Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

to meet him at Hedemann Strasse. As they were meetinghere, they found an S.S. man, Hertel, writing notes on their conference from thelocked room next door, ‘on orders from above.’ Stennes ordered the immediateeviction of the S.S. unit by his own men under S.A. Standartenführer Döbrich.26 Itwas two-thirty A.M. before he had enough men on hand, and the S.S. Sturmführer inGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 199charge refused to comply, objecting that he took orders from Wilke not Stennes.Hearing (he claimed) pistols being loaded behind the door, Döbrich ordered it battereddown and his men bloodily evicted the S.S. men, though not before one ofthem, Walter Kern, had alarmed the police.27 Dr Bernhard Weiss sent a massive forceround within minutes, who hauled off the S.A. trespassers.An urgent telegram notified Goebbels in Breslau. He phoned Hitler at Bayreuth;Hitler said he would come to Berlin at once.28 Back in the capital Goebbels found hisHQ a shambles. There were bloodstains everywhere. Unshaven and baggy-eyed, Hitler,Himmler, and Hess reached Berlin around eleven A.M. and checked into an hotelnear Potsdamer Platz.29 Hitler asked Wilke for a full report, then toured the city’sS.A. units to test morale.30 He was jeered at some locations. That evening he invitedthe lesser commanders, and then Berlin’s S.A. Oberführer Wetzel, to meet him inGoebbels’ apartment. Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, and Himmler were present, but notStennes. ‘The Berlin S.A. commanders,’ recalled Himmler, ‘trooped into Dr Goebbels’apartment that afternoon and acted in an incredibly rowdy manner toward the Führer.Gangs of S.A. men were chorussing slogans outside in the street. Stennes had probablystaged the whole thing.’ For two hours they bandied allegations and counterallegations.Rudolf Hess mentioned the odd fact that Stennes had a gun permit issuedby the head of the political police, Wündisch, and implied that he was a policeagent (a belief which Goebbels came to share).31 Hitler ruled that Stennes wouldhave to go. In the middle of the night however a Herculean figure, Richard Harwardt,probably the toughest man in the Berlin Sturmabteilung (S.A.), came clattering upstairsinto Goebbels’ apartment, flung a salute, and roared: ‘Adolf, don’t get toughwith your own S.A.!’32Urged by Harwardt to give Stennes himself a hearing, Hitler reluctantly agreed. Itlasted until six a.m., when Hitler sent for all the S.A. commanders once more anddeclared that he was going to cut their Brown army rigorously in size.This was getting nowhere. Goebbels left to snatch an hour’s sleep—he had to be incourt for yet another libel action that morning (he refused to offer any defence, wassentenced to prison, appealed).33 Exhausted and almost asleep on his feet he pleaded200 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHwith Hitler once again to promise the S.A. whatever they demanded.34 Winning theelection must come first.It was now Monday September 1. According to Goebbels’ diary, at four P.M. Hitlertook the decision he had urged: Stennes should stay. But he would dismiss Pfeffer asSupreme Commander and take over the S.A. himself (with the notorious Ernst Röhmas his chief of staff).35 A letter went to Stennes, and Stennes pledged loyalty. Goebbelsaccompanied Hitler to the S.S. unit under Kurt Daluege at Anhalt station. The S.S.,Goebbels noted, had remained loyal throughout. Taking selected S.S. men as an escort,Hitler demanded to speak to ‘his’ entire Berlin S.A., and in the Veterans Buildingthat evening he told these simple stormtroopers that it was their duty to ‘draw athick line’ under past events. Assuring them that he was not blind to their bloodysacrifices, he promised to meet Stennes’ fundamental demands. Giving Stennes hishand, he declared that he would for ever remain true to him.36 Police observersreported that Hitler, his voice cracking, appealed hysterically for unswerving loyalty:‘Let us pray in this hour that nothing can divide us, and that God will help usagainst the Devil!’ screamed Hitler. ‘Almighty Lord, bless our fight!’—and the roarsof Heil, so the police reported, had died away as the audience noticed their Führer’shands folded seemingly in prayer.37The Görings threw a little reception at Badensche Strasse afterwards. Stennes wasnot invited. The whole reconciliation with him was a charade designed to appeasethe S.A. until later, as Goebbels had recommended to Hitler. This became plain fromremarks made by the top Nazis at the reception.38 ‘Everything shipshape,’ wroteGoebbels later that day. ‘That’s the end of the Stennes putsch.’39 They would, headded, be drawing the necessary consequences after the election. The campaign resumed.GERMANY had never seen a battle like this. Over the last two weeks the Nazis stagedhundreds of dramatic meetings—in the open air, in halls, by night, in marquees, bytorchlight. He willingly spoke side by side with Gregor Strasser.40 His HQ printedtens of millions of leaflets. The streets were carpeted with them. Sixty truckloads ofGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 201Nazis careered around the capital tossing out pamphlets; Goebbels clambered fromtruck to truck, haranguing pedestrians through an amplifier and whipping on hismen. The posters clearly betrayed his own handiwork. One contrasted unlovely photographsof all their thick-lensed oppressors, with Dr Weiss in pride of place, withmajestic studio portraits of the top eleven Nazis. As for his own likeness, Goebbelsplaced this right next to Hitler’s.41Unemployment had been two million as the year opened. It would reach 4,380,000as the year ended. ‘Out with this rabble!’ shrieked Goebbels in Angriff. ‘Rip the masksoff their hideous countenances! Take them by the scruff of their necks, boot their fatbellies, and sweep them right out of the temple with due pomp and circumstance!’And the worried middle classes particularly, the peasants, the businessmen, the officeworkers, danced off behind the Nazi demagogue as willingly as the children hadfollowed the pied piper into the mountain labyrinths beyond Hamelin.He hoped for a quarter of a million Nazi voters in Berlin. When Hitler came to theSport Palace on September 10, one hundred thousand people applied for tickets.The photos show him with clenched fists raised, orating into a box microphone somethree feet ahead of him (in Hermann Schäfer, Goebbels had now gained one of Europe’sfinest public-address system technicians).42 ‘With fanaticism like this,’ wroteGoebbels afterwards, ‘a nation can and will rouse itself again.’ He attributed thepublic curiosity to the S.A. mutiny. ‘The S.A. must