Goebbels9: Conjuring up SpiritsTHERE was a side to Dr Goebbels which few suspected. He half believed in theoccult. At the very end of his life he would have horoscopes cast for himself,for Hitler, and for the Third Reich; scattered through the earlier diaries are referencesto seances at which dark forces were consulted. On leave in Bavaria in 1928 hewas to be found conjuring up the spirit of Leo Schlageter. The great martyr of theRuhr resistance ‘appeared’ and, when asked Who Shall Save Germany, replied with atact that was commendable under the circumstances, ‘Vest Your Hopes Only in Hitler.’1 In 1929 Goebbels and his friends again conjured up the spirits. ‘I don’t reallybelieve in such frauds,’ he noted airily, ‘but it’s usually quite amusing.’2 Visiting PrincessWied in August 1930 he found an astrologer there who ‘lied forth from the starsprecisely what we would expect to happen anyway.’ Goebbels’s own apparent cynicismwas belied however by the diary passage that followed. ‘Auwi [Prince AugustWilhelm] is very sceptical, but I am flabbergasted.’3 He unquestioningly accepted themystic powers of graphology. He allowed the Party lawyer Ludwig Weissauer to readhis handwriting; Weissauer told him that it betrayed sensitivity and a determinationto fight on.Weissauer found one flawed line. That, guessed Goebbels, must be Anka. Sincelosing her he had had nothing but a sense of loneliness.4AIDED by young Horst Wessel, he had spent the summer of 1928 organising a HitlerYouth detachment and a Nazi student association in Berlin. But those months saw the140 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHfirst problems with the brownshirted S.A. battalions of Party stormtroopers. Theyhad believed his earlier talk of revolution; but with Hitler’s new-found belief in thelegal approach to power they saw the day when they might storm the Reichstagreceding. Friction with their commander Captain Stennes grew.5Goebbels was in two minds. Unlike Hitler, he never wholly abandoned the idea ofa putsch. He spent much of the summer organizing an S.A. march on Berlin, toculminate in a mass rally in Berlin’s largest hall. It would be a show of power. In midAugust Stennes threatened to quit, taking several of his commanders with him.6Goebbels told him of the planned ‘rally.’ ‘We can do without a crisis at this moment,’he notified his diary. ‘We must keep the peace. I convince [Stennes], against my ownconvictions.’7 At the Party’s annual general meeting in Munich at the end of AugustHitler directed him to concentrate his efforts now on Berlin, while Brandenburgwould be detached to form a separate gau.8Hitherto Goebbels had merely reacted to political events. Now he seized the politicalinitiative. He proclaimed the last week of September 1928 ‘Dawes Week’,seven days of intense campaigning in Berlin against the pact obliging Germany to payher war reparations bill regardless of her economic plight. He printed a special issueof Angriff which sold sixty thousand copies.9 Growing bolder, he risked hiring for thefirst time the Sport Palace in Potsdamer Strasse for the third ‘Brandenburg Rally’(Märkertag); to fill the cavernous building, which could seat fifteen thousand people,he placarded the city with lurid posters announcing: ‘On Saturday September30 Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts will march into Berlin. For the first time since itsestablishment in the Reich capital the National Socialist German Workers Party willdemonstrate before the German public in Close Discipline against the pauperizationof the German people by the Dawes Pact.’10 That Sunday he drove out to Teltow towatch his brown army assemble. Four thousand S.A. men marched into the capital.At Steglitz town hall the immense throng, which Goebbels put at ‘tens of thousands,’paused, bared their heads and roared the national anthem before marching on throughthe city’s frightened, wealthy west end to the Sport Palace building. With thousandsof communists massing threateningly outside a riot began and the police opened fire.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 141Four Nazis were seriously injured. Goebbels left under a barrage of rocks, jeers, andcatcalls— ‘Hatred and love,’ he philosophized. The next day’s ‘non Jewish’ press waslargely sympathetic, the rest less so.11‘A day of triumph,’ he concluded in his diary: he had Anka sending him telegramsfrom Weimar; he had young Hannah; he had fifteen thousand Berliners hanging onhis every word.12 A letter of congratulations came from Hitler.13 A few days laterHitler appeared unannounced at gau HQ in Berliner Strasse and repeated his congratulationsin person. He reiterated that Goebbels alone had his confidence in Berlin,and he spoke harshly about Dr Otto Strasser. He could now afford to give hisstaff, over twenty strong, a substantial pay rise.DECIDING to move into larger lodgings, he finds just what he needs in WürttembergischeStrasse in west Berlin, closer to gau HQ. His landlady is a Miss Grothe, an elderlyspinster, as he is careful to record.14 The apartment has a pleasant drawing room. Hefeels entitled to some luxury—‘I have naught else, neither wife nor child, and onlyseldom a lover.’ He uses the word Geliebte, although ‘girlfriend’ would seem morejustified. Most are passing fancies, like one Eva Otto—she donates a piano to thenew apartment.15 On October 31, 1928, the day before he moves in, his secretarycirculates the new address requesting it be kept secret ‘for obvious reasons.’ A copygoes to Anka.16He is still terrified of any hint of homosexuality, a criminal perversion which seemsparticularly prevalent in the Nazi party. Unable to form lasting relationships withwomen, he loiters in cafes or haunts movie theatres with his chauffeur Tonak
