time in Munich. Goebbels was appreciativebut critical: ‘I am not overlooking his failings,’ he wrote privately about Hitler. ‘He’stoo soft and he works too little.’ ‘I suspect,’ he continued primly in his diary, ‘that heindulges in too much womanizing too.’ Lying awake pondering these failings in hisadopted father-figure, Goebbels charitably concluded that Hitler was different andthat he had a right therefore to be judged on a different scale. ‘Hitler the Myth muststand, like a rocher de bronze.’40172 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHIn Rheydt, he was losing his real father. The Goebbels family doctor pronouncedthe old man’s condition as beyond hope. Ashen and gaunt, his face streaked by tearsof pain, his father had lain on a sofa in their spotlessly tidy kitchen when he last sawhim at Rheydt, surrounded by his family. (‘There we are,’ Paul Joseph had soliloquizedin his diary, ‘the Goebbels family: of diverse character every one of us, but allof the same blood. Soft as children, and hard as nails.’41) He wrote a long last letter tothe pious old man and travelled to Rheydt again. A living skeleton, whimpering withpain, his father asked only that they all pray for him.42 On December 7 he died. Whatperson does not suffer pangs of remorse upon a parent’s death? ‘Without his children,’Goebbels reflected, ‘and all alone, he crossed to the wilderness of Nirvana.’43Tonak chauffered the Goebbels brothers up to the church where their father layalone surrounded by flickering candles; helpless tears trickling down his cheeks,Joseph stroked the waxy hands and face of the man who would now never know towhat heights his own sacrifices had propelled his son.A letter of condolences came from Anka. ‘It will be my endeavour,’ he solemnlyreplied, ‘to equal my late father’s fanaticism and devotion to a cause, with the differencethat his was for his family, whereas mine shall be for my people and fatherland.’‘I should be glad,’ he mechanically concluded, ‘to hear again from you soon.’44In Rheydt he had run into Else Janke. She pinked, turned pale, and asked if he everthought of her. ‘What should I reply?’ he reflected, and answered with a lie.All of these events unsettled him. A week before Christmas he had a grotesquenightmare. He dreamed he was back at school being pursued along echoing corridorsby rabbis from eastern Galizia. The Jews were chanting as they ran, screamingHate, hate, hate! He always kept a few limping strides ahead of them, and answeredwith the same taunt. In his dream it seemed as though the pursuit lasted for hours,but they never caught up with him.45GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 1731 Diary, Sep 10-12, 1929.2 Ibid., Jul 5, 1929.3 Ibid., Aug 24, 1929.4 Ibid., Jul 12, 1929.5 Ibid., Aug 2, 1929; Dokumente, 299ff; VB, Aug 3, 1929.6 Wessel MS; and gau history, NA film T581, roll 5; BA file NS.26/133.7 Stennes, statement on Jul 29, 1968 (IfZ: ZS.1147); and Prince Schaumburg-Lippe, WarHitler ein Diktator? (Witten, 1976), 57f.8 Diary, Jul 26, 28, Aug 5, 6, 1929.9 Ibid., Aug 11, 13, 14, 1929.10 JG to Anka, Sep 7, 1929 (Irene Prange papers).11 JG to Anka, Sep 29, 1929 (ibid.)12 JG to Anka, Oct 1, 1929 (ibid.)13 Diary, Oct 3, 16, 28, 1929.14 Ibid., Jul 5, Aug 14, 1929.15 Ibid., Jul 21, 1929.16 Ibid., Oct 6, Dec 1, 1929.17 Ibid., Sep 2, 1929.18 Ibid., Nov 25, 1929.19 Ibid., Sep 3-5, Oct 1, 1929.20 Ibid., Jun 18, 1929: with 1,000 marching farmers’ sons, ‘I feel like a dwarf.’21 Ibid., Aug 27-29, 1929.22 Angriff, Sep 9, 1929.23 Diary, Aug 30, 1929.24 Angriff, Nov 24, 1929; cit. Reuth, 153.25 Diary, Aug 28: ‘The swine. All this will be repaid later.’26 Angriff, 1928, No.22, 3 and 1929, No.4, 9; Bering, 236.27 Diary, Sep 10, 1929.28 Ibid., Sep 3, 10, 20, 1929.29 Ibid., Sep 26, 1929; see the photo in Berliner Montag, Sep 23, and Dokumente, 304.30 Diary, Sep 19, 20, Oct 5; and ‘Kampf gegen Young, eine Sache des deutschen Arbeiters,’ Redegehalten am 26. September 1929 im Kriegervereinshaus Berlin (Berlin, 1929)31 Diary, Oct 28, 1929.32 Ibid., Oct 31–Nov 3, 5, 29, 30, 1929.33 Gau history, NA film T581, roll 1; BA file NS.26/133.34 Diary, Nov 14; hearing (diary Nov, 22, 1929) that she was involved with another man hehad another showdown with Anka and parted without pain: ‘It seems I have gotten overAnka.’35 Diary, Oct 29, 1929.36 Ibid., Nov 18, 1929.37 Ibid., Sep 22, Oct 20, Nov 5, 1929; Franz Eher Verlag to NSDAP Hautparchiv, Feb 27,1936 (NA film T581, roll 47; BA file NS.26/968).38 Diary, Nov 17, 20, 1929; police file.39 Ibid., Nov 20, 22, 23, 1929; Jan 7, 1930.174 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH40 Ibid., Nov 22, 1929.41 Ibid., Oct 10, 1929.42 Ibid., Nov 29, 1929.43 Ibid., Dec 11, 1929.44 JG to Anka, Dec 14, 1929 (Irene Prange papers).45 Diary, Dec 17, 1929.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 175
Goebbels12: Hold the Flag HighWITH only five dead by the end of 1929 Berlin had as yet few Nazi martyrs.1But the war in the streets was intensifying. Sometimes Goebbels foundsomebody in the HQ’s kitchen being treated for stab injuries; bullet wounds increased.2 As he was visiting Edmund Behnke, slowly dying from the original Pharusrooms brawl, another man was brought in with a slashed forehead.3 On November 4communists murdered Gerhard Weber; on December 14 a communist gunned downWalter Fischer during a raid on an S.A. office. Capitalizing on these martyrs, Goebbelsorganised ever larger funerals. At Fischer’s he spoke alongside Göring, Prince August-Wilhelm, and Horst Wessel.4 Spending Christmas with his now widowed motherhe heard that their opponents had slit the throat of yet another S.A. man, the bookbinderFritz Radloff, and New Year’s Eve found him at a rainsoaked cemetery buryinghim too.No murder really fired the imagination of the Party so much as that, when his timecame, of young Horst Wessel himself. Goebbels had considered him one of his mostpromising apostles although still only twenty-two.5 But he was a marked man. Wessel’sNo.5 Sturm had angered the communist high command by recruiting freely fromtheir ranks. More recently, according to Stennes, he had fallen
