Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

music toGoebbels’ ears. He bickers sometimes with Magda, probing remorselessly into thedarker crannies of her past. He dredges up noisome episodes, which he attributes toher wayward manner and tries to forget.49 The more she teases him with stories ofpast lovers, the more helplessly jealous he becomes. It seems that some of these oldflames are not extinguished even now.50 No matter how loving Magda is, he cannotforget that before him she loved another. ‘She has loved too much,’ he writes, ‘andkeeps telling me only the half of it. And I lie awake until the small hours lashed byjealousy.’51 Driven by these powerful emotional engines he has completed three hundredpages of the manuscript when he returns to Berlin: he truly loves Magda, but ashadow still darkens the horizon.IMPORTANT new faces met him at his gau HQ. The dynamic, heavily built, square-242 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHjawed Karl Hanke, aged twenty-seven, was his new chief of organisation.52 He had adry, ironic manner that belied his tough, non-nonsense attitude. Berlin’s new propagandachief was Karoly Kampmann; determined to force back to rising Munich tideof bourgeois Reaktion—best translated by the word ‘diehards’—Goebbels orderedKampmann to concentrate his efforts on recruiting new members from Berlin’s factoryfloors.53 Millions of leaflets and stickers were printed with the new slogan, ‘Intothe factories!’54 That was the only place, Goebbels would write, where the workerscould be won over—and he intended to gain ten thousand new members in the nextthree months.55 In consequence of this shift of emphasis to the factory floor, theregular pace of his public propaganda slowed down that autumn; in October, his gauwould stage only 125 public meetings.56DURING 1931 the political violence worsened. Since May 1930 there had been twentyninepolitical murders in Berlin alone—including twelve communists, six Nazis,one Stahlhelm member, two Social Democrats, and four policemen.57 In July 1931Ernst Röhm put a new man in charge of Berlin’s S.A., the thirty-four year old aristocratCount Wolf Heinrich von Helldorff. Helldorff had only joined the party in August1930; Goebbels, meeting him a month later, had not liked him at the time. Awhiff of perfume caught his nostrils, and he wondered if Helldorff were a poofterlike the rest. He had since then tackled Hitler about Röhm’s perversion, about whicha Munich newspaper had made headlines in June.58 Goebbels concluded thatHelldorff’s appointment was a back-door affair with Röhm and his bi-sexual adjutantKarl Ernst. ‘The future of the S.A. looks grim to me,‘ wrote Goebbels. ‘§175[the clause of the penal code on homosexuality] casts its shadow right across it.’59Yet he soon came round to liking, even adoring, Helldorff, forming an enduringfriendship with the scoundrel which, in the words of the Spanish proverb, tells usmuch about Goebbels himself. Helldorff was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, abully, a Jew-baiter, and a murderer. Police records showed one warrant against himin 1922 for manslaughter, and another for carrying an unlicensed weapon.60 Born onOctober 14, 1896, the arrogant, wastrel son of a blue-blooded landowner, he hadGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 243not bothered to join the party until August 1, 1930. During the Stennes revolt he hadsided with the insurgents, saying ‘Hitler is a traitor.’61 None of this appeared to botherGoebbels. Early in September 1931 he briefed Helldorff and his chief of staff KarlErnst to stage an operation—ostensibly a demonstration by unemployed—to roughup Jews along Kurfürstendamm on their New Year’s day, Yom Kippur.62 On the chosenday, September 12 Helldorff cruised up and down the boulevard in his greenOpel, according to police reports, directing his stormtroopers, who were disguisedas ordinary passers-by, to set on anybody who looked like a Jew.63 The police howeverhad been tipped off—one disgruntled S.A. man in Potsdam said later that it wasodd that the police learned what had happened at a secret briefing attended only byGoebbels, Helldorff, and Ernst64—and arrested Helldorff with Ernst, another memberof his staff Heini Gewehr and thirty-four other S.A. men.65 (More likely theinformer was Goebbels’ own secretary Ilse Stahl.66) The police docket six days laterdescribed Helldorff’s private life as messy—he was swamped with unpaid bills, currentlyseparated from his wife, and not on speaking terms with his family, and he hadall but bankrupted his family estate at Wolmistedt. The court sentenced him to sixmonths in prison as ringleader of the riot but he did not serve one day.67 At Helldorff’sappeal in January Goebbels stood by his new friend, screamed at the prosecutor DrStenig, outrageously insulted the court, demanded that the chief of police producehis informant as a witness, and flatly refused to testify otherwise, bringing about thecollapse of the prosecution case and earning a fine of five hundred marks for contempt.Helldorff’s sentence was reduced to a piffling fine of one hundred marks.68(His lawyer was Roland Freisler, whom he would meet again under different circumstancesafter July 20, 1944.) Helldorff’s streetfighters were less fortunate: theyreceived prison sentences of up to two years for affray.69 This inequality widened thebreach between Goebbels and the S.A. men, and that winter saw several intemperateleaflets circulating in Berlin claiming that he and Helldorff had left them in thelurch.70His attitude toward the S.A. officers became ambivalent. He began sniping againstRöhm.71 But he kept up his support for the ‘army’s’ rank and file. On September 11,244 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH1931—the day before the Kurfürstendamm riot—he resorted to his old propagandatricks at a Sport Palace fund-raiser for the S.A. clinic, at which he presented sixrecent S.A. casualties.On Goebbels’ instructions [wrote one of the six] we were given brand newwhite hospital gowns and the staff at the Party clinic began to bandage us. One ofus who just had a bad headache was given a gigantic turban bandage. Another …who had been kicked in the stomach was given a large and totally pointless bandagearound his abdomen. As we entered the Sport Palace it was announced thatwe were the ‘victims of political terrorism.’ The resulting applause was deafening.72Three days after this, Goebbels was delivering the graveside eulogy for an S.A.man,Hermann Thielsch. On the twentieth he spoke at Brunswick when the new Naziminister of the interior Dietrich Klagges was sworn in. He harangued factory cellofficials at