Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

S.A.’s massed bands and torchlight marches,the famous Nuremberg rallies were beginning to take shape; however he could nothelp noticing with vexation the Stahlhelm dignitaries lined up on Hitler’s platform.Three chartered trains had brought his men from Berlin. Erika Chulius stepped outof the first; to his delight she had a twin sister too. The Berlin stormtroopers marchedsnappily into the city centre with Horst Wessel at the head of his Sturm.6 The S.A.contingent from the Palatinate wore white shirts; the French occupation authoritieshad banned the brown. ‘The time will come,’ Hitler promised them to cheers, ‘whenwe’ll have the shirts off the French!’There was one episode with the S.A. that forewarned of trouble to come withthem. Hitler was in mid speech when the heavy doors burst open. Several hundredcommunists had arrived from Berlin under the leadership of Max Höltz, bent onstaging a bloodbath. The S.A. dealt with them roughly and, their blood lust aroused,rampaged through the streets of Nuremberg afterwards leaving two dead and manyinjured. Hitler sent a chalk-faced Goebbels out by car to call the stormtroopers toorder. Horst Wessel showed particular bravery in reining in his young toughs. WalterStennes, his S.A. commander, later said that the Brownshirts would have taken overthe city there and then had he and their national commander Franz von Pfeffer notheaded off the catastrophe.7ON the evening after the riot Erika Chulius joins Goebbels, brimming with still unrequitedpassion. She mentions that she has a twin sister: double-delight! To Goebbels’dismay Xenia von Engelhardt also suddenly appears, furious at his romantic foray toWeimar. Hoping no doubt to escape her, he drives with Erika over to picturesqueRothenburg. Downstairs the next morning he finds the importunate Xenia again.But as suddenly as this tearful apparition appears, it melts away.8 Back in Berlin hebroods all day on the fair sex. ‘Women!’ he generalizes. ‘Women are to blame foralmost everything.’ It is all getting him down. ‘This has got me tied in knots,’ heGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 167reflects. He tells Xenia and Jutta that he is putting an end to it all. He will dump thelot of them. ‘Otherwise I’ll just wither away. I can’t do both. One thing or the other!’9For Anka, of course, he will always make an exception. Twice after the Weimarfiasco, which must have wounded her deeply, he writes to her and cannot understandwhy she makes no reply. Twice he asks chattily if she has the ‘time and inclination’ tosee him on his way through Weimar. Again no reply. ‘How lazy you are at writing!’ hechides her.10‘Here in Berlin all hell is loose,’ he adds. And in a sense it is, because Erika and hertwin Traute have come to drive him out to their forest home. He takes the ‘insufferablyjealous’ Josephine von Behr along too. On September 29 he writes again toAnka. ‘The Reichstag is meeting on important matters,’ he explains, and suggestsshe ask Georg’s permission to come to Berlin. ‘You’d get to see all sorts of things.’11She makes an excuse—she is not well. Goebbels apologizes that he cannot come toWeimar because of the Reichstag. ‘It is just frightful,’ he continues, writing from theReichstag, ‘In the long run one has to dispense with every friendship for the good ofthe cause.’ He might be able, he adds, to fit in Weimar on Sunday. ‘But .Ê .Ê . I’ve alsogot to go home as my father is gravely ill.’ ‘Fare well!’ he concludes. ‘The division bellis ringing. It’s showtime.’12None of these letters has been published before. He makes no mention of them inhis diary. Anka has defeated him.NOTIONS of nationalism had stirred only infrequently in his diaries until now. In October1928 he had thrilled at the majestic airship Graf Zeppelin cruising over Berlin onher 112-hour flight to New Jersey; four weeks later, he and Schweitzer had watchedthe newsreel report, furious at the jeers from an audience who only a few minuteslater fiercely applauded a Soviet film.13 In August 1929 he copied down the inscriptionon the Brandenburg Gate: ‘To all the World War dead,’ and made the acid commentthat they had forgotten to add: ‘—except the German’. The idea of taking overnational propaganda began to appeal to him.14168 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHStaying at Anka’s house he had read Erich Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war book,‘All Quiet on the Western Front.’ He had found it a mean-spirited and even seditiouswork, and ventured the prediction: ‘Two years from now nobody will talk about thisbook any more.’15 Nature documentaries like ‘With Amundsen to the North Pole,’ orthe mountaineering movie starring the delectable Leni Riefenstahl, enthralled him.16He fully recognized the subtle persuasive power of the cinema. At the advertisingexhibition in Berlin he lingered at the movie section, and a few days later he took hiseditor Dagobert Dürr to see the latest sensation, a talking film. He dismissed theproduction, ‘The Singing Fool,’ as kitsch, but the technological advance itself impressedhim. ‘Here lies the future,’ he wrote, ‘and we should be wrong to dismiss thisall as American gimmickry. Join it! Beat it!’17 He wanted to use sound films forpropaganda. ‘Here,’ he repeated in November 1929, ‘lies a gigantic future, particularlyfor us orators. The more the movement grows, the more we must exploit technology.’18In the approach to the city elections that month he was already using new techniques.He had posed for a propaganda film in his office. Their amateurish film ‘Strugglefor Berlin’ and two documentaries on the Nuremberg rally were already circulating.Taking control of their propaganda in Berlin, he composed twenty placards, some inrhyme. In the evenings he held training courses to ensure that all candidates emphasizedtheir ‘socialist’ policies. After a bloc meeting in October he noted with approvalthat all his fellow Reichstag deputies had come down firmly against the rightwing.19With himself at their head, constantly aware of his own dwarflike shortcomings,he led the S.A. and its battle standards on violent marches through the communiststrongholds of Berlin.20 He hammered into his S.A. that attack was the only suredefence against being overwhelmed by the communists. Gatecrashing a communistrally in Charlottenburg on August 25 he demanded permission to speak and, whenthis