Goebbels20: The Big LieFOR Joseph Goebbels the years of poverty and struggle seemed to be over, thoughhe still had no formal government office.He was now thirty-five, his life already three-quarters spent. ‘G.’ wroteone official English visitor at this time, ‘has charm and a captivating smile and manner’—surprising, he felt, in one described as the cruellest man in the whole movement.The Englishman detected in Goebbels something of an intensely enthusiasticundergraduate, but also a dangerous fanatic.1 Franz von Papen was struck by thewide mouth and intelligent eyes.2 General Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s new defenceminister, felt that Goebbels was convinced of his own superiority.3 Goebbels’staff would find him a disagreeable employer. He rarely showed gratitude, and preferredcruel sarcasm to measured criticism. ‘A man with many enemies,’ concludedBlomberg, ‘Goebbels had no friends at all.’Wisely, most of his enemies had fled. Albert Grzesinski had escaped to Paris wherehe was even now composing memoirs in which Dr Goebbels would not fare well atall.4 Dr Bernhard Weiss had fled to Czechoslovakia. With their departure, Goebbelswas at a rather loose end. ‘G.,’ Alfred Rosenberg would write, ‘was a discharger ofpurulence. Until 1933 he squirted it at Isidor Weiss. With him gone, he began todischarge it over us instead.’5 The publication in 1934 of his opinionated memoirs‘Kaiserhof’ would infuriate the other top Nazis. ‘They used to say that the falsificationof history begins after fifty years,’ Ribbentrop would snort to his family. ‘Wrong—itstarts at once!’ (Goebbels had not mentioned him.)6GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 291Not that the diaries are devoid of inherent usefulness. While the later volumes utilizedrepeatedly the same stereotype phrases, this very ossification enables us to deducewhere perhaps other unwritten events need to be suspected between the lines.They lauded Magda Goebbels so cloyingly that one suspects that Goebbels’ occasionalnocturnal Spazierfahrt (motor outing) through Berlin was designed to grabmore than just the ‘breath of fresh air’ to which he referred. The diaries portray himat other times as flogging himself to the limits of endurance for the cause. (‘Twelvehours non-stop sitting at my desk today,’ he writes in July 1933.) But as the yearspassed the pages filled with unbecoming references to villas, boats, and motor cars—the latter evidently donated by the party’s benefactors in the Daimler-Benz company.‘Kaiserhof’ made him briefly a wealthy man. Tax returns among his papers indicatethat his literary royalties total 34,376 marks in fiscal 1933, 134,423 in 1934 (theyear of ‘Kaiserhof’), 62,190 in 1935, 63,654 in 1936, and 66,905 the year after that.7He had firmly hitched his star to his Führer (still often referred to as ‘Hitler’ in the1933 diary). Over the following years Goebbels consolidated their personal relationship,becoming a regular lunch guest at the Chancellery, where he delighted theothers with his repartee. ‘Magda exaggerates so much,’ he teased her in front of theothers. ‘She won’t admit we live at No.2 Reichskanzler Platz, but No.20!’ Far intothe night he and Hitler yarned about cars and kings and criminals. ‘And how welaughed,’ he recorded after one session that summer. ‘Until my jawbone ached.’In September 1933 Hitler turned the first sod to begin work on Germany’s autobahnnetwork; Goebbels saw the crowds cheering and weeping.8 Often Hitler revealedto him his secret plans—to unite and expand the Reich under one centralgovernment, but also eventually to create a Senate to provide the checks and balancesthat even a dictatorship must need. After President Hindenburg’s demise, theyagreed, Hitler himself should become head of state, with a popular vote to confirm itwhen that time came.9292 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHON that historic day when Adolf Hitler came to power Goebbels stood next to him inthe Chancellery window looking down on his six-hour torchlight parade. One millionBerliners surged past them, holding up their children to their new leader, to thethump and blare of brass bands. A radio truck arrived and Goebbels spoke a runningcommentary; he found that speaking into a radio microphone took some gettingused to. ‘It is a moving,’ he ended, ‘for me to to see how in this city where we begansix years ago with just a handful of people, how in this city the entire public hasarisen and is marching past below—workers and citizens and farmers and studentsand soldiers… Truly one can say, Germany is awakening.’ Only Munich and Stuttgartrefused to carry the broadcast.10Chilling news awaiting him on his return home at three A.M. Assassins had gunneddown his twenty-four year old S.A. officer Hans-Eberhard Maikowski and a policeconstable.11 Maikowski, a veteran of the Pharus rooms battle, had marched at thehead of his No.33 Sturm in that evening’s parade. Hitler told Goebbels that he wantedno reprisals. He wanted the Red Terror to ‘burn out first’—a phrase which Goebbelssubtly changed in ‘Kaiserhof’, the published text, to ‘flare up.’ He had six hundredthousand Berliners line the rain-sodden streets of Berlin for the funeral of Maikowskiand the policeman. The Berlin S.A.’s scoundrelly commander Count von Helldorffstrutted at the head of the parade; he had put all bars off limits to his S.A. as a markof respect that day but he himself was sighted that evening in full uniform in a particularlysleazy Kurfürstendamm bar.12Still feeble from her illness, Magda came home on February 1. Goebbels broke itto her that he was not included in Hitler’s Cabinet. ‘I am being frozen out,’ he wrotein his diary. Although Hitler had mentioned a propaganda ministry several times inrecent months, he had now given to the tedious and narrow-minded ex-schoolteacherBernhard Rust the responsibility for culture and higher education in Prussia. Goebbelsheard whispers that he was to be fobbed off with the job of radio commissioner.‘They’ve stood me in the corner,’ he recorded privately. ‘Fat lot of good Hitler is.’Hitler did not even plan to take any steps as yet against the press. ‘We want to lullthem into a sense of security,’ mimicked Goebbels. Things got worse. On February 5GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 293Hitler appointed the financial journalist Walther Funk his state-secretary for ‘pressand propaganda.’ Meanwhile throughout
