Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

for all time with a share of the blame for Papen’s failure.In the government quarter at midday on August 13 both Schleicher and Papen urgedhim to accept the position of vice-chancellor. Hitler refused, and Goebbels had toback him.33 Later Hitler took Frick and Röhm over to see the president; he again leftempty-handed. Frustrated and angry, the Nazi leaders foregathered at Goebbels’apartment. Typewriters rattled out communiqués. The S.A. commanders were strainingat the bit, they wanted action. Together with Röhm, Hitler briefed them to toethe line. He left for Bavaria, leaving Goebbels in Berlin.It was a totally unexpected impasse. The Nazis were the largest party: they hadfollowed the path of legality until now: yet the System was thwarting them onceGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 275more. Goebbels consoled his embittered lieutenants and left to vacation atHeiligendamm. Once, the millionaire banker Emil Georg von Stauss of the DeutscheBank invited him over to his motor yacht.34 But Goebbels’ mind was in a turmoil. Hefeared that the Nazis’ share of the vote had peaked, and might now rapidly decline.The Reichstag resumed on August 30. Its members elected Hermann Göring asSpeaker, a powerful position indeed. Göring invited Hitler, Röhm, and Goebbels upto his luxurious new apartment on Kaiserdamm to discuss tactics.35 They agreed thatat the very next Reichstag session on September 12 they must force an immediatedissolution. The new election would be held on November 6. The party was now ina precarious position, sliding in the polls and with its campaign coffers dangerouslylow. Goebbels ordered Angriff to appear twice daily instead of once. He organized aconsumer boycott of opposition newspapers. He had no mercy on them. When anewspaper impugned Magda’s honour he sent an S.S. officer to treat the journalistconcerned with a riding whip; in best Prussian style, the S.S. man left his visitingcard on the bleeding offender.Magda had given birth to their first child on September 1, 1932. She had hoped fora boy to call Hellmut, to fill the hole left in her heart by her stepson’s tragic death inParis years before. But it was a girl, so ‘Hellmut’ became Helga. The infant’s nocturnalwails kept the household awake. Goebbels, a novice in the art of parenthood,complained unfeelingly and left Magda in tears.36COUNT Helldorff took the breakdown of negotiations particularly hard. ‘He’s onlytough,’ observed Goebbels shrewdly, ‘when the going’s good.’37 He moved his gauHQ for one last time, to a building in Voss Strasse barely three hundred yards fromthe Reich Chancellery. He had come a long way since the ‘opium den’ six yearsbefore. He began planning ahead listing whom he would need to take over the radiosystem. Hitler again flew a whistlestop tour of fifty cities. Goebbels followed in anopen plane, his face anæsthetised with cold. When his graphic artist Schweitzer(‘Mjölnir’) showed him his latest poster designs, he felt that he was running outsteam: but then so was everybody. The Goebbels Diary for the last weeks before the276 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHNovember 1932 election lacked the sense of urgency and intrigue that had characterizedit in July and August. Only rarely did anything of the old fun element surface inthis campaign. He ordered the less sophisticated marxist districts plastered with stickersreading simply VOTE LIST 1 AGAIN (‘without stating which party that is’).38 He luredthe German National party (D.N.V.P.) into accepting a public debate with him: inthe hall the opponents provided him with only two hundred tickets, an inconveniencewhich Goebbels circumvented with the aid of Angriff’s printers, who turnedout two thousand more. When his opponents arrived, they found his men had takenover most of the hall.39On October 20 he ordered the Jewish problem placed more firmly to the forefront—citing Papen’s Jewish adviser Jakob Goldschmidt as a case in point.40 In theSport Palace four days later he heaped scorn on the D.N.V.P. and immediately issuedthroughout Germany a dramatic recording of the two hour speech, complete withthe intervention of Papen’s police and the four-minute ovation by his twenty-thousandlisteners at its end—’the recording,’ he stated, ‘gives an impressive picture ofthe forcefulness, strength, and majesty of our movement.’41 He ordered gau officialsto start systematic rumours that Hindenburg had already written off Papen. Afterquoting with strange relish from the D.N.V.P.’s organ (‘Goebbels is a male RosaLuxemburg—neither a pretty sight; both are of Jewish countenance. He is impelledby the same burning ambition to incite and to lie’42) he ordered his troops to refrainfrom similar personal insults. However, disguised as harmless civilians, his officialswere to cluster around Nazi poster hoardings singing the party’s praises.43Towards the campaign’s end there was an odd episode: Goebbels decided that hisNazis were to back a communist organised Berlin transport strike. It was as thoughhe had lost sight of the Nazi party’s larger election horizon. His men had heavilyinfiltrated the B.V.G., the capital’s public transport authority. The transport workersprobably had legitimate grievances, and Goebbels had remained at heart a socialistagitator. Kampmann, his propaganda chief would claim that the strike was actuallyquite popular.44 But the public’s backing of the Nazi party melted away as all theusual brutish signs of union intimidation appeared, with the pickets this time wear-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 277ing Nazi armbands. Together the Nazi and communist strikers terrorized strike breakers,ripped up tramlines, and wrecked buses. The l;iberal rightwing Deutsche AllgemeineZeitung expressed concern about the spread of class-warfare to the extreme right.45‘The bourgeois press,’ Goebbels would write in ‘Kaiserhof’, ‘invented the lie that Iinstigated this strike without the Führer’s knowledge or consent … although I am inhourly phone contact with the Führer.’ This self-defence is to be regarded with asmuch scepticism as his claim that the Berlin public displayed an ‘admirable solidarity’with the strikers. Less hollow rings his excuse that to have withheld support fromthe strikers would have confounded all their recruiting efforts among Berlin’s workers.Perhaps Goebbels had seen a chance for the Nazis to seize control of the strike andshortcut the tedious democratic process by expanding it into a full-blooded coup.But the strike backfired badly on their election campaign. Nationwide, two millionvoters deserted the party, costing them thirty-four of their 230 Reichstag seats. Thecommunists gained