Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

enigma still,often inexplicably unpunctual for their dates. Once she tells him that ‘a stranger’ haswarned her that Dr Goebbels is a Jew, and has shown her an original letter ‘stolenfrom the gau HQ files’ written a decade earlier by Goebbels to Director Cohnen, afamily friend at Mönchen Gladbach. Cohnen was the gauleiter’s real father, suggeststhe stranger, who also mentions Peter Simons, the husband of Goebbels’ maternalGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 239aunt Anna. ‘This is what I have to put up with,’ winces Goebbels, puzzling over thestranger’s identity.29 (The ‘stolen’ document is probably a product of Magda’s ownfeline dustbinning around while working in his personal archives, but this evidentlydoes not occur to him.)The two spend Whitsun on her ex-husband’s estate Severin in Mecklenburg. GüntherQuandt’s manager, a leading local Nazi, lets them in. Alone at last they iron out theirremaining differences. Sometimes she still wounds him with an ill-considered word,but the wound soon heals.30 He longs for a hearth and home. He begins talking aboutsetting up a matrimonial home when victory is theirs; this is comfortingly vague, andshe goes along with that.31 After he returns to Berlin—alone, as she has asked to stayon for another day in this country idyll—he writes, ‘When we have conquered theReich we shall become man and wife.’32 In fact Magda probably entertained little realambition to harness her uxorial ambitions to such an uncertain chariot. He writesher a real love letter—the first such essay in ten years.33 Visiting her to give her aclock a few days later, he is thunderstruck to find the Shadow still living there; Magdatells him that since the student will not budge, she is moving out and will have thepolice evict the trespasser.34 As a sop to Goebbels, she agrees he shall have the rightto walk young Harald to the Herder school across the square.After speaking at Erfurt Goebbels meets Anka Stalherm and breaks the news aboutMagda to her. He is pleased to see that Anka goes to pieces. She wants not to believehim, thinks she can hook him back even now. But it is too late—‘I am with Magda,’he vows to his diary, ‘and shall stay with her.’35 When his latest book ‘Struggle forBerlin’ appears later in the year, he will have it mailed to Anka with a typed note(‘Dear Party-member…’) signed by his secretary.36THE police lifted the speaking ban on May 1, 1931; and how the thousands cheeredwhen he rose at the Sport Palace that evening. But the ban had hurt. His gau was indebt.37 He decided on a two-month plan to double membership. By mid June 1931 ithad risen to about twenty thousand.38240 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHAngriff too was entering troubled times. On May 4 the editor Dagobert Dürr hadfinally begun serving his two-month sentence for libelling Dr Weiss. Each visit in jailwas a reminder to Goebbels of the volcano rim around which he himself was dancing.39 He found he had much more in common with the ordinary S.A. men than withthe party’s self-important artistocracy. ‘We are still a worker’s party,’ he wrote. Göringirritated him the most. At a rally in Saxony he cold-shouldered the former aviator.‘He’s sick,’ he felt. ‘Looks a wreck.’40 ‘He really does go creeping up Hitler’s arse,’ headded crudely. ‘Were he not so fat he might succeed, too.’ In Munich for a leadershipconference on June 9 however he found himself arguing alone against this ‘disgusting… big-mouthed slob.’ ‘I have few friends in the party,’ he realised, yet again. ‘Virtuallyjust Hitler.’41AS the recession bit deeper, the central parties in the government flailed at the partieson the left and right. On Jun 16 Brüning enacted an emergency press decree. Berlin’spolice chief Grzesinski boasted, ‘My powers have been augmented just as I desired.’The next fourteen days would see the prohibition of Angriff, the VB and a stringof other papers, Nazi and bourgeois alike. The press protested vigorously. When theFrankfurter Post was banned, the rival Frankfurter Zeitung bravely reprinted the offendingsentences for its readers to judge.42Angriff reappeared on the nineteenth. That same evening, citing a remark in thatday’s newspaper, Grzesinski maliciously banned the next day’s summer solstice rallyon which Goebbels had vested all his hopes of restoring the gau’s finances. Goebbelsfrantically offered to allow the hated red-black-and-gold colours of the Republic tobe flown instead of the Nazi flag, but still failed to get the ban lifted.43 He rejigged theentire event, organizing simultaneous functions in seven different halls for the Saturdayevening. ‘We escaped,’ he wrote, ‘with just a black eye.’44Hitler himself started spending more time in Berlin. Police agents sighted himwith Goebbels at the Kaiserhof on May 9.45 Jealous of their intimacy, Goebbels’ rivalscontinued to spread rumours of his imminent resignation. He published a defiantdenial.46 That same evening he staged the gau’s annual general meting at the SportGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 241Palace—the first time that any party had dared to hire the huge arena for such apurpose. He blamed Himmler,who had taken over leadership of the S.S. from Heiden,for the rumours; he found that the S.S. was now spying on his HQ and demanded,visiting Munich on July 2, that they desist. After speaking to forty thousand at Dresden’scycle-racetrack47 he set of on a month’s seaside vacation; he took Magda—‘sheis a lady, a woman, and a lover’—and a secretary Ilsa Bettge whose role was lessclearly defined.With Goebbels temporarily absent, on August 1 Hitler appointed the virtuallyunknown journalist Dr Otto Dietrich as chief of his new Press Office. Dietrich, sixweeks older than Goebbels, had got to know Hitler only recently, while working forthe Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung. Goebbels loathed all journalists; but for Dietrich hewould reserve a very special fury until the end.48THAT July he spends five weeks with Magda in a cottage on the cliffs at Sankt Peterlistening to storm rains pounding the roof while the gray-white waves of the NorthSea lash the rocks below. He makes love to her, he plays the piano, and he begins anew book, ‘The Struggle for Berlin,’ dictating a new chapter every day or so.Unemployment has passed the five million mark. Brüning’s miseries are