, the flags and standardsforegathered, and Goebbels played organ music to them and then spoke. ‘These sonsof the Brandenburg countryside,’ reported Muchow in purple prose, ‘hung on everyword of this man, their appointed leader in life and death; something ineffable unitedthem with the sacred soil on which they stood, soil steeped in blood throughout itshistory.’ The next day he addressed them again on Trebbin’s market square, a clever,mocking speech, scoffing at their State ‘in all its beauty and dignity,’ proclaiming thatblood was still the best cement to hold them together in their onward struggle against‘Jewish marxism,’ and ending with the battle cry of the S.A., ‘Deutschland—awake!’58So far, so good. The trouble began as the seven hundred Nazis piled into the trainback to Berlin. Sitting near the front, they found twenty-three bandsmen of the RedFront’s Seventh District (Brandenburg) and a communist member of the provincialparliament, Paul Hoffmann. By the time the train pulled into East Lichterfelde stationevery window had been shattered. As the Nazis jumped out a shot rang out andWaldemar Geyer, leader of the S.A.’s first regiment (Berlin-Brandenburg) was hit inthe stomach. Another S.A. man was grazed on the head by a bullet. The police stormedGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 103the platform and arrested several Nazis. They found the communist bandsmen coweringon the floor amongst the shattered glass, splintered wood, and rocks; eighteenof them were injured, twelve seriously. Hoffmann was barely recognizable, his facesmeared with blood. Twelve bullet holes peppered the train. The band’s instrumentswere no longer playable. A thousand more Nazis had meanwhile arrived outside thestation to join the S.A. for a march through Berlin’s bourgeois western suburbs. Thegunfire caused uproar. Goebbels, Daluege and gau manager Dagobert Dürr arrivedin their dark-blue limousine, a seven-seater Opel-Landaulet, to storms of applause.‘Where the road curved,’ wrote one S.A. man, ‘there stood our Doktor in his car…Standing with arm raised he saluted us and looked into our faces.’ Goebbels wouldclaim at the resulting court hearings to have called for discipline and calm as theirinjured comrades were carried out of the station.59 The owner of a neighbouringsoap-store testified however that after an injured thirty-five year communist wascarried into a taxi two Nazis had torn its door open: one, a thin young man, pulled apistol out of his pants pocket, and shouted, ‘I’m going to shoot the dog dead!’ Theother, a little man with a right club foot that turned inwards, had dissuaded him.60They marched past Steglitz city hall and on through west Berlin. Wherever Jewswere spotted they were set upon and clubbed to the ground.61 At Wittenberg Platzwhere eight thousand people had gathered Goebbels made a speech. ‘The reds havespilled our blood,’ he shrieked. ‘We’re not going to allow ourselves to be treated assecond class citizens any more.’ He ended with a transparent hint: ‘Now don’t all gochasing off massacring those Jews down Kurfürstendamm!’62 ‘Deutschland—awake!’came the response.Those were his methods. Horst Wessel, soon to become commander of No.5 Sturmbased on the communist-infested Alexander Platz area, was in the thick of it all.‘March through Neukölln,’ he summarized. ‘Eight hundred against tens of thousands.Ê .Ê . We carried it off! That’s the main thing. We were the first to carry it off. ThenBattle of the Pharus rooms, four hundred versus three thousand; ten badly injured,but victory. Gunfight on East Lichterfelde station, three injured but victory. Victoryeverywhere the S.A. goes into action : everything for the movement!Ê .Ê . We relied104 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHonly on ourselves, that was our strength.’ ‘We accomplished what no other movementhad in Germany,’ wrote Wessel with bitter irony in 1929, ‘namely to unite theentire people: because they were all united against us—incredibly united.’63Goebbels now had two more men in the hospital. Eight had been arrested, severalwould draw prison sentences. ‘Isidor’ Weiss ordered his Charlottenburg and Moabitsection HQs ransacked for weapons, and for several days the Red Front exactedrevenge on any Nazis caught alone in the streets. They had captured the Party ID ofone Nazi, and splashed its photograph on placards all over Berlin two days later:WANTED—DEAD OR ALIVE.64 ‘The National Socialists,’ reported the police, ‘chargedinto the communists with a fusillade of revolver shots and wielding steel flagpoleslike lances, leaving nine slightly and five seriously injured on the battlefield.’65Goebbels’ version in Völkischer Beobachter differed. ‘The first shot