Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

in with bad company.He dropped out of his law studies and was working as a labourer.6 Perhaps this wasno more than youthful rebellion—his late father was an evangelical pastor andfreemason. Against his mother’s will he had moved into a sleazy attic room at No.62Grosse Frankfurter Strasse with his girlfriend Erna Jänichen, whom he had rescued176 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHfrom the streets.7 That December his brother Werner had frozen to death in themountains; Goebbels buried him with a torchlight parade routed provocatively pastthe communists’ Karl Liebknecht building. On the evening of January 14 the enemysquared accounts with Horst: a dozen communists and Jews beset his lodgings;Albrecht Höhler, Salomon Epstein, and another raced upstairs and hammered on hisdoor. As Wessel, inside with Erna and another girl, opened up Höhler, a carpenter,shouted ‘Hands up!’ and discharged a nine-millimetre Parabellum pistol into his face,blowing away his jaw. Seizing papers and a gun from Wessel’s locked cupboard (hisdisaffected landlady, widow of a communist, had obliged them with the keys) theattackers escaped; Höhler kicked the prostrate Wessel as he ran out, yelling, ‘Youknow what that’s for!’ The communist HQ put a well-oiled escape plan into actionfor Höhler, providing refuges in two Jewish households and then funds and a forgedpassport to flee to Prague.8Horst Wessel clung to life in the hospital for weeks. Goebbels visited him often,and mused once that this was the stuff of a real Dostoyevsky novel— ‘The Idiot, theWorkers, the Harlot, the Bourgeois Family.’9Once Wessel croaked, ‘We must go on!’10Foolishly returning to Berlin, Höhler was arrested and confessed.11 The aftermathwas a textbook example of the brilliant disinformation techniques used by Goebbels’opponents. The defence lawyer hired by the communists, Löwenthal, started a whisperingcampaign to smear Wessel as Erna’s pimp.12 Thus he could portray Höhler’smotives as purely personal. The ‘Judenpresse’ seized on this tidbit. Communist playwrightBertolt Brecht mocked, ‘In the search for a fitting hero who really personifiedthe movement, the National Socialists opted, after considerable deliberation,for a pimp.’ Goebbels gritted his teeth and fought back: he now had the one realmartyr the movement needed. On February 7 he had the Horst Wessel anthem,‘Hold the Flag High,’ sung by massed choirs at the end of a Sport Palace rally. Visitingthe hospital he urged him not to give up the fight to live, but the young man diedsixteen days later. ‘Thou shalt live on with us,’ wrote Goebbels mawkishly after visitingthe death bed, ‘and shalt partake in our victory.’13 He ordained a colossal funeralGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 177parade for March 1, and Hitler himself promised to attend. Fearing major disturbancesDr Weiss banned the parade, allowing only ten cars in the cortege and aceremony confined to the walled Nikolai cemetery itself. Police officers confiscatedthe flag draping the coffin. Communists, out in force along the route, snatched thewreaths from the horse-drawn hearse and sang the Internationale.14 At the cemeteryGoebbels found a large libel painted on the wall: A FINAL HEIL HITLER TO WESSEL THEPIMP! He swallowed his fury. As the coffin sank into the ground a thousand throatsdefiantly roared the anthem that bore its murdered composer’s name. In ten years,Goebbels prophesied to the S.A. men parading within the cemetery walls, in one ofthe finest speeches he ever delivered, that anthem would be sung by every schoolchild,by every factory worker, and by every marching soldier in Germany.15 A barrageof rocks came flying over the wall from the jeering mob outside. ‘They rampage,’recorded Goebbels upon his return home: ‘And we win.’16HITLER had missed the funeral; he had decided to spend the weekend at his Obersalzbergcottage with Geli instead. Goebbels took this very hard. He felt he had got to knowHitler better, and deprecated his indolent, undependable, indecisive personality.17He believed that Göring shared this view. ‘He [Hitler] works too little,’ wroteGoebbels, ‘and then the woman, the women!’ How many promises Hitler had nowgiven him and broken: to attend the Horst Wessel funeral; to break with Otto Strasser;to enable Angriff to appear as a daily newspaper; and to appoint him Reich PropagandaDirector—these were only some of them.18The irrational feud with Otto Strasser was at the root of much of Goebbels’ miserythat first half of 1930. The bitter feelings ran so deep that one suspects some unknownorigin antedating even the famous club-foot article. He still respected Gregor,but despised Otto who in turn loathed him. Each called the other ‘satanic.’19 ‘Hitler,’he had decided in mid 1928, ‘will have to lay down the law however tough this maymake things with Gregor Strasser.’ Otto was the fly in the ointment. ‘He is ruiningGregor’s entire reputation,’ Goebbels wrote in 1929.20178 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHDelayed by obstructionism from Munich Goebbels had failed to upgrade Angriff asplanned to a daily newspaper in January 1930.21 That month the Strassers announcedthat they would publish a daily in Berlin, National Sozialist, from March 1. Since itwould flaunt the Party’s swastika emblem it would be a lethal stab in the back forGoebbels. He protested to Hitler.22 Characteristically, Hitler did not even reply. ‘Helacks the courage to take decisions,’ Goebbels deduced.23 Finally Munich phoned,inviting him down to talk it over with Hitler. Goebbels set off determined to threatenresignation.24 Hitler however claimed to know nothing of the Strasser’s newspaperplan; he feigned a convincing rage about Otto’s ‘disloyalty,’ a rather smaller rageabout Gregor and, with the beloved Geli at his side, comforted the gauleiter, sayinghe would publish VB in Berlin. ‘That puts Strasser up against the wall,’ wrote Goebbelsmaliciously, ‘just where he wanted to put me.’25 He returned to Berlin appeased. Infact, Hitler’s subsequent announcement of his plan seemed even to disavow Goebbels.26There were howls of glee from Berlin’s organised Jewish community and particularlyfrom their Central-Verein Zeitung.An open breach with Munich threatened. Hitler had promised to squelch OttoStrasser’s plans to publish his daily newspaper; the Strasser brothers continued howeverto announce it as coming.27 No sooner had Hitler persuaded the VB to publish atitem on Goebbels’ behalf than the Strassers talked him round again.28 Their new dailynewspaper hit the streets on March 1, the day of Horst Wessel’s funeral. Hitler’scapitulation to the Strassers