Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

was refused, turned 150 of his toughs loose on the audience.21 A few days laterHorst Wessel’s No.5 Sturm launched a violent attack on the communist headquartersin Berlin-Kiez, injuring several Reds.22 ‘Drive the fascists out of the factories,’GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 169the Red Flag screamed, ‘smash them wherever you meet them!’ In private Goebbelsrejoiced. ‘This is a fight we’re going to see through with brute force.’23 Nazis andcommunists alike declared savage war on each other. Goebbels called the Reds ‘roaring,raging sub-humans,’ and the women worst of all—‘They scream, they shriek,they bare themselves to us quite shamelessly.’ The communists referred to him as‘Goebbels the workers’ assassin.’24Police chief ‘Isidor’ Weiss was mortified. He too went onto the counter-attack.Gregor Strasser, his immunity revoked, was sentenced to six months’ jail.25 In SeptemberWeiss seized one entire issue of Angriff charging it with incitement to treason.Angriff developed an iconoclastic style of its own, making fun of people’s namesand lampooning the Central-Verein, the pompous Jewish organisation which had protestedat a spate of Nazi attacks on ‘harmless passers-by,’ by calling it henceforth the‘Central-Board of Harmless Passers-By.’26 To Goebbels’ discomfiture, the ‘Judenpresse’struck back by printing every truly seditious word he had said (and many he hadnot), trying to get the Party banned again.27 But there was no going back. Findingsigns that the communists were trying to frame the gau HQ in a bombing outrage,Captain Stennes suggested they tip off Weiss. Goebbels was shocked at such naïveté.‘These military types,’ he observed, ‘have no political instinct whatever. They haven’tgot wise to the Jews. To back off now in our fight against Isidor would be a catastrophe.’Stennes went to police HQ on Alexander Platz nevertheless and returned withword that Weiss wanted a truce; they would offer protection if Goebbels called offthe onslaught on Weiss. ‘A two-edged sword,’ mused Goebbels, scenting victory. ‘I’llplay off both ends against the middle.’28His courage, or bravado, was nearly his undoing. One Sunday in September 1929he went with two thousand S.A. marchers into proletarian Neukölln. He expectedblood to flow, and it was nearly his own. He caught up with the marchers at WienerStrasse. Standing in his open car he took the salute, then ordered Tonak to drive onand park near the Görlitz station. Here a burly communist called Hans Krause shouted,‘It’s Goebbels, the assassin of the workers! Let him have it!’ ‘Before my very eyes,’recorded Goebbels, ‘there appeared blackjacks, knives, and knuckledusters… A170 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHcommunist hurls himself at me. A shot rings out.’ The shots were answered from hiscar, a pistol loaded with blanks. His chauffeur was injured yet again. ‘I staunch Tonak’sbleeding. He accelerates away, still conscious, sitting chalk white behind the wheel,bouncing the car off street signs and kerbstones. A hail of rocks follows us, and moreshots are fired.’29 Tonak got them to a police station, but the police arrested themboth for using a firearm. It was seven P.M. before they were released.The ill-conceived campaign for a referendum on the Young Plan, which would askvoters among others things to approve the incarceration of any minister guilty of‘enslaving’ the German people, occupied him throughout that month.30 He wroteprivately however that nothing was to be achieved by parliamentary means: ‘Therevolution must march.’31 By midday on November 2 it was plain that the Nazis andD.N.V.P. combined had collected signatures from more than the requisite ten percentof the electorate, some 4,135,000 names. The government however blockedthe referendum and the campaign collapsed.32Goebbels’ next campaign was for the communal elections in Prussia. He orderedevery man and implement into the fray. ‘Our Doctor,’ wrote one, ‘was everywhere…We organized choruses of National Socialist slogans. Trucks with illuminated bannersreading VOTE NATIONAL SOCIALIST roared through the streets.’33 He spoke in othercities too. At Weimar he met Anka for five minutes in November—she suddenlykissed him with tears in her eyes.34 But these women were now history, even Xeniawho had came to wish him well on his thirty-second birthday but also with her headfull of marriage and fantastic plans—‘This Dirne, this flibbertigibbet!’ He was impressedby the sudden firmness of his own resolve.35His HQ was like a warehouse with bales of printed propaganda being moved in andout. Fighting on a shoestring the Nazis could not match their rivals’ expenditure buthis campaign was not without effect. While in May 1928 thirty-nine thousand Berlinershad voted the Nazi ticket, on November 17, 1929, his campaign attracted132,097 votes—or 5·8 percent of the total. Twice during the night he gleefully phonedHitler. There would now be twenty-three National Socialist deputies in Prussia, withGoebbels at their head.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 171‘The next task,’ he formulated the day after the election: ‘Our own daily paper.’36The problem of financing this leap forward had troubled him all year. Angriff’s streetsales were soaring. He hoped to go daily with it from January 1930. But they wouldneed at least eight thousand new subscribers and massive extra capital. Swallowinghis pride he asked Elsbeth Zander to get the Women’s Order to raise the forty thousandmarks and five five thousand new subscribers too.37 After he addressed a gigglingmeeting of six hundred women on November 7 they raised 4,500 marks on thespot. Police agents learned that Helene Bechstein later donated five thousand. Asanother woman, of the old Russian Potempa family, handed over five thousand marksGoebbels could not help noticing her pretty twin daughters.38Party HQ in Munich was unenthusiastic about his publishing plans. His politicswere still radically different from Hitler’s. For a while Rosenberg talked of bringingout a Berlin edition of his stupendously boring VB, with Angriff as a local supplement.But the latter’s war chest was expanding. A Mr Heidenreich donated ten thousandmarks, ‘trusting,’ as he said, ‘in our victory.’ By early January the Women’s Order hadamassed twenty-six thousand marks and two thousand names.39THREE days after the November 1929 election Goebbels had travelled down to Munichfor planning talks on Angriff. After an evening of speeches he stayed up talkingwith Karl Kaufmann, Göring, and Kube. They shared his view of the Hitler’s beerhallg147milieu. Hitler again promised to relinquish control of national propaganda toGoebbels, if he would spend more of his