Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

off scot free… Not a penny shall I pay anyway.’3 He continuedto run rings round the courts; his supporters packing the public galleries hootedand jeered as he and his lawyers made monkeys out of police witnesses, prosecutors,130 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHand the bench.4 The fines were derisory. ‘Two hundred marks or twenty days,’ herecorded, ‘for libelling Ia,’ Weiss’s political police.5He received his free travel pass. ‘Let my voyaging now commence,’ he wrote, ‘atthe Republic’s expense!’6 The new Reichstag opened on June 13. The twelve Nazismarched in wearing uniform. Meeting afterwards, the Nazi bloc assigned to him theportfolios of culture and internal affairs.7 The Strassers blamed him in their publicationsfor the party’s poor showing in Berlin.8 He sensed Gregor’s hostility, but decidedhe could live with it. They were equals now. As he limped down the steps therewas a ripple of applause that he recorded for posterity in his diary. ‘Parliamentarianism,’he concluded: ‘I’ve seen my fill of it. They won’t find me around much in future.’With a more measured insight he mused a few days later, ‘The whole show is somean and cunning, but so sweet and seductive, that only a few characters emergeunscathed.’9After a month the Reichstag, under joint pressure from its communist and Nazimembers, approved an amnesty for all political crimes committed before 1928. DrWeiss saw his tormentor’s slate suddenly wiped all but clean. A year later Berlinpolice headquarters would endorse his file, ‘All judgements and outstanding casesagainst Dr Göbbels have been quashed or annulled on the basis of the Law of Amnestypassed on July 14, 1928.’LATE in June 1928 he transferred the gau HQ to No.77 Berliner Strasse inCharlottenburg—fourteen newly furnished rooms on one floor, ‘not bad going foreighteen months,’ he reflected.10His health, never robust, had suffered in the election campaign.11 He now felt perpetuallytired; overshadowing the head- and backaches, which he attributed to nervousproblems, was the permanent agony of his steel-encased lame leg—‘chronic painsand unpleasantness,’ he would write that autumn, before a phrase which suggests hewas beginning to doubt his own sexuality: ‘plus the malicious gossip that I’m a homosexual.’12 Such gossip was inevitable. Here he was, a young man of thirty, of brains,courage, and notoriety, and yet: a bachelor. Seeking company he was as likely to pickGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 131Tonak or Schweitzer for a walk à deux around the park at Wannsee or a visit to thelofty new Radio Tower as to scoop up two or three of his female staff for a stroll inPotsdam.13 ‘I am sick in mind and body,’ he would confess.14 Since doctors foundnothing wrong, he resorted to that most German of remedies, a Kur; that did helphim, or so he imagined, which was what mattered.15 His club foot never ceasedhurting—‘for weeks on end now,’ he would write early in 1929. ‘Sometimes it justblights my whole day.’16His worries had been magnified by the onset of his father’s last illness in the latespring of 1928. Laden with filial remorse Joseph Goebbels visited the paternal homeas often as he could, sat silently watching the grey-bearded old man, wept as he feltthe thin, bony fingers, and romanticized each farewell wave in his diary in case it wasthe last.IN July 1928 Adolf Hitler came to Berlin. Goebbels wrote that he was fond of himlike a father, and staged a huge private meeting for him at Friedrichshain. ‘Althoughit was the summer silly season,’ wrote young Horst Wessel admiringly, ‘the hall waspacked out. Who else could do that in high summer?’ New members flooded in afterHitler’s speech.17 Before Hitler left, Goebbels vented his anger about Dr Otto Strasser,and the Führer waffled reassuringly about winding up the Strassers’ publishing housein Berlin. He mentioned that he and his stepsister Angela Raubal would be taking atrip to the island of Heligoland with Angela’s daughter ‘Geli’—would Dr Goebbelslike to join them? Knowing Geli already, Goebbels jumped at the chance.18On Heligoland he found himself alone. He limped over to the aquarium and watchedfor a while as large, spiky, predator busied itself devouring the smaller fry. It comfortedGoebbels’ own radical beliefs to see how nature in microcosm was as pitilessas mankind.HE has met Geli Raubal, Hitler’s barely nineteen year-old niece, in Munich four monthsbefore. Unaware of the nearly forty year-old Hitler’s proprietary interest in her, hehatched plans to bring her to Berlin.132 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHHe is still pining for Anka Stalherm. But married to the humdrum George Mummeshe lives in Weimar and he has not seen her for years. ‘I must have a good, beautifulwoman!’ he writes in his unpublished diary at the start of 1928.19 Göring has comeback from Sweden married to a beautiful Swedish countess; Hess is marrying hisIlse.20His cri de cœur seems answered by a teenaged girl working at headquarters, a girlof, he writes, almost Asiatic submissiveness.21 ‘I love Tamara von Heede,’ he records.‘Wonder if she loves me? Hardly. That’s how it always is: what you get, you don’twant; and what you want, you don’t get.’22 Tamara puzzles the naïve and sexuallyinnocent gauleiter by being off colour at monthly intervals.23 He bridges these periodsby ogling the wife of Dr Müller and a toothsome Nuremberg maiden he has meton a train, one Luise Scherff, who is ‘just like a little mother.’24 One evening canoodlingwith him in the park Tamara freezes him with a thoughtless remark, perhaps abouthis foot. She makes up the next day with a basket of fruit and other delights.25 Theirfriendship causes the usual tensions at HQ.26 Meanwhile Anka suddenly returns tohis life: there she is, standing in the doorway of the hotel foyer at Weimar after arenewed staging of his play ‘The Wanderer’. By his own account Goebbels tremblesand stammers with joy at seeing his long lost love.For half an hour Anka pours out her heart about her joyless marriage: Mumme hasconcealed from her upon marriage that he is impotent from syphilis; her four-monthold son is by another man. Goebbels is under her spell again, it is as though theynever parted. ‘O, l’amour!’ his pen exclaims after he has lain awake all