Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

a sprinkling of Stennes’ supporters too). The body of Norkus, son of aworking-class Nazi from Plötzensee, was found in the entrance hall of No.4 ZwingliStrasse bleeding to death from six stab wounds. Goebbels personally inspected thescene with its twenty yard trail of dried blood and the one bloody handprint on thewhitewashed wall. After going on to the morgue he wrote these words in his newspaper:‘There in the bleak grey twilight a yellowing childish face stares with halfGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 257open, empty eyes. The delicate features have been trampled to a bloody pulp. Long,deep gashes have been torn into the thin body, a lethal wound gapes between lungsand heart.’29 The next day he buried the artist Professor Ernst Schwarz, an S.A. officergunned down in a communist ambush a week before.30ONE evening Dr Goebbels returned home excited, limped up and down chain smokingfor a while, then told Magda he had had a splendid idea. ‘Hitler himself muststand for president,’ he said. Hitler however proved unexpectedly difficult to persuade:he wanted the opposition to come out with their candidates before making uphis own mind. The other gauleiters were critical of Hitler’s reticence, and feared hewas prevaricating yet again. Hitler acted with studied calm. ‘He’s a wonderful manto work with,’ Goebbels wrote in ‘Kaiserhof’. ‘There’s no human being less equippedto be a tyrant than he.’31Still delaying his decision on February 9 Hitler reviewed fifteen thousand S.A.stormtroopers in the Sport Palace. Goebbels enthused, though only in the first editionof ‘Kaiserhof’, ‘Chief of Staff Röhm has pulled off a miracle.’ This embarrassinglaudation peared only in the first edition of ‘Kaiserhof’, and was struck out of alleditions published after June 1934.32Police chief Grzesinski gagged at the prospect of Hitler, his arch enemy, becomingpresident. This centurion of social democracy made little pretence of impartiality:‘How shameful it is,’ he declared in Leipzig, ‘that millions of Germans are trottingalong behind a foreigner… How shameful that this foreigner, Hitler, not only conductsserious talks with the government on foreign affairs, but is able to speak toforeign press representatives about Germany’s future and about Germany’s foreigninterests without somebody seeing him off with a dog-whip.’33 Dr Goebbels madehay with that remark.34 In Angriff he pointed out how often Grzesinski had bannedNazis for precisely the same kind of incitement to violence.35 ‘Let’s see,’ he crowed in‘Kaiserhof’, published when he already knew the answer, ‘which of us gets seen offwith a dog-whip out of Germany.’36258 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHHindenburg announced on February 15 that he intended to stand again. TakingHitler’s decision for granted, Goebbels began designing election posters with punchyslogans like Schluss jetzt!—‘Time’s up!’37 Hitler was still undecided. Goebbels decidedto present him with a fait accompli, subjecting him to the pressure of publicacclaim. To a cheering Sport Palace audience on February 22, Goebbels simply announcedthat Hitler would stand for president.38 Hitler’s HQ in Munich was horrifiedand issued an immediate embargo to the Party newspapers forbidding them to printGoebbels’ announcement.39 Writing in ‘Kaiserhof’ two years later Goebbels claimedthat Hitler had phoned him after the meeting to express his delight that the announcementhad gone down so well.40Whatever the truth of this self-serving statement, on February 23, speaking in aReichstag building surrounded by riot police, Groener announced the election dateas March the Thirteenth. After that, speaking on behalf of the Nazis, Dr Goebbelslaunched into an hour-long assault on Dr Brüning, seated stony faced and with armsfolded near him. In one year, he said, the police had banned Angriff twelve times;eight times the courts had ruled these bans illegal. ‘The Illustrierte Beobachter,’ he said,‘the picture magazine of the National Socialist movement, has today been banneduntil March 13—i.e., for the whole of the election period.’ In the last three monthstwenty-four S.A. men had been murdered (‘probably by other Nazis,’ yelled a socialdemocrat) and now their police chief was talking of whipping Hitler out of Germany.No foreign power, he declared, was willing to sign treaties with Brüning—‘Because they know, Mr Reich Chancellor, that you are the Man of Yesteryear, andthat the Man of Tomorrow is coming.’To a barrage of abuse from the left, Goebbels doggedly waded into Hindenburg’sreputation. ‘Lauded by the Berlin gutter press, fêted by the Party of Deserters—’ he declaimed,flinging out a demagogic arm toward the social democrat benches. The restof his words were lost in the howl of outrage that his taunt provoked.41Furiously clanging his bell the Speaker called for silence. Dr Goebbels,’ he charged,‘you have named one of the parties present in this House the “Party of Deserters”…’GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 259The social democrats screeched at Goebbels, ‘Who deserted? Where were you!’One of them shouted, ‘You weren’t at the front for even one day!’ Amidst mountinghubbub the communist bloc leader Ernst Torgler mocked, ‘Let war veteran Goebbelsspeak.’ The social democrats were however now hysterical. ‘We were at the front!’‘He was the dodger!’ ‘Withdraw!’ ‘Behold Goebbels, the political cripple!’Barely pausing to draw breath Goebbels continued: ‘The Jews of the Berlin gutterpress have held the field marshal on high. These are the same Jews and social democrats[shouts of Sit down! and Time’s up!] who dumped buckets of mockery and scornon the field marshal in 1925.’‘Sit down! Sit down!’ roared the social democrats. ‘We’re not going to be insultedby dodgers!’The Speaker capitulated, and ordered Goebbels out of the chamber. Gregor Strasserleapt to his defence, pointing out that the gauleiter had not accused any particularparty by name. ‘When he said “Party of Deserters” only the social democrats felt thehat fitted!’42Returning to the attack the next day Goebbels complained that the illegal andunjust bans on Angriff had cost the newspaper 180,000 marks already. As for theopposition’s specious allegations that he had just slandered Hindenburg as a ‘deserter’,he retaliated by reading out devastating passages from press clippings in hisconfidential archives, reporting what the social democrat organ Vorwärts, the BerlinerMorgenzeitung, the Berliner Morgenpost and Carl Severing himself had written about thefield marshal during the previous presidential election campaign. In a brutal closingtirade he offered a string of definitions for the Nazi word System, ending with thisone: ‘Where criticising the