Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

tomarry him.20GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 219Back in Berlin Quandt had settled down and purchased a roomy winter home inCharlottenburg, while keeping on their new villa at New Babelsberg for the summer.Magda took refuge from her boredom in books—buying a ten-volume Buddhistcatechism one day in Leipzig—and wafted from store to store, from one emptysocial event to the next until she could stand it no longer.21 In the summer of 1929she embarked on an affair with a thirty-year old law student, a Jew.22 She pleaded invain with Quandt to release her. Hoping to catch him in some infidelity, she had himwatched, but equally in vain. The student was a perfect and attentive lover, plying herwith flowers, and she accompanied him on a trip to the Hotel Dreesen at Godesberg.This time however Quandt had hired the detectives; after reading their report, hethrew her out.Penniless and unemployed Magda returned to her mother while she negotiated asettlement with Quandt. Ello Quandt, her sister-in-law, advised her to blackmail heraging husband about a bundle of papers she had found.23 It proved unnecessary, however.He remained a perfect gentleman, agreed to a divorce, and willingly acceptedthe fiction that he had contributed to the breakdown of the marriage. ‘Do we not all,’he would write, ‘at times assume the blame, when in fact we are not in the wrong?’24Until she remarry he granted her custody of their son, a lavish four-thousand markmonthly allowance, and fifty thousand marks to purchase a house. She leased a sevenroomluxury apartment at No.2 Reichskanzler Platz in West Berlin.There could be no question of marrying her unemployed student lover—marriageto anybody would cut off her alimony cornucopia. So she lived, loved, and travelledaround as her law student’s paramour while privately planning her future—withouthim. Drinking heavily one evening at the Nordic Ring club she met the HohenzollernPrince August-Wilhelm (Goebbels’ S.A. comrade, ‘Auwi’). The prince suggestedthat the party needed people like her. She heard Goebbels speak soon after; fascinated,she enrolled at the Nazi party’s minuscule West End branch run by the youngengine-driver’s son Karl Hanke. Her Party membership dated from September 1,1930.25 She found herself taking charge of the local Women’s Order. From there shegravitated to headquarters at No.10 Hedemann Strasse. With her above-average edu-220 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHcation she was appointed secretary to Dr Hans Meinshausen, Goebbels’ deputy asgauleiter.26Goebbels, it must be said, had little going for him at this time. He was a cripple; histotal monthly salary was one-eighth of Magda’s monthly alimony; but she heard himspeak again, and she passed him once as he came limping up the steps. ‘I thought Imight almost catch fire,’ she told her mother excitedly, ‘under this man’s searching,almost devouring, gaze.’27 She told Ello Quandt that to judge by his suit Goebbelswas obviously in need of, well, mothering. A few weeks later it struck Günther Quandt,who still frequently met her, that she talked of nothing but the Nazis. ‘At first Ithought it was just a passing fad for the oratorical gift of Dr Goebbels,’ he wrote. Herlaw student lover also noticed, and flared that she seemed to be losing her head tothat clubfooted loudmouth.‘You’re mad,’ she snapped. ‘I could never love Goebbels!’GOEBBELS had other preoccupations right now. At the end of January 1931 an S.A.man had gunned down the Berlin communist Max Schirmer; four days later Nazisshot dead the communist Otto Grüneberg in a Charlottenburg street fight.28 OnFebruary 4 police chief Grzesinski banned Angriff for two weeks. Goebbels was alsodown with ’flu. What sickened him even more than this was how close to the communistshe found his position really was. After one Reichstag interruption on thefifth a Social Democrat rounded on him with the stinging rejoinder, ‘—That is froma gentleman … fully aware that Messrs Hitler, Frick, Jung, etc., have been to theRuhr several times to explain their National Socialist programme to the gentlemanof heavy industry and to demonstrate that they have nothing to fear from the NationalSocialist brand of socialism.’That day the communists in the Reichstag called for a vote of no confidence. AsWalter Ulbricht rose to speak, many of the Nazis including Goebbels drifted out.The communists taunted, ‘Goebbels is ducking out!’ ‘Mr Goebbels only dodges,’shouted Ulbricht, ‘when the allegations of the communists rain down on him.’ Headded to loud cheers, ‘When the boys of big business beckon, he wags his tail.’ ‘ForGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 221weeks,’ Ulbricht continued, ‘we have been asking Goebbels Ten Questions. We askedhim if it’s true that the Nazis are subsidized by heavy industry; that they haven’tbacked a single action on behalf of the unemployed; and that they have backed everyaction against the unemployed. He is too much of a coward to answer.’When Goebbels rose there were communist taunts of ‘The Race Man!’, ‘Pure racefrom head to toe,’ and ‘a real Germanic type!’‘Comrade Ulbricht asked for a clear answer to certain questions,’ Goebbels shrilled.‘He could have had this clear answer from me in front of Berlin’s assembled workersin the Friedrichshain Hall—’ amidst rising Nazi cheers, ‘—if only he hadn’t preventedit by a premature brawl.’ He accused Brüning of creating a national catastrophe:the farms were in rebellion, the middle class being ground down by inflation,the cities facing bankruptcy, the Poles bearing down on Upper Silesia, and Germanynaked and disarmed in a hostile world. Although they were the main oppositionparty, the Nazis found themselves with every newspaper except one currently banned.If the government continued to rig the rules of the Reichstag to disadvantage them,he said, people would begin to ask: ‘Why bother to convene this Reichstag at all? It’sdone nothing else in recent months but adopt emergency decrees.’ They, the opposition,might as well go on vacation. Elections had shown that their backing was stillgrowing. He confirmed however what Hitler had said in the recent supreme courthearing in Leipzig: ‘We intend to come legally to power. But what we do with thispower once we have it—that’s our own affair.’ As for Prussia, he declared a fewminutes later, ‘The conquest of the Reich takes precedence over the conquest ofPrussia—’‘In a Mercedes-Benz!’, a communist voice