Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

fired by the Redassassins,’ he claimed, ‘hit one of the two police constables in the forearm. He appealedto our S.A. for help, shouting: “Guys, help us, we can’t handle it on ourown!”’66 While the police however accused Goebbels of exulting in the violence andreferring to a ‘battle won’ he judged only by results: four hundred more Berlinersjoined the party, bringing its membership to three thousand.The Strasser brothers despaired, preferring reason and logic to brute force. The‘Judenpresse’ seized upon the differences between them and articles appeared in thecommunist Welt am Abend, the Berliner Tageblatt and the equally Jewish Vossische Zeitunggloating over a ‘feud in the house of Hitler.’67STILL perfecting his techniques, Goebbels stood in front of the folding triptych mirrorin Mrs Steiger’s drawing room practising each oratorical pose and gesture.68 Herode the mood of his audience, leading them on a tide of invective to to a hysterical,cheering, table-rattling finale. He had instinctively developed the art of ceremonialtoo, to bring audiences to fever pitch—the flags, the bands, the deliberately delayedarrival. He spoke at locations from Weinheim in the south to Hamburg in the north.69Writing in the Letters on April 1 he prescribed how to deal with hecklers. ‘You don’tseem to realize that you’re at a National Socialist meeting,’ the speaker was to shoutGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 105at the unfortunate interrupter. ‘I’ll not be able to guarantee that you won’t be madeinto a useful member of the human race by a suitable head massage.’When I speak in Essen or in Düsseldorf or in Elberfeld [he had written once]it’s like a holiday for me… We don’t have to search for the enemy, he’s in ourmidst, lurking in the audience ready to pounce. When I come into the hall athousand voices shout Down With Him, there’s a hooting and a screeching. Thenthe struggle begins—two, three hours, sometimes longer… And the miraclehappens. What was a wild, howling mob turns into human beings of flesh andblood who think and feel just as we do, only more tormented, more trampled on,with an immense hunger for light and succour… And gradually the people arere-created before my very eyes. I see just fists and eyes, and there is a holy fire inthose eyes.70The Ruhr gau held its annual rally on Sunday April 25. Here too the party’s rankswere swelling. ‘Essen is dominated by the swastika & our flag!’, Rudolf Hess boastedto his fiancée Ilse.71 Goebbels mailed a picture postcard of the huge assembly to AnkaStalherm. While he and Hitler addressed the fourteen thousand invited Party membershowever Goebbels was seething with rage: people had drawn his attention to ascurrilous article published anonymously in the Strasser’s newspapers on April 23,entitled ‘Results of Race Mixing.’ (Its secret author was Erich Koch).It is well known [this venomous piece began] that miscegenation results inmental disequilibria… Physical equilibrium is disturbed, either by disease or bythe stunted growth of individual limbs or by other physical defects.Goebbels took this as a wounding reference to his physical disability. The anonymousauthor adduced various examples from history, like the Emperor Charlemagnewith his protruding eyes and castrato voice and the murderous Richard III who wasalso ‘a dwarf who limped!’ There were references to the ‘cretinous behaviour’ andimpotence of Louis XIII, the ‘Jewish-Mediterranean stereotype’ Marat and the ‘greenvein’d’ Robespierre72 and the ‘revoltingly ugly’ Voltaire, ‘past master of spitefulness106 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHand calumny.’ Talleyrand too, this fearless author triumphed, ‘possessed a club foot…The word “character” could not be applied to him.’73Goebbels complained to Hitler that same afternoon. Hitler agreed that coupledwith the Kampf Verlag’s other recent irruptions against Goebbels this article wasclearly actionable; he warned against litigating, but promised to tackle the Strassershimself. Erich Koch wrote to Goebbels admitting (or claiming) authorship, but couldnot resist rubbing salt in the wounds by stating that his article was no more than anexposition of ‘the racial theories our Party stands for.’74THE article brought the Goebbels-Strasser feud to boiling point. The Strassers had bynow learned that he was raising finance to launch a rival Nazi tabloid in Berlin calledAngriff, attack.75 Although the Strassers had earlier provided his gau with every facilityin their Arbeiterzeitung and the N.S. Letters of which he was still editor, Goebbelshad determined to smash their monopoly. The Arbeiterzeitung was still the officialorgan of the Berlin gau and by September 1926 it was already printing a nationalweekly, the Nationalsozialist, for northern Germany (which had also printed the libellousarticle). Expanding in 1927, the Strassers had persuaded the tall, flabby twentysixyear old Hans Hinkel, editor of a local southern newspaper, to invest heavily intheir concern; the brothers George, Otto, and Franz Strasser still controlled fiftyonepercent. The firm was thus comparable with the Party’s Franz Eher Verlag in thesouth.76 But the Strasser publications were less heathen and antisemitic than the Hitler-Rosenberg newspapers like the Völkischer Beobachter .Goebbels undoubtedly nursed an unhealthy complex about the wealthy Strasserfamily although his diaries show that he privately respected Gregor at least morethan his later public remarks would allow. Gregor was a member of the Reichstag,which provided him with free first-class travel and immunity from arrest. From thislofty, wealthy, and immune position they disdained their puny, crippled rival. ButGoebbels could call upon the talents of his gifted caricaturist Hans Schweitzer(‘Mjölnir’), and through him he spread the corrosive rumour that Otto had Jewishblood. Gregor riposted that both he and Otto had at least served in the Great WarGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 107and in the Free Corps after that, ‘unlike Dr Goebbels or Mr Schweitzer,’ and therethe matter, for the time being, rested.MAY 1927 brought first triumph, then disaster. On May Day Hitler himself spoke inBerlin for the first time—before a private audience because the Prussian minister ofthe interior Albert Grzesinski had banned him from speaking in public. The fivethousand listeners packing into the Clou, a well known dance hall in Mauer Strasse,still made an impressive audience. Unaware that the police were now just waiting fora pretext to clamp down on him, Goebbels arranged a further mass meeting at theVeterans Building for May 4.77 Garish placards announced the theme: