Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

starched collar,and finally director in the obligatory stovepipe hat. As his father’s life drew to itsclose years later, Joseph would see in him only a ‘petty minded, grubby, beer swillingpedant, concerned only with his pathetic bourgeois existence and bereft of any imagination.’11 Among his effects were found blue cardboard account books in which hehad detailed every penny he had spent since marriage.12 Conceding grudgingly thathis father would in all likelihood go to Heaven, Joseph would write: ‘I just can’tunderstand why Mother married the old miser.’13 He painted a picture of his fatherlying in bed three-quarters of the day, then reading papers, drinking beer, smokingand cursing his wife, who had already been about her housework since six A.M. His18 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHsympathies were all with her. ‘I owe her all that I am,’ he once wrote; and he remainedbeholden to her all his life.14He had his mother’s astute features—the face perceptibly flattened at each side,the nose slightly hooked, the upper front teeth protruding. She had been bornKatharina Maria Odenhausen in the village of Uebach-over-Worms in Holland, andoccasionally she lapsed into Rhenish Plattdeutsch15 when speaking with Joseph.16 Herfather was a muscular Dutch blacksmith with a long beard, a man Joseph would lookback upon as the dearest of his ancestors. He died in the Alexianer monastery atMönchen-Gladbach of apoplexy. Her mother had then moved into Germany to serveas housekeeper to a distant relative, a local rector at Rheindahlen; she had spent heryouth there with all her brothers and sisters except for Joseph Odenbach, Goebbels’sarchitect godfather, who had stayed at Uebach. It was at Rheindahlen that Katharinahad met Fritz Göbbels and married him in 1892.So much for Goebbels’ parents. Two sons had arrived before him, Konrad17 andHans.18 Three sisters followed him: two, Maria and Elisabeth, died young, a third,also christened Maria, was born twelve years after Joseph. We shall occasionallyglimpse Konrad and Hans, struggling through the depression until Joseph’s rise topower from which they too profited, being appointed to head Nazi publishing housesand insurance associations respectively. Maria remained the apple of his eye.19Through living frugally, and thanks to a pay rise to 2,100 marks per annum, in1900 his father was able to purchase outright a modest house at No.140 DahlenerStrasse in Rheydt (still standing today as No.156).20 There was no front garden; itstwo bare windows beside the front door still overlook a monumental mason’s yard.Young Joseph had his room under the sloping roof, his mansard window’s view limitedto the skies above. This remained ‘home’ for him, the fulcrum of his life, longafter he left it as a young man.He remembered his sickly earliest years only dimly. He recalled playing with friendscalled Hans, Willy21, Otto (whom he knew as ‘Öttche’) and the Maassen brothers,and a bout of pneumonia which he only barely survived. He was always a little miteof a fellow. Even in full manhood he would weigh less than one hundred pounds.GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 19At age six his mother placed him in the primary school (Volksschule) right next tothe house. Bathing little Joseph his mother often found the weals on his back causedby one particularly sadistic teacher’s cane. Goebbels was a stubborn and conceitedboy. Fifteen or twenty years later he would reveal, in an intimate handwritten note,how his mental turmoil both delighted and tormented him. ‘Earlier,’ he wrote, ‘whenSaturday came and the afternoon yawned ahead of me, there was no restraining me.The whole of the past week with all its childish horrors weighed down upon my soul.I seized my prayer book and betook myself to church; and I contemplated all thegood and the bad that the week had brought me, and then I went to the priest andconfessed everything that was troubling my soul.’22HIS right leg had always hurt. When he was about seven, a medical disaster befell himwhich would change his life. ‘I see before me,’ he would reminisce, ‘a Sunday walk—we all went over to Geistenbeck. The next day, on the sofa, I had an attack of my oldfoot pains. Mother was at the washtub. Screams. I was in agony. The masseur, Mr.Schiering. Prolonged treatment. Crippled for rest of my life. Examined at Bonn universityclinic. Much shrugging of shoulders. My youth from then on,’ Goebbels musedpiteously, ‘somewhat joyless.’In adulthood his right foot was 18 centimetres long—3·5 centimetres shorter thanthe left; its heel was drawn up and the sole looked inwards (equino-varus). The rightleg was correspondingly shorter than the left, and thinner. The indications are thatGoebbels’ defect was not genetic but acquired as the result of some disease.23 Itdefied all attempts at surgical remedy; had the deformation occurred at birth, whenthe bones are soft, it would have been relatively easy to manipulate them back intothe right alignment. Perhaps he acquired it from osteomyelitis (a bone marrow inflammation)or from infantile paralysis. He would hint, at age thirty, that the deformitydeveloped from an accident at age thirteen or fourteen.24This schoolboy with a large, intelligent cranium, a puny, underdeveloped body anda club foot lived out his childhood to a chorus of catcalls, jeers and ridicule. It was,he later accepted, ‘one of the seminal episodes of my childhood… I became lonely20 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHand eccentric. Perhaps this was why I was everybody’s darling at home.’25 He learnedhow cruel children could be. ‘I could say a thing or two about that,’ he would sigh inhis diary, aged twenty-six.26 Each creature, he now saw, had to struggle for survival inits own way.When he was ten they operated on his deformed foot. He later recalled the familyvisiting him one Sunday in the hospital; he flooded with tears as his mother left, andpassed an unforgettably grim half hour before the anaesthetic. The operation left thepain and deformity worse than before. But his Aunt Christine brought him somefairy tales to read, and thus he discovered in reading a world of silent friends thatcould not taunt or ridicule.When he returned to his mansard room he began to devour every book and encyclopediathat he could lay his hands on.He would show them: the brain, if