Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

notes, ‘but she wants it no other way.’I’m arriving Friday 11:51 A.M. [he scribbles tersely]. Will you book a room atthe Kaiserin Augusta? I’ll stay until Saturday morning. Unfortunately can’t staylonger. In haste.Ê .Ê . Your ULEX.14At Weimar Anka realizes that Xenia was coming between them and bursts intotears. He returns to Berlin early. Here Xenia phones him, fearful on account of Weimarand Anka, as the smug gauleiter records.15 Vacillating between the two women, hewrites back in Berlin, ‘I love Xenia a lot, because she is so young and unberührt [sexuallyinnocent] and all self sacrifice and goodness. Anka is too scatterbrained.’16 Aletter comes from Anka with her photograph.My dear Anka … [he writes back]. On Sunday I too kept thinking of you… Soit’s very unfair of you to reproach me for having left so early. There was no choice;besides, what matters is not how long, but how we meet. What d’you say I comeback to Weimar on Sunday week?Ê … But then we’ll probably have to hang aroundwith G. all day and can’t talk about the things we’re interested in.At this instant in his complex epistolic devotions, Xenia arrives. Goebbels concludeshis letter to Anka with a hurried evasion: ‘Sorry can’t write much today…I’m about to fly to Dortmund.’ But just as he is, in fact, dining at his lodgings with thepure and innocent Xenia, the phone rings. A voice announce, ‘Hitler here—’; he isGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 157in Berlin. Unable to conceal his joy, Goebbels dashes off the last line of the letter toAnka: ‘Life is beautiful, O Queen! Yours, ULEX,’ and, abandoning Xenia, he hurriesoff to Hitler. There is no doubting his order of priorities now.17GOEBBELS sat with Hitler and Hess that night until two A.M. Hitler asked if he wouldtake over the Reichspropagandaleitung, propaganda at national level, travelling downto Munich every fortnight for this with a second home there. Goebbels was uncertain,and Hitler tried to tempt him. ‘After the Party Rally,’ the gauleiter noted, ‘weshall all motor down to Italy for study purposes… I am to get a new Mercedes justfor this.’ The question was left unresolved18 and in July Hitler again failed to temptGoebbels down to Munich to this end.19In Berlin, he felt he was somebody. His S.A. was growing fast. On May 26, atFrankfurt on Oder, he took the salute at a parade of two thousand S.A. men andheard the bands play a stirring new march with words written by Horst Wessel, DieFahne Hoch! (‘Hold the Flag High’). Later it would become a second national anthem.He itched to use the S.A. to seize power although Hitler had told him, ‘We mustnow learn to wait and above all avoid a ban.’20 Hitler had good reason to fear a ban.The communists had begun violent disturbances in Berlin; in fighting after they threwup barricades on May Day nine were killed and one thousand arrested.21 To Goebbels’disappointment Grzesinski banned his main opponent, the militant Red Front. In theresulting debate demanded by the communists on June 8 Goebbels spoke for fortyminutes using language that differed little from theirs. ‘What we have in Germany,’he argued, ‘is not a State but a plantation of international capitalism, a colony of theworld’s tribute-enforcers which is not one iota different from a Black Bantustan incentral Africa.’ The essence of their ministers’ policy must be foreign, not domesticpolicy. ‘They brandish the palm frond abroad,’ he scoffed, ‘and the police truncheonat home. They are skulking pacifists abroad, but bloodthirsty militarists at home,determined to choke any nationalist resistance at birth.’ ‘They sign slave-dictatesabroad and enact a law for the Protection of the Republic at home!’ Recalling that it158 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHwas Severing who had banned Hitler from speaking, Goebbels mocked: ‘Every Jew,international pacifist, and traitor has the right of free speech but not a German soldierfour times wounded on the battlefield, on the pretext that he is a foreigner.’ TheNazi Party had, he recalled, been dissolved in Berlin although it had erected no barricades.‘We just tossed a lush out of a public meeting after boxing his ears.’ Dr. Weisshad arrested seven hundred of his men returning from Nuremberg, which had costthirty-six of them their jobs. The Reichstag itself had annulled Gregor Strasser’simmunity because he had dared to call the Republic a ‘moneybags-colony’. Countlesscivil servants had been disciplined for joining the National Socialists.Goebbels teasingly added that he had no intention of mentioning the private affairsof the Prussian minister of the interior— ‘Whether or not for instance Mr Grzesinskitravels with his “lovely wife” to Vienna and it turns out the lady’s not his “lovely wife”at all’—they were purely a question of taste.22 Nor would he dwell upon the facttheir police president had been chief carnival clown of Mainz before the war (‘Don’tget me wrong. We’re not complaining that he was chief carnival clown. Merely thathe still is.’) As for Dr Weiss (‘whom we must not call Isidor’) he had now sued themtwenty-eight times for calling him a Jew. ‘So this police chief has himself recognizedhow demeaning it is to be a Jew, and he considers it a libel to be properly identifiedby what we would call his religion or what he would call his race.’ ‘The time willcome,’ he shrilled in his peroration, ‘when it will not be our Party which brings thissystem crashing down, but the people itself.’23Once more that month, June 1929, he addressed the Reichstag, on the suffocatingLaw for the Protection of the Republic.We National Socialists want there to be no doubt: we do not support politicalmurder. In our opinion the day must one day dawn in Germany when it will bepossible legitimately to hang all of those who have toppled the German peopleinto the abyss of misfortune.After blandly reading out, to loud protests, a letter written by ‘the Jewish megaswindlerJulius Barmat to the former chancellor Heinrich Bauer promising him ‘an-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 159other thousand or fifteen hundred U.S. dollars’ if needed, Goebbels retorted that inforty years their former Kaiser had not had so many people charged with lèse majestéas