Goebbels7: Fighting the Ugly DragonTHE ban would stay in force for eleven months. It was the work of the SocialDemocratic politician Albert Grzesinski, the minister of the interior in Prussia.The illegitimate son of a servant girl, Grzesinski was a year older than Dr Weiss anda former metal worker and trade union leader.1 He had previously been Berlin’spolice chief himself. The communist Red Flag accused him of hating the revolutionaryworking class; the conservative right wing feared that he would use his power toconsolidate the Social Democratic position; the Nazis would fight him tooth andclaw. Goebbels would claim that Grzesinski’s natural father was not the butcher’sboy named in the files but one Ernst Cohn, a Jewish merchant in whose service hismother had been employed. No matter that Cohn was only seventeen at the time inquestion, the legend persisted resulting in one of the many libel actions that Goebbelswould soon face.The ban signed by police chief Karl Zörgiebel on May 5, 1927 alleged a catalogueof misdemeanours by the gau—assaults, criminal damage, and firearms offences—since mid October. ‘In the “Ten Commandments” issued by Goebbels [to the S.A.],’the document read, ‘the ninth reads: “Resistance to police and state authority todayis always stupid, because you will always come off worse… The state will take revengeon you and on us with prison sentences and steep fines. So, if there is no otherway, comply with the state authority, but console yourself: we shall square accountslater!”’ The ban also quoted from Goebbels’ pamphlet ‘Ways to the Third Reich’:114 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHDomination of the Street is the first step to state power. He who purveys hisWeltanschauung with terror and brute force will one day possess the power, andthus the right, to overthrow the state.The document also referred to orders published in a recent issue of Letters whichwere to be promulgated when the Nazi ‘Third Reich’ came to power. ‘As such aimsof association are incompatible with the criminal law,’ Zörgiebel concluded, ‘disbandmentis justified.’2Goebbels was mortified. He refused to sign a form acknowledging receipt of theban, stating that it was written in unintelligible German.3 Writing to Grzesinski, hepointed out that his gau embraced the whole province of Brandenburg, not just Berlin:‘The ban is therefore null and void,’ he argued. He also claimed that Berlin’s‘gutter press’ (Asphaltpresse, another invented Goebbels word) had deliberately distortedthe Pastor Stucke business. He made no apologies for having publicly identifiedthe journalists who dared to jibe at Hitler, ‘a German front line soldier.’ As for Stucke,he said, the clergyman had called out ‘du Hund!’ (you dog) whereupon members ofhis audience has ‘slowly ushered him out.’ He blamed the weapons arsenal on agentsprovocateurs and added that his gau had appealed in writing to Dr. Weiss for policeprotection after individual members had been attacked by ‘Red mobs’. ‘Your policepresident,’ he lectured Grzesinski, ‘is being praised by the entire press of the internationalmoney-capital. This proves that it is not the German people, only a clique ofinternational moneybags who had an interest in seeing the German freedom movementbanned.’ If Grzesinski still refused to lift the ban, history would prove himwrong since he did not possess the power to kill an idea.As a veteran marxist you are yourself a living witness that even the entire mightof the bourgeoisie was unable to suffocate the marxist movement; and that despitebans, or perhaps even because of them, it became ever more active until itfinally conquered Germany on November 9, 1918. Today you are the incumbentminister of the interior in Prussia; and for that you have only one thing to thank—GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 115that people once tried to cripple a revolutionary movement by prohibition anddissolution.Perhaps this may afford even to you an insight into things to come.Still smouldering, he spoke to a provincial Nazi rally in Stuttgart with Hitler onMay 7, seizing the opportunity to accuse Weiss, Zörgiebel, and Grzesinski of stagemanagingthe incident with Pastor Stucke, a parson unfrocked for morals offenses.4On his arrival back in Berlin his fans rioted at the Anhalt station, and he was taken offfor questioning.5 He hired a lawyer and appealed, using the gau’s headed notepaper;Zörgiebel silkily advised him to refrain from using the banned Nazi notepaper orrubber
