Goebbels19: ‘It’s all Fixed!’WE have just completed,’ reported Louis P. Lochner in December 1932,‘one of the hardest months of reporting in my career: those days whenthe Kaiserhof had to be watched every hour to see what Hitler was going to do nextabout his bid for power; then the days during which the von Schleicher cabinet wasformed after the wily general had won the race against von Papen; still later, the newReichstag with its flying spittoons, chairs, desks, and chandeliers as “impressive” arguments—I tell you,’ Lochner added to his family, ‘we had no end of excitement.’1Goebbels had inevitably neglected the provincial election in Thuringia and the party’svote there slumped by forty percent. Wakening to the realisation that the Naziparty was in danger of electoral extinction, he took immediate action to revitalizethe propaganda campaign: blaming Lippert for the tactless remarks about Strasser,he replaced him as editor of Angriff by Kampmann.2 Hanke told him that the deputychief of national propaganda, Heinz Franke, had allowed his Munich organisation togo to seed. Goebbels replaced him with Wilhelm Haegert, a sound and popular attorneyon his own legal staff.3After consultation with Goebbels, on December 15 Hitler drafted a memorandumexplaining how the party was to pack more punch into the election battle.4In the first two weeks of Schleicher’s chancellorship a quarter-million more Germanshad been thrown out of work. On December 15 the general delivered an insipidbroadcast on his economic programme. Goebbels wrote a caustic commentaryGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 285in Angriff entitled ‘The Programme without a Programme.’ The people were now tooweak, he wrote there a few days later, even to clench their fists.5As he toured the gau’s Christmas parties at the historic Pharus rooms and theVeterans building, he found worse scenes of poverty than ever before.6RETURNING home immediately after the Strasser brouhaha he has found Magda feelingill. She is pregnant again. He is still madly in love with her—Magda tells Ello thattheir honeymoon is going to last ten more years yet.7 Her husband worries constantlyabout her as he mounts his new propaganda campaign. His hours grow longerand longer. Sometimes he creeps in at three A.M.; when Magda weakly scolds him hebrings her roses. Her illness will not go away. When, at some of the Christmas parties,he glances at the beautiful society women, Providence immediately raps hisknuckles. Magda collapses on Christmas Eve and is borne off in floods of tears witha miscarriage. ‘Just perfect,’ he curses in his diary. ‘Now everybody else has theirgifts and fare, let my own Christmas begin!’8 He and Harald set up a Christmas treeoutside her ward and wheel the whole glittering contraption in.Then, thrusting aside all the trappings of Christmas, he sketches out for Magda ona white-lacquered clinic stool his plan for the upcoming election campaign in littleLippe. The Nazi party will focus its entire national propaganda machinery on the tinyrural constituency, like a burning glass. None of the other parties is bothering withLippe’s 150,000 voters.9 He has Hitler alone speak at sixteen meetings there.Hitler invites the Goebbels family to the Obersalzberg. Leaving Magda in the clinic,Goebbels takes Harald down there on then twenty-eighth but the news from Berlinsteadily worsens and he begins to brood upon the unimaginable, a future withoutMagda. He pays scant attention to the seismic sounds of fresh political upheaval—the renewed billets doux from Papen and Alvensleben to Hitler. All joy has left thepolitical fray. New Year’s Eve brings word of a relapse and of Magda refusing to eat.The first hours of 1933 see him hurrying by sled and car to Munich; as he waits forthe overnight train to Berlin the power of prayer returns to him. ‘I am nothing withouther,’ he writes. The clinic tells him by phone that her fever is worsening. She is at286 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHdeath’s door. ‘Is this how 1933 is to begin? Horrifying! Even so, I shall stand andfight.’ The next morning he arrives to find the crisis over. Magda lies there weeping,with intravenous tubes still connected to her arm, but the fever has passed on.10Over the next weeks she makes a slow recovery, and Hitler often comes to see her.FOR an analysis of the epoch-making events of January 1933 the handwritten diariesof Dr Goebbels, preserved in Moscow, are an indispensible tool.11 For a biographerhowever their content is less revealing than their structure. True, he was preoccupiedwith Magda’s illness; her gynæcologist Professor Walter Stoeckel had alreadywritten her off, it turned out.12 As Hitler’s and Göring’s meetings resumed withSchleicher, Hugenberg, and Papen, Goebbels dutifully recorded them—but only atsecond or third hand. On January 4 he launched the Lippe campaign: he now discoveredrural Germany, speaking in tiny farming villages sometimes of only a few housesand barns surrounded by fields glistening with snow. Meanwhile Hitler and Himmlersecretly met Papen at the Cologne home of a young banker friend of the party.13Briefing Goebbels on this meeting, Hitler said that the ex-chancellor still claimedHindenburg’s ear and was now willing to offer Hitler the chancellorship in returnfor the vice-chancellor’s office for himself.14 But much depended on the Nazis winninga convincing victory at Lippe.Goebbels shuttled between Berlin and Lippe. Leftists had murdered another youngNazi, the tailor’s apprentice Walter Wagnitz, on new Year’s Day. Goebbels gave him afuneral fit for a prince, parading the coffin for three hours in drizzling rain past ahundred thousand party members and formations of the S.A., S.S., and Hitler Youth.The figure of Gregor Strasser still haunted the pages of his diary. Unlike Stennes,the man still enjoyed wide support in the party’s ranks. Even Hitler was not as hostileto him as Goebbels would have liked. Indeed, Hitler sent the gauleiter of Saxonyto hint to Strasser that he could let bygones be bygones even now.15 At
