Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

often as Braun had wielded the hated Law. He hurled this parting shot at theprotesters: ‘Once we have [the absolute majority] in the Reich, we shan’t need a Lawfor the Protection of the Republic. We’ll hang the lot of you!’24 He happily notedafterwards: ‘The Reds foam with rage.’25 The Reichstag adjourned for the summeramidst satisfying scenes of tumult.THE stage was gradually filling with the characters who would dominate this, alreadythe last one-third of Joseph Goebbels’ life. He knew young Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’sdeputy chief of propaganda, as ‘a small, fine man, good natured but perhaps a bitindecisive; a Strasser product.’26 On Hermann Göring he was ambivalent: he had gotto know the overweight, bemedalled aviator better after sharing a platform with himin communist dominated Friedrichshain in May. Göring bragged of knowing Mussoliniintimately while in Italian exile (in fact they had not met).27 Partying with hiseleven fellow Reichstag deputies at Göring’s luxurious apartment in BadenscheStrasse, the gauleiter envied his style of life. Six weeks later he recorded that Göringwas ‘as thick as two planks and lazy as a tortoise’, but it was the former air forcecaptain who introduced him to Berlin’s high society.28 The princes, dukes, and countsforegathered in the Göring apartment, and Goebbels gradually acquired a proclivityfor having blue-blooded men around him too. His opinions on the Baltic-born AlfredRosenberg, cold, arrogant, and unapproachable, varied sharply; he feared thatRosenberg’s opaque treatise, ‘The Myth of the Twentieth Century,’ would cause frictionwith the church.29 Surprisingly, he also disapproved of Julius Streicher’s ‘Jewmania’. ‘This naked anti-semitism,’ he recorded, ‘is too primitive. The Jew can’t beblamed for everything. We are as much to blame as anybody, and until we accept thatwe’ll never find our way.’30 But by 1930 he had a soft spot even for Streicher, probablybecause Hitler did too: ‘I like him a lot,’ he noted, ‘he’s a real [knorke] guy!’31Both men like Goebbels. ‘I’ve had Dr Goebbels for a week with me at the Berghof,’Hitler confided to Streicher once. ‘You know, anybody who can laugh as heartily as160 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHGoebbels, despite what Nature has inflicted on him, can’t be all bad.’ (And, commentedStreicher, Hitler was right, as Goebbels stayed his best man to the end.)32Hitler towered over them all; but the picture of Hitler, still only forty and unmarried,that is presented by the early Goebbels Diaries is an unfamiliar one: the GreatCunctator, taking refuge in the comforting milieu of his beer-bench pals in Munich,squandering the Party’s money, and for ever chasing young women of whom Geliwas, in Goebbels’ despairing estimate, only the latest example.33 But he had an instinctive,engaging manner. Meeting Goebbels’ mother for the first time, Hitler remarked:‘She’s just like my own.’34THE summer of 1929, a real tar boiler in Berlin, sees Dr Goebbels still fighting shy ofsexual relations. He sees Hans Schweitzer, whose drawing pen is the scourge of thehighest officers of the Republic, living in mortal terror of his new wife. True, in hertemporary absences Schweitzer briefly flutters his clipped wings, but she always returnswielding the clippers afresh.35 Goebbels prefers to shuffle the pack—Xenia,Jutta, Anneliese, and occasionally a glimpse of Anka in Weimar. The kindly and submissiveXenia, now on school vacation, tries in vain to dominate him: she sulks forhours, then capitulates and returns for a night which the gauleiter mechanically logsas selig, ‘blessed,’ though with no supporting details. He serenades her on the piano,but has no intention of letting any woman capture him.36 He has witnessed too Tonak’sfate, totally ensnared by ‘the hysterical females’ of the Nazi Women’s order (‘nowthe silly lad’s gone and got engaged.’) So Xenia runs the whole gamut of femaletrickery from flouncing and huffs to affectionate letters, in vain.37 ‘She is too easygoing and fluttery,’ he reports to his diary. ‘I don’t think it’ll last much longer.’38Setting off on vacation to Prerow, on a Baltic peninsula, that July he takes his secretaryJosephine von Behr and does not invite Xenia despite her tearful entreaties.Too late, on July 5, Anka phones from Weimar—she has a sudden chance to visitBerlin for several days. Has the Great Moment finally arrived? Goebbels responds:GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 161I have thought about it all night. I can’t stay in Berlin; I would never get awayfrom work… I can’t cancel Prerow, and I’m fed up with Berlin.39He suggests an alternative plan: that Anka come to a town fifty miles from Berlinand he will come over and spend one or two days with her there. He even spells outthe train times and connections. But at Prerow his little fantasy is dashed. She telegraphsthat she cannot come.How about this plan [Goebbels then suggests]. I’ll come down for a week toWeimar. Can you get me that room in your building again? I hope it won’t be tooexpensive, as I want to go to England in August and to Italy in September… Is itokay by you and George if I come on Saturday [July 20]? You’ll have to leave me tomyself a bit as I’ve a new book in my pen. And don’t tell anyone I’m coming toWeimar.He begs her to cable her agreement— ‘Otherwise I may go up to Sweden for aweek.’40The book is his drama ‘The Wanderer’ which he has begun to rework at Prerow.Walking along the rainsoaked beaches he contemplates the placid, grey-green Balticand reflects how different it is from the wind-whipped North Sea—the one a gentlemistress, the other a diabolical old maid.41 The Great Moment in any young man’slife is, it seems, drawing nigh.But there is an unscheduled interlude. At a seaside concert he sits next to ErikaChulius, teenaged daughter of a local forester. Not good looking, he concedes, butprovocative.42 Is the chase on again? She presses a posy of flowers into his hand andfor several days goes out with him and Josephine. Together they all go on a moonlightsail, and Erika talks and flirts and asks bright questions. He suddenly realizes that it isthe young Anka that she reminds him of. As his train pulls out, bound for Berlin andWeimar, he finds between the pages of ‘Michael’ a