Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

stamp again.6 Goebbels’ friend Heinz Haake, a former south Rhinelandgauleiter who was now a member of the Prussian parliament and thus immune,staged a protest demonstration in a Charlottenburg hall on May 11.7 But after that agreat silence overcame the Party organisation in Berlin.One fact buoyed Goebbels at this dark hour, the knowledge that he would soonfound a weekly newspaper of his own in Berlin, called Angriff—attack. He announcedhis plan at a secret meeting in his apartment. Raising the finance was not easy.8 GregorStrasser was furious at the plan, and tackled Hitler at his favourite Munich restaurantabout rumours that he had agreed to write a regular leading article; Hitler assuredhim the rumours were not true.9Goebbels had no time for the Strassers since their newspapers had lampooned himand his club foot. A homeopath, Dr. Steintel, had told him in a Berlin pub how theStrasser brothers, especially Otto, had plotted to ruin Goebbels by highlighting his‘racial defect.’ There was enough circumstantial detail to make it seem plausible.When Steintel curiously asked the truth about the club foot, Goebbels declared thathe had had an accident as a teenager, which ruled out the racially ‘otherwise permissible’inference. Armed with this new information Goebbels dictated a furious letterto Hitler: neither Jews nor marxists had, he said, stooped so low to get at him. ‘Hehas to be destroyed,’ the Strassers seemed to have said, ‘because he is inconvenientfor Kampf Verlag, a private enterprise.’ Hinting at resignation, he warned Hitler that116 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHhe would never succeed without ‘eradicating’ personalities like these.10 When Hitler,in a quandary, did not reply, Goebbels nagged Hess, Hitler’s secretary, to issue a astatement backing him.11 At a private meeting of the Berlin gau’s officers on June 10attended by Steintel he asked for a vote of confidence. He pointed out that ErichKoch, a humble railroad official, could not possibly have authored such a venomouslyclever article; the club foot, he again insisted, was not congenital but the consequentof a teenage mishap.12The split widened, as Goebbels stepped up the pressure on his rivals. When GregorStrasser spoke in Berlin he had a member of the audience ask about his lucrativepharmaceutical practice and fat Reichstag pay-cheque.13 By mid-June the bickeringwas so bad that Emil Holtz, the gau’s legal arbitrator, appealed to Hitler to settle it inperson. Holtz sided with the Strassers, while conceding that Goebbels had succeededin spurring the Berliners on: ‘He has made the movement famous,’ Holtz told Hitler.,‘But he lacks inner stability and attention to detail.’14 Since Goebbels was callingon his members to buy only Angriff—it was now due to appear on July 4—Holtzfeared irreparable damage to Strasser’s publications (which was just what Goebbelsdesired). Nobody, Holtz pointed out, could tell how long Angriff would survive.Goebbels hurried off to see Hitler in Munich. He wanted both Strassers evictedfrom the Nazi Party. The Party’s chief arbitrator ruled that the Führer would settlethe whole matter at some major Berlin function later on.15 While still in Munich onthe evening of June 20, Goebbels addressed 450 people on his first six months asBerlin’s gauleiter—and the ban.His aim [the police transcript quoted him as saying] had been to get the movementnoticed in Berlin, and with the help of the Jews he had succeeded. As elsewhere,the Jewish press in Berlin had ridiculed the movement and then cloaked it insilence. All the Berlin parties had concurred in its banning.A prominent leader of the Stahlhelm party had pointed out to [Goebbels] thathis politics were bound to result in prohibition. He had, he said, retorted that ifhe could have paraded 120,000 men through Berlin like the recent StahlhelmGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 117rally he wouldn’t have offered the guarantees of a peaceful turnout that Stahlhelm’sleaders had. One thing was certain—120,000 National Socialists would not haveleft Berlin in the same state as they found it.16Goebbels claimed to have added six hundred new members during April. ‘Let thegentlemen in Berlin,’ he said, ‘take note that the time will come when the NationalSocialists will pay them back in the same coin and with interest. Nothing will beforgotten.’The fight against ‘Isidor’ Weiss went on. ‘He who has the police HQ in Berlin hasPrussia,’ Goebbels would define. ‘He who has Prussia, has the Reich.’17 Justifying hisrowdy methods in a speech on July 10 at Potsdam, just outside Weiss’s fief, he saidthere was a difference between selling soap-powder and fighting for liberty. ‘Youmay say,’ he admitted, ‘that for the time being the cautious, sober desk-warriors haveproven right; but even if our methods have resulted in the ban they have had oneeffect already—that every youngster in Berlin now knows of the National Socialistparty… A movement which means to smash the old State cannot march in bedroomslippers,’ he continued, ‘We may not have won the affections of this city of fourmillion, but we have earned its hatred, and hatred can turn to affection.’18Even more seditious in police eyes was Goebbels’ now widely disseminated fifteenpage brochure ‘The Nazi’ which clearly spoke of plans to overthrow the State.19 ‘Weshall create a power-group with which we can conquer this state,’ he had written.‘And then ruthlessly and brutally, using the State’s prerogatives, we shall enforce ourwill and our programme.’ On the following page Goebbels claimed, ‘History hasseen repeatedly how a young, determined minority has overthrown the rule of acorrupt and rotten majority, and then used for a time the State and its means ofpower in order to bring about by dictatorship… and force the conditions necessaryto complete the conquest and to impose new ideas.’ So too, wrote Goebbels, it wouldbe with the Nazi party. ‘And then we, the responsible minority, will enforce our willupon a flabby, lazy, supine, and stupid majority lurking behind which the Jew prosecuteshis dark plans.’ All of this was noted in Dr. Weiss’s police files, and more: ‘If118 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHthe German people does not want to be liberated,’ Goebbels had written, ‘then weshall act without their consent.’Then [continued Goebbels] we march against this State, we take one last great riskfor Germany; from revolutionaries by word we become revolutionaries