Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

of organisation KonstantinHierl wrote to Hitler warning that everybody felt that if he clung on to Röhm itwould damage the masses’ belief in the purity of the movement.5BY 1932 Goebbels’ fame was spreading beyond Germany’s frontiers. Famous Americanjournalist H. R. Knickerbocker, writing from Berlin for the New York EveningPost, singled him out as the ‘greatest master of public management’ that Europe hadever known. To Goebbels, he wrote, went all the credit for Hitler’s election successes.‘He is the best journalist in the party, and the best orator.’ His election billboardswere masterpieces. ‘In each election,’ wrote Knickerbocker, ‘he discernedwith uncanny accuracy the precise shade of appeal to the greatest mass.’6Goebbels had lost his appeal against the two month sentence for libelling Dr Weiss.and a warrant had been issued on February 11; on the twentieth Dr Bernhard Weisswas informed that the sentence could now be enforced—as soon as Goebbels losthis immunity.7 Meanwhile, on April 25 supreme court officials from Leipzig servedanother forty-page indictment on Goebbels, this time for high treason. This documenttoo he shrugged off.8The manœuvering between the Nazis and a camarilla of army officers had begun.Goebbels’ diaries show that the negotiations were conducted on Hitler’s side byRöhm, Göring, and Frick, while General von Schleicher operated through his colleagueWerner Count von Alvensleben, whom Goebbels identified only in his unpublisheddiary.9 As the regime’s position weakened in May 1932 Hitler and Goebbelswho had been conferring in Munich hurried back to Berlin. A minister resigned andHitler, living in the Kaiserhof or with the Goebbels’, again negotiated with Schleicherand Hindenburg’s emissaries. Power seemed so near to the Nazi leaders, and yet sounattainable. When the Reichstag belatedly resumed Göring and Strasser spearheadedthe attack on Brüning’s ruinous financial policies. Brüning survived the Nazi motionof no confidence, this time by 286 votes to 259. The gap was narrowing all the time.270 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHThe next day, May 12, saw scandalous scenes in the Reichstag. After Nazi deputiesroughed up an opponent, Dr Bernhard Weiss and his police officers stormed in andarrested several of them. Goebbels was thrilled at ‘Isidor’s’ blunder in violating thesovereignty of their parliament. The entire press echoed him. Groener resigned asdefence minister. The police arrested Strasser that evening on his train heading backto Munich, and Weiss issued a libel writ against Goebbels for insulting him as a Jew.10Clinging grimly to the tattered remnants of office, Brüning still refused to resign,adjourning the Reichstag instead until June. Hitler was determined to force a newelection, so that his party could bring its now massive voting strength to bear.For all his own public triumphs, Goebbels’ own finances at this time were on aknife-edge. Angriff was having to pay off his costs in one libel action by monthlyinstalments of twenty marks. His lawyer tried to get the balance of 598 marks annulled.11 His accountant declared a tax demand of 564 marks for 1931 to be totallybeyond his means, and asked if he could pay one hundred marks a month; Goebbelsindignantly penciled in the margin, ‘Pay—what from?’12 Magda’s lucrative alimonypayments from Quandt had ended of course with her new marriage.Goebbels evidently refused however to touch the colossal funds that he raised forthe election campaigns. After his private diary recorded on May 22 a visit from somegentlemen from Mercedes, the gau HQ was suddenly awash with funds. Magda, nowin her fifth month of pregnancy, rented a little summer cottage in the middle of anorchard at Caputh, near Gatow, on Lake Schwielow. In this idyllic setting they spenttheir summer nights while frogs bleeped and swallows flitted through their openbedroom windows.13AFTER Dr Brüning resigned on May 30, 1932, the clever, foxy career politician Franzvon Papen was appointed interim chancellor. The election was set down for the lastday of July. Goebbels called his staff out to a council of war. ‘We went over theindividual drafts of the election propaganda,’ wrote Kampmann, his propaganda chief,‘in a little summer cottage … that he had rented at Caputh for his few remaininghours of relaxation.’14GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 271Once again it was Goebbels who masterminded the nationwide campaign, fromHitler’s fifty-city aerial tour of Germany right down to the tiniest personal detailslike obtaining the names of eight Berlin Nazis in prison and in hospital and dividingbetween them the latest meagre royalty cheque from his book The Unknown S.A. Man‘as a small token,’ he wrote them, ‘of recognition.’15He did not intend to allow ‘Isidor’ to disrupt this campaign and started a determinedcampaign to get him and Grzesinski sacked. Papen had appointed a bumblingweakling, Baron von Gayl, as minister of the interior. Hitler got him to lift the eightweekold ban on the S.A. and S.S. and Goebbels publicly called on Gayl to ‘get rid ofMessrs. Grzesinski and Weiss.’16 Under Nazi pressure Papen repealed virtually all thebans. A Nazi was appointed Speaker of the Prussian parliament: under his dictate,this body set up a formal commission of inquiry into Weiss’ activities. ‘Revenge is arepast best served up cold,’ wrote Goebbels yet again. Weiss responded by banningAngriff for five days.17A month remained before the election day. This time the Nazis enjoyed limitedaccess to the air waves18. Goebbels scripted a broadcast on ‘National character as abasis for national culture.’ It was stripped of its venom however by the radio censorsbefore he could broadcast it.19 The final list of Nazi candidates for Berlin and Potsdamagain poorly justified the claim to be a workers’ party: of the forty-one local names,six were office workers, five businessmen, two former police officers, and amongthe rest a civil servant, teacher, bookseller, pharmacist, tailor, librarian, and bankclerk; only five were truly working class.20 All of these candidates, including Goebbelshimself, had to sign a five-point declaration for Hitler’s personal files, of which thefirst two points read as follows:1. I swear that I have no links or relations with the Jews;2. I swear that I hold no directorships in banks or other corporations.21With the irksome ban on the S.A. lifted by the obliging Franz von Papen, theBrownshirt armies marched again. For two hours twenty thousand marched pastGoebbels and Strasser in Dessau on July