1938 (28 page)

Hitler, on the other hand, was always happy in Bayreuth; indeed, he was one of the few Nazi bigwigs who actually enjoyed the music. Goebbels thought it useful propaganda; the others endured it, as did the proletarian rank and file. Hitler was lodged in the splendor of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner’s home, and for the performances he sat in King Ludwig’s royal box. On Wagner’s birthday that year, he initiated the Richard Wagner Research Center under Otto Strobel, with the intention of purging any unwelcome Jews from the story of Wagner’s life and banishing the suggestion that Wagner’s father, Ludwig Geyer, might have been a Jew.

Furtwängler was being difficult about Nuremberg, as he thought it might harm his image abroad. Goebbels had no patience with his circumspection and vowed to put pressure on him. Hitler would have been able to hear the more pedestrian Franz von Hoesslin conducting
Parsifal
again in 1938. Not only was Hoesslin a quarter Jewish, he was married to the singer Erna Liebenthal, who was completely so. Rudolf Hess’s cabinet chief, Martin Bormann, was trying to have Hoesslin removed from the list of artists allowed to perform at Bayreuth, but Winifred was able to invoke Hitler’s protective aegis. It was Hitler who insisted that the festival go ahead every year, as opposed to every second one.

At a small gathering in the new Führerbau, the Czech situation was discussed with suitable outrage. According to one source Hitler merely laughed and admitted quite shamelessly that it was he, and not the Czechs, who was “the instigator of the violence.” He also boasted of the impregnability of the West Wall, which he was building so that Germans could sleep soundly. Hitler had to miss Siegfried, as he and Goebbels traveled to Breslau to see the Gymnastics Festival on the 30th, taking Unity Mitford with them. She had suffered for her love of Hitler. In June she was allegedly insulted and stripped by the Czechs. She had earned herself the name of Unity “Mitfahrt” (the Hitchhiker) as a result of her travels with the Führer.

In Breslau Hitler and Goebbels endured a four-hour parade performed by 150,000 gymnasts, but the real purpose of the visit were talks with Henlein, who was instructed to step up the Czech agitation. Goebbels found Henlein ebullient. There was no chance of negotiation: “The hatred between the Czechs and the Germans was insuperable.” “What are we going to do with six million Czechs when we have finally got the country? It is a difficult, almost insoluble question.” They flew back in Bayreuth via Nuremberg the next day to see
Götterdämmerung
with Lorenz and Ludwig Hofmann playing Hagen. A reception that night celebrated the fact that Winifred’s son Wieland had joined the Party. It was a dull evening, despite a number of animal games, with the soprano Germaine Lubin doing an imitation of the duck. Hitler indulged in one of his interminable monologues that lasted until six o’clock in the morning.

The 25th was party time in Austria. It was the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss. The thirteen Nazi thugs who had left him to bleed to death in his study on the Ballhausplatz had been executed but were now to be elected to the Valhalla of Nazi martyrs. By July 28 a third of Jewish property in Vienna had been transferred to Aryan hands. Göring’s Office of the Four Year Plan had located 2.29 billion RM in the hands of just 50,000 Jews, the vast majority of whom lived in Vienna. Forty percent of Jews fitted into the lowest income group, those possessing between 5,000 and 20,000 RM. There were still 102 Jewish millionaires. The report also signaled that 16,000 had already left the city. In Vienna they had been cleared out of their villas in plush Hietzing and moved into “Judenhäuser” in the Leopoldstadt. Their former homes were to be had for a pittance. Dressed in borrowed robes, horny-handed Nazis and their toadies moved into the refined elegance of the former elite. Dachau’s Jews were also on the move. That month the bulk of them were transferred to Buchenwald to help expand the camp.

WITH DACHAU bursting at the seams, Buchenwald was expanding to take more and more prisoners. Ernst Wiechert had been in Gestapo custody in Halle for weeks before he, too, was taken to Buchenwald. The train journey to Weimar was torture in itself. Then there were cars to take them to the camp. “The doors slammed shut and the motors started up, and then they set off towards the Ettersberg, the same hill from which Goethe and Charlotte von Stein had looked out over the Thuringian Forest and where now, wrapped in electrified fences, the camp now awaited them.”

Wiechert was a Gentile. Jews had been sent to Buchenwald since the roundups in Berlin and other large cities in May and June. Reich was one of those transferred from Dachau later that summer. He noted that Dachau was a kindergarten beside Buchenwald, where brutality and sadism were coupled with a degree of corruption he had yet to experience. One favorite method of creating space in the camp was to toss the prisoners’ caps into the no-man’s-land next to the wire. Prisoners were forbidden to approach the fences. When guards ordered them to fetch their caps, the machine guns opened up from the towers. He estimated that 117 prisoners had been killed in this way since the camp opened.

Compared to the Bavarian camp, Reich’s new home was filthy and the huts only half built. The food was even more paltry, and as a Jew Reich would have only received half as much bread as the Gentiles, and nothing whatsoever on Sunday. Prisoners were expected to work for thirteen hours a day in grueling summer heat, without a drop of water. The only liquid provided was half a cup of warm broth at lunch. In July alone, 103 prisoners died. A homosexual guard wandered around the buildings at night, hoping to find the prisoners indulging in illegal sex—presumably with a view to punishing them. It was quite prevalent, with the older, richer prisoners buying favors from the younger men. Very few of those who indulged in homosexual sex in the camps had been originally incarcerated under Article 175.

The smell of corruption in Buchenwald went all the way down to the capos—privileged prisoners who acted as assistants to the camp guards. In the beginning these had been members of the Communist and Social Democratic parties, who had been locked up after the Reichstag fire. In 1938, the “reds” were replaced by “greens”—criminals. They brought all their know-how to bear, and soon anything could be obtained in the camp for those with money: food, alcohol, cigarettes. Money was pumped from the prisoners on all occasions. When the SS had something to celebrate, a “contribution” was raised from the prisoners. The inadvertent killing of Commandant Rödl’s pet wolf cost the inmates 8,000 RM. News of the corruption in the camp got out when production began to drop off. An investigation revealed large sums of money hidden in the capos’ lockers. The “greens” were then replaced by “reds.” Conditions improved very briefly, but life was still so bad that it was wise to develop a thick skin to deal with it. Wiechert was told, “You must hear and see nothing. You have to get through everything like a stone. . . . Anyone who feels pity here falls apart.” One way he found of dealing with the camp was to make for Goethe’s oak. Wiechert was suffering for having defied Goebbels, who described the distinguished novelist as a “piece of dirt.” On August 3, the minister wrote, “After three months in a concentration camp I shall win him over to my cause.”

One cruelly tortured inmate was a Pastor Schneider, who could be heard occasionally from the punishment block shouting, “Jews, fear this devil not! Your God will deliver you.” His speech turned to screams when the guards rushed round to deal with him. He spent a year in the bunker before yielding up his spirit. Many became religious in the camps. Maximilian Reich learned later of an extraordinary phenomenon that occurred at Buchenwald at the Jewish New Year. A young Viennese rabbi had led prayers for an hour, undisturbed by the guards. Hundreds of Christians had come out of their huts to join the Jews in their orisons. There was a clear, star-lit night sky. “Jews and Christians, united in their great misery, were praying to the one immortal, the God of all men.”

G
oebbels had been using the garden pavilions at his houses in Lanke on the Schwanenwerder peninsula near Berlin to entertain “Babkova”—the Czech actress Lida Baarova, who lived around the corner in Schwanenwerder with the actor Gustav Fröhlich. Despite calling the summer “The loveliest holidays of my life!” Goebbels does not allude directly in his journal to the affair, but there are hints at problems within the Goebbels ménage. At the beginning of August he decided it was time to tell Magda. Rather than asking for a divorce or a separation, Goebbels proposed retaining both wife and mistress. At first Magda does not seem to have been too put out: “It is so good to possess a person who is so totally dedicated to you,” he wrote. On the 3rd he had an “important discussion” with Magda. “She is of great importance to me. I am happy that it is now out on the table.” Clearly there were arguments for all that. On the 9th he recorded unity with Magda: “Let us hope it lasts.”

For two weekends Lida Baarova lived in the house at Schwanenwerder. Magda tried to make both him and his lover see reason, but she also asked her husband’s second-in-command at the Ministry of Propaganda, Karl Hanke, to compile a dossier on Goebbels’s infidelities. When she learned how numerous they were, she had him banned from the house. Magda poured her heart out to Emmy Göring. Hermann Göring naturally knew all about the affair from the “Brown Sheets” his manservant Robert brought him with his morning coffee. He called Hitler and told him that Magda desired to see him urgently; she wanted a divorce.

On August 15, Hitler returned to Berlin. The Goebbelses, husband and wife, were summoned in turns. Magda informed the Führer that she wanted no more to do with her husband. Goebbels went to see Hitler next. Hitler told him that he was a public figure and could not give in to private scandal. He had a choice between dropping Lida or forfeiting his career. This was a
Führerbefehl
—an order from the all-highest. He was not allowed to see the actress again. Goebbels’s conversation with Hitler shook him to the marrow: “The Führer is like a father to me. I am so grateful to him. At this difficult time I need something like this. I am taking very difficult decisions, but they are final.”

Hitler was not only sentimentally attached to Goebbels’s wife; he had a horror of scandals, as he had demonstrated at the time of the Blomberg-Fritsch Crisis. He also had his time cut out with his Czech project. It transpired that Goebbels’s various conquests had been found work through the Ministry of Propaganda. When Hitler discovered this, he was even angrier with Goebbels. In the end ambition got the better of him. Goebbels rang Lida Baarova: “A very long and very sad telephone conversation. And now a new life begins. My youth is at an end.”

The actress, who was genuinely smitten with Goebbels, was summoned by Police President Helldorf and informed that she was forbidden to see her lover for at least six months. She reacted so hysterically that Helldorf was obliged to call Hitler for guidance. She insisted on speaking to Goebbels. He called her later that day. He was, he said, at the house of “his friend” Hermann Göring. Hitler had only allowed him to call if there were a witness in the room.

Magda would be slow to forgive him. Goebbels was wasting away, refusing to eat. “Humiliation. . . . She is so hard and horrible.” “I have never seen her like this.”

The Nazis continued to heap repressive measure upon repressive measure against the Jews. On August 1 Austrian Jews were forbidden from keeping servants, as the Nuremberg Laws were fully enforced for the first time. The measure was rescinded by Globocnik on the 3rd, however, after complaints from the servants themselves, who had lost their jobs as a result. There was a spate of divorces after the Laws were applied: Non-Jewish spouses dropped their wives and husbands to save themselves.

Jewish doctors were banned from practicing altogether on the 8th. In Vienna they represented 52 percent of the whole pool of physicians. The next day Viennese Jews were obliged to leave Aryan apartments, and the streets were clogged with removals vans. As many Jews no longer possessed the means to pay off arrears of rent, their furniture was detained by their landlords. In Italy Mussolini also introduced new drastic measures against foreign Jews. On the 6th a
numerus clausus
came into force. The price of support for Germany over Czechoslovakia had been increasing the pressure on the Germans in South Tyrol, where the place names were Italianized.

In keeping with other Nazi propaganda shows, the Ewige Jude (eternal Jew) traveling exhibition opened in the empty hall of the Northwest Station in Vienna on the 3rd in the course of a nationwide tour. It was inaugurated by Reichsstatthalter Seyss-Inquart and Gauleiter Globocnik. The whole front of the building was covered by a poster of a “Kaftan Jew,” which could be clearly seen from the heavily Jewish Taborstrasse in the Second District. The aim of the exhibition was to demonstrate how German life had been weakened by Jewish influence.

The cruel mockery of the Jews was not limited to Germany; there was an international dimension too. In London, the
Daily Telegraph
reported that it exhibited “repulsive caricatures of Jewish individuals of all nations.” The worst Jewish films were pilloried together with various prominent British Jews. The Rothschilds had a room to themselves. There was space given to the Goldschmidts, Charlie Chaplin, and Richard Tauber, the half-Jewish, Viennese-born tenor. The show had been put on first in Munich, but new elements had been specially designed for Vienna by the two local antisemitic businessmen—Dr. Robert Körber, author of a literary spin-off
Rassesieg in Wien
(Racial Victory in Vienna), which came out the following year, and one Gustav Zettl.