Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

orcartoonist Schweitzer, his only friends.17 After major events he returns to his emptyapartment and mopes. He needs a woman, as ‘a starter-motor,’ but the maliciousgossip will not go away. ‘It’s too filthy even to think about without being ashamed,’ heinsists to his diary the day after moving into his new bachelor apartment. ‘Decay!Decay! It must be expunged, radically and ruthlessly.’18 His reasoning is odd, however— ‘Because if the enemy ever learns something like that, we shall be finished.’ Ishomosexuality for Goebbels, this ‘immoral vice,’ a crime in the detection rather than142 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHin the commission? ‘It’s got to be stamped out radically,’ he writes on November 4.‘It’s all so dirty,’—again, an interesting choice of word,—‘It’s all so dirty that itwould preferable not to hear or see it at all.’ Several of his officials are unmasked ashomosexuals, and Goebbels does not know whom to trust.19 ‘It’s so averse to myown nature,’ he writes, ‘that I can’t work up for them even the vestigial sympathythat I do for any common murderer.’20Over the next months Goebbels, now thirty-one, tries relationships with half adozen teenage girls. The first, Johanna Polzin, lasts three weeks: he trembles as heshows her photographs of the big Sport Palace meeting. ‘And then I kiss her… Shejust stares at me amazed with her grey-blue eyes. Bells ring within me. A woman! Aloving woman! I smother her with kisses. She is trusting as a child.’21 His eye soonroves on. Talking with Josef Terboven his eye lights upon the Essen gauleiter’s attractive,‘but unfortunately rather ageing,’ sister.22 When Hitler visits Berlin with nieceGeli Raubal in mid November, Goebbels again finds her ‘almost lovable’ but wiselysmites from his mind the horrendous idea of cuckolding the Führer.23 Wilhelm Kube,another gauleiter, introduces him to Traute Tessel: she is an eager Nazi, but alreadyhas an escort. ‘They all set up homes and take wives,’ Goebbels wails into the diary.‘I just get lonelier.’ Traute pays a couple of furtive visits to him, chatters away in thatinfuriating mixture of brightness and inanity that females have long monopolized,then passes out of his life.24 He visits the Party’s Woman’s order, despite their harridanElsbeth Zander, and spends an evening watching the healthy young girls danceand sing: surely a sign that he is desperate for female company.IN 1928 alone he spoke at 188 meetings. He seemed not to know fear. On November3 that year he led the S.A. into one of Berlin’s reddest suburbs. ‘A lot of blood willflow,’ he accepted. ‘But I shall be with them.’25His ‘Book of Isidor’ had sold out and was reprinting. Dr Weiss unsuccessfully canvassedhis prosecution for felonious remarks about the Rathenau murder.26 Not that thisleft Goebbels free of problems. His bandmaster Wilhelm Hillebrand, the ‘Reich musicmaster’ whose band had recently serenaded the thousands in the Sport Palace, de-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 143fected with a bundle of dirty linen from the Berlin gau which he compiled into apoisonous brochure entitled ‘Off with that Mask!’ It clearly worried Goebbels andhe rejoiced when it was confiscated (‘A nightmare off my shoulders.’27) It particularlyannoyed him that Hitler did nothing to silence Hillebrand.28When the Reichstag reconvened in November there were immediate moves tostrip Goebbels of his immunity. He hated the ‘rotten’ parliamentary system, behavedoutrageously during the debates, and attracted several reprimands.29 The ban on Hitlerspeaking publicly in Prussia had been lifted. On November 16 Goebbels presentedhim with a Sport palace overflowing with sixteen thousand listeners, martialmusic, and the ceremonial entry of Berlin’s Nazi standards as a visible sign of theParty’s growing might. As Hitler spoke eight hundred police protected the hall andits audience.30 The two men sat far into the night with Hess; Goebbels could not helpnoticing that Adolf now had his Geli, and Hess his Ilse, while he was still alone.The next day the body of Hans-Georg Kütemeyer, a Scharführer in No.15 Sturm ofthe Berlin S.A., was fished out of the Landwehr canal. What Goebbels called the‘Judenpresse’ scoffed that Kütemeyer had killed himself, and there was report of amorose letter to his wife about their poverty. Goebbels was not going to lose his firstmajor martyr that easily (‘Never have liars stooped so low!’); he wrote a eulogy inAngriff and began a noisy propaganda campaign.31 The Party buried Kütemeyer withfull honours on November 21. Thousands gathered at the graveside. Sizing up thesobbing widow and the anger of the dead man’s young comrades ‘clutching theirstandards in chalk white fists’ Goebbels decided that one day he could indeed marchwith these men against the Reichstag.32 ‘Marxists!’ his street placards challenged.‘Why did you murder the worker Kütemeyer?’33 The police hefted into his dossier anote that he had propagated ‘untrue statements’ on the case. The S.A. man’s twokillers were caught and given suspended sentences of two and four months for manslaughterin June 1929. ‘Three Jews as judges,’ observed Dr Goebbels, and vowedhatred, vengeance, and retribution against the system.34AS the appointed ‘minister of culture’ of the little National Socialist faction he went144 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHmore often to the theatre and the movies, which were still silent. He took Schweitzerto a love film but walked out before the end, but he found the romantic scenes in‘Anna Karenina’ a delight.35 Once he went to an all-Negro revue; he sniffed at their‘silly doo-dah’ing and dancing’ and was annoyed when the public roared applause.36He found Buster Keaton unfunny and incomprehensible. After seeing his first Hollywoodmovie, again with Schweitzer, he recorded: ‘Sheer hell. Jewish kitsch. Virtuallyall you saw were Hebrews.’37 The dominance of the Jews in this relatively new industrydid not elude him.38 They were everywhere. He heard Offenbach’s opera ‘TheTales of Hoffmann’ on the radio and dismissed it in his diary as Jewish music. ‘TheJewish question,’ he added intensely, ‘is the question of all questions.’39His enthusiasm for the Russian cinema, like much else from Moscow, was undeniable.He viewed Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s silent epic ‘Ten Days thatShook the World,’ and found its crowd scenes good but overburdened with partypolitics. ‘We have a lot to learn from the bolsheviks,’ he readily conceded, ‘particularlyin