B006OAL1QM EBOK (11 page)

But the children in Munich had what Goebbels wanted, a certain amount of money. Hitler lived in a comfortable flat and had a car with a chauffeur. In Elberfeld Goebbels was sure he had less than his due from Kaufmann to whom he kept talking for endless hours until they must all have been glad to see the back of him when he went away to speak—"a great annoyance, what with my being practically indispensable here in Elberfeld”. He became intensely jealous of a man called Helmuth Elbrechter, a dentist who was on the fringe of the movement and exercised a certain influence over Kaufmann who was some years his junior.
³
It is very evident that Elbrechter disliked and distrusted Goebbels, who was aware of this and saw at once intrigue against himself as well as lack of his due in appreciation. The diary during the spring of 1926 is filled with vituperation as a result of Elbrechter's alleged intrigues with Kaufmann.

It was at this time that Hitler began to invite Goebbels to speak in other parts of Germany and particularly in Munich and Bavaria. He went to Munich in April with Kaufmann. A car was waiting for them at the station, and later Hitler telephoned them at the hotel and then came round to see them. “He is very, very kind to me and he lends us his car for the afternoon.” He addressed two meetings, the last in Hitler's presence, and received the usual ovation. “At the end Hitler hugs me. My eyes are full of tears. I am happier than ever in my life. Through the milling crowds to the waiting car. Thunderous shouts and heils.” Then he had supper with Hitler, and could not sleep afterwards for sheer excitement. The following morning, however, Kaufmann criticised the speech. Goebbels put it down to envy. But the truth of the matter was that the lionising treatment given him by Hitler was already bearing fruit. “Well, he may have something in these arguments on foreign policy,” writes Goebbels after another session with Strasser and Hitler. “After all he has thought it over a great deal. I am beginning to be quite happy about it. I recognise him as my leader quite unconditionally. I bow to the greater man. To the political genius!”

The honeymoon with Hitler had begun.

Yet he went to visit the Strassers' parents in Landshut and talked again to Gregor. “He is very satisfied. That evening in the soft spring air, wandering through Strasser's home town. What peace!
Ach, du Gregor.”
Then he went back to the magic of Munich. “Ach, those Munich women, so beautiful! And the sun!” Hitler asked him to dinner and produced a girl for company. The next morning Hitler's car came again, but Goebbels by now was equal to the occasion. “I had flowers for him and he seemed ever so pleased.” It was like a romance. When he had at last to leave he wrote: “Farewell, Munich! I love thee!” He had to speak in Stuttgart, and Hitler, accompanied by Hess, took him there by car. Hitler arrived clothed in his famous ‘autodress’, with the leather jacket suitable for motoring in open vehicles in the ‘twenties. Goebbels the radical was most impressed by the snobbery of it all. “Lunching in a small inn. He is being recognised. Lots of cheering and back-slapping.” He made his speech in Stuttgart as effective as he could to please Hitler. Evidently he succeeded. “He hugs me as soon as he sees me. He praises me to the skies. I think he has really quite a soft spot for me.”

His speaking tours were now more widely spread, and among the places at which it was arranged that he should speak was Hamburg. He drove through the amusement quarter, including the Freudlose Gasse that gave its name to G. W. Pabst's famous silent film which appeared about this time. Goebbels' puritan sensuality was roused at the sight—"The Joyless Street. Tarts standing in front of every doorway, beckoning. Practically naked, most of them. Some of them disgusting to look at. To buy a body! How can a man do such a thing? For money! … But whose fault is it? To be locked into that ghetto of lust! On the streets one can see blonde girls hugging Jewish pedlars, and the police do nothing about it. In fact, they laugh. Such is bourgeois society. All of it either lust or business. Oh, let's get out of here. Back home. But I cannot go to sleep. Is it because I feel as if I bore part of the guilt?” He was glad to leave Hamburg; he was on his way back to Bavaria.

Again there was trouble with Kaufmann, who had written to say that Goebbels was “lacking in the necessary toughness”. Goebbels blamed this on the intrigues in his absence from Elberfeld of his scapegoat Elbrechter, the enemy. “Poor Kaufmann,” he writes as if more in sorrow than in anger. Strasser believes that by now even Goebbels must have felt some pang of conscience about moving over to Hitler's faction. Nevertheless, on the train south he was not too worried to notice “on the side opposite a lovely wench peacefully asleep. Quite a girl. Yearning? You bet!” He was reading a book about Rasputin. “How much elementary strength in that fellow, when compared with sickly intellectuals.” It was about this time, too, that he first saw Eisenstein's film
Battleship Potemkin,
which had recently reached Germany and was causing a sensation. Kaufmann had strongly recommended it. Goebbels never ceased to think it a masterpiece of propaganda.

Now, however, it was spring. It was Bavaria. It was Hitler. Elberfeld lay on his conscience like a hidden sore, but Hitler played his cards well. “A two-hours' speech, and in the course of it he praises me to the skies, and quite publicly too. Later he takes me home in his car. He seems quite fond of me.” It was sour to return to the Elberfeld office from this. “As for me, no one seems to care twopence. As if I hadn't done a thing!… There is an evil spirit about, making my heart ache, and somehow I feel Kaufmann is behind it.” He wonders whether he ought to discuss his troubles when he next meets Hitler. Meanwhile there was always Kaufmann to worry at. “Well, well, people do repeat again and again an old saying: ‘Politics spoil the character.’ I would put it better than that: ‘Politics teach us what sort of a character a person really is …” I
must
have these things sorted out. Can't do a proper job of work otherwise.”

On 10th June there appears a significant entry. “There is a lot of talk about sending me to Berlin as a sort of saviour. No thanks! I would hate to live in that wilderness of brick and mortar.” This seems to have momentarily frightened him back into Kaufmann's arms. “He is my good friend again. I cannot be cross with him for any length of time. I love persons with a kind heart.” But two days later he bursts out: “The whole
Gau
is in a bad way owing to Kaufmann's slackness… I am fed to the teeth with the whole bloody organisation. How can we ever make Germany free with rabble such as that? … My only hope is that Hitler will take me to Munich so as to get me out of all this muck here. Everything now depends on his decision. Does he want me? … Sleep! Oh, if only one didn't have to wake up again at all!!”

And so he was ready for Hitler who was due to speak in Elberfeld. “I revere and love him,” he writes gushingly. Hitler arrived, spoke at closed meetings in the district (he was forbidden at this time to speak in public), and consolidated his influence over Goebbels. “Hitler, the dear, old and good comrade. One cannot help being fond of him as a person. And on top of it all, his overwhelming personality. With such a man one can really conquer the world.” Hitler invited him to spend three weeks the following month in Upper Bavaria; this announcement in the diary is spaced out from the rest with a flourish. It was apparently intended to be a holiday.

Meanwhile there was to be a delirious meeting along with Hitler at the annual Party Congress, this year staged in Weimar. This was accompanied by a mass demonstration by the Nazis. “I have to shake a thousand hands… Berliners arriving in mass formation. They are all so fond of me. A lot of waving and laughing. Then, his motorcar! Hitler arriving. Pandemonium.” The following day both Goebbels and Hitler spoke. “My own speech about Propaganda gets them into a frenzy of enthusiasm…. Then Hitler speaks…. He is so deep it is almost mystical. He knows how to express infinite truth! I thank Fate that there is such a man as he. On the Market Square 15,000 S.A. men march past us…. A wonderful sight, these 15,000 and a whole forest of flags.” He spoke again, to an audience of students, who carried him from the hall shoulder-high. And again the question is debated, whether he should take over the Party organisation in Berlin.

On 23rd July, after what was apparently an agony of suspense and waiting for Hitler in Bavaria, suddenly there was a knock on the door and there was “the Chief”
(der Chef)
arrived by car with Strasser. Off they set through the night to Berchtesgaden, Goebbels sitting in his favourite seat beside the chauffeur. In Berchtesgaden Hitler at this time merely had rooms at the Hotel Platternhof, which was owned by a friend and Party member.

In the lovely mountain sunshine Hitler seemed a god. During the days that followed Goebbels underwent a deep, transfiguring experience as a member of the intimate circle. Love was what he needed, and love was what he found. “Wonderful to be among one's friends and comrades. Rust keeps reminiscing until deep into the night. He seems to be quite fond of me. And now I fall asleep, surrounded by friends and comrades. And I sleep in blissful happiness.” It was a mountain idyll, a lullaby.

Hitler himself appeared a genius. “He is the creative instrument of Fate and Deity. I stand by him, deeply shaken. That is how he is. Good and kind, but also clever and shrewd and again at times great and gigantic. What a person. What a man.
(Ein Kerl! Ein Mann!)
He speaks about the State and how to win it and he speaks about the meaning of political revolution. The themes he develops I may have myself thought of from time to time, but never so clearly. After supper we sit in the garden for a long time and he preaches to us about the State and how we are to fight for it. He seems like a prophet of old. And in the sky a big, white cloud almost seems to shape itself into the form of a swastika. Glittering light all over the sky…. Is that a sign from Fate?!”

And so the communion went on, for three whole days. “He spoils me like a child. The kindly friend and master! … He is absolutely and completely an artist in statesmanship
(Staats-Kiinstler)
. Farewell, my dear Obersalzberg. Those wonderful days gave me direction and pointed my way. In deep anguish I can see a star shining. To him I feel deeply linked. Now the very last of my doubts have vanished. Germany will live! Heil Hitler!”

The parting was no less hallowed. Hitler knew his man.

“We go down into the valley. He singles me out to walk alone with him and he speaks to me like a father to his son…. Thanks for everything! Thanks! Thanks!”

Though so beautifully staged, the parting was not for long. They met again in Augsburg four days later, where other supporters showered them with flowers. Hitler prepared a second farewell scene. “Hitler gives me a bunch of flowers… red, red roses.”

That was 31st July. At the end of August the Berlin post was again in suspense. It was proposed that Goebbels should look after the
Gau
for four months on a provisional basis. However on 28th August he records: “As for the Munich suggestion I should go to Berlin, I have turned it down flat. I don't want to get bogged down in all that mess up there.” He had, of course, met the present Gaufiihrer of Berlin, von Schlange, and had liked him, but he knew that the Party organisation in the capital was feeble and ill-disciplined. Berlin might well not prove a good centre in which to shine. He wanted to be with Hitler in Munich.

However on 17th September he writes, in Berlin itself: “In the evening I receive Schlange and Schmidt. Both seem to be well aware of my being all set to take matters in hand.” It seems, therefore, that the lure of the titles Gauleiter and Gauführer had begun to overcome his dislike of Berlin. The next day he went to Potsdam, and the aura of Frederick the Great surrounded him as he wandered through the summer residence of the great king. “It is so exciting to go through these rooms. My God! Frederick the Great! That is the big thing about him, that at all times he remained master of himself, that at all times he was the servant of his State. A soldier for seven years. Frederick the Unique.”

He was decided. He would accept Berlin. In any case, everything at home was collapsing about his ears. Kaufmann, he learned in September, was thinking of marrying into the same family as Elbrechter, “that swine”, his enemy. Strasser, he learned by gossip, “is madly jealous of me”, and in October he heard that Hitler had appointed Strasser Head of Propaganda for the Party, the post that Goebbels would dearly have loved to possess. And, lastly, Else had just taken her final leave of him.

Kaufmann gave him a farewell party in Elberfeld, and off he went. Now he had only one master to serve, Adolf Hitler.

It was November. Winter lay ahead in ‘Red’ Berlin. But at least he was Gauleiter now, at the age of twenty-eight. Berlin was to be his headquarters for the rest of his life.

CHAPTER THREE

Berlin

’ A
GREY NOVEMBER DUSK
falls over Berlin as my train steams into the Potsdamer Bahnhof, and hardly two hours pass before I am standing for the first time on the speaker's platform which is to become the starting-point for our future development. At once I address the Party members.”
¹

This was the legend Goebbels himself perpetrated in his book
The Battle of Berlin,
a belligerent account of his first year's work in the capital, but published seven years later in 1934. In order to create the right atmosphere of the beginner who was to make good he allowed another story to circulate: that on his arrival he climbed on to a street bus, a lonely figure from the provinces carrying a simple suitcase, and killed time before the Party meeting looking at the city lights and the pavements covered with strangers. He marvelled, he said, at the size of Berlin; he felt it would swallow him up.

Whatever his real emotions may have been on his arrival—and it seems certain he did not really want to undertake this thankless task— he was no stranger to the city. He had, as we have seen, frequently spoken there at Party meetings, and he knew the previous Gauleiter, von Schlange, whom he was to replace. But Berlin was, of course, the headquarters of the Strassers, and they had secured him a room in the large and elegant establishment of Johann Steiger, who was a member of the editorial staff of the
Berliner Lokalanzeiger,
a right-wing paper controlled by Alfred Hugenberg, the financier. The Steigers, who were ardent Nazis, let off some of their spare rooms and were prepared to give Goebbels good value for very low rent. Frau Steiger had a certain amount of money of her own, and Goebbels not only lived in comfort but was given the use of one of the drawing-rooms for conferences. Otto Strasser met him at the station and took him round to the Steigers' flat to introduce him to his hosts. He did not address a Party meeting for some while after his arrival in Berlin.

He had known for long enough that Hitler was very dissatisfied with the state of the Party organisation in Berlin. The Strassers had been quite unable to maintain order through von Schlange, and such power as there was remained in the hands of the leader of the Berlin S.A., Kurt Daluege, and a man who had already been expelled from the Party, Heinz Hauenstein. Hitler expected Goebbels to face these things alone, purge the membership and begin the work in Berlin all over again. The new Gauleiter was responsible directly to Hitler and not, as he would normally have been, to Gregor Strasser.

Hitler himself has explained why he chose Goebbels, a man with barely eighteen months' experience in the Party, for this difficult task:

From the time I started to organise the Party, I made it a rule never to fill an appointment until I had found the right man for it. I applied this principle to the post of Berlin Gauleiter. Even when the older members of the Party bombarded me with complaints over the Party leadership in Berlin, I refrained from coming to their assistance, until I could promise them that in Dr. Goebbels I had found the man I was seeking. He possesses the two attributes without which no one could master the conditions in Berlin: intelligence and the gift of oratory…. When I invited him to study the organisation of the Party in Berlin, he reported in due course that the weakness lay in the junior leaders, and he asked me for a free hand to make the necessary changes and to purge the Party of all unsatisfactory elements. I never regretted giving him the powers he asked for. When he started he found nothing particularly efficient as a political organisation to help him. He worked like an ox, regardless of all the stresses to which the latent opposition must have exposed him.
²

He had in fact chosen wisely. Goebbels was to make history in Berlin.

The five years 1927 to 1931 were the period during which the Nazis began to consolidate their power in Germany. They won twelve seats in the Reichstag in 1928, when Gregor Strasser, Göring and Goebbels were among those chosen to represent the Party in the House. The allied Control Commission was withdrawn in 1927, and this permitted the German Government to begin a secret policy of rearmament and of the reorganisation of the professional Army, the
Reichswehr
. Nevertheless in the same year Stresemann, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But to extremists such as the Nazis Stresemann remained the appeaser, the man who stood by the Versailles and Locarno treaties, the man who signed the Kellogg Pact renouncing war. In Germany itself the internal strife continued between the men of the Left and the
Reichswehr
(who had the police under their control), and this often led to bloodshed. When, for example, in 1929, the workers organised their usual May Day demonstrations in Berlin, they were fired on by the police, who killed no less than twenty-five of the demonstrators. This happened in spite of the fact that men who called themselves Socialists were participating in the Reich Government.

The Nazis, meanwhile, gained in 1929 the help of certain leading industrialists and bankers such as Thyssen and Schroeder, and were able to set up their headquarters at the famous Brown House in Munich. The industrialists subsidised the Nazis because through them and the other Nationalist parties they hoped to establish a counter-revolution which would place Germany entirely in their power. They fostered the semi-military organisations which the Nationalist parties were developing—such as Hitler's Storm Troopers and the German National Party's
Stahlhelm,
a large body of ex-servicemen which was favoured by the
Reichswehr
. When in January 1931 Rohm was put at the head of the Storm Troopers he rapidly developed them into an organisation representing a further half-million men. The Socialists and Communists also had their private armies. Within ten years of defeat, a considerable proportion of the able-bodied men in demilitarised Germany belonged to somebody's private army. In October 1929 Stresemann died to the delight of the Nationalists, in spite of the fact that he had prepared the ground for Germany's resumption of military power. He had negotiated for the Allies to evacuate the Rhineland by June 1930, five years before the time originally fixed in the Versailles Treaty; he had also negotiated the Young Plan, which lessened considerably the burden of reparations and left the repayment to Germany's good faith.

Opposition to the Young Plan was loudly proclaimed by the Nazis, and on the strength of their outcry they won much greater support in Germany. In the elections of September 1930, they won 107 seats in the Reichstag. They were now a first-class power in Germany's political life.

This had not been achieved without much difficulty. Stresemann's policy had led Germany towards economic prosperity and by 1929 unemployment had been reduced to manageable proportions. What played into the hands of the Nazis was the depression of 1930. Stresemann was dead, but even he could not have prevented the catastrophic effect of this on the German economy. Between September 1929 and January 1933 (when Hitler became Chancellor) unemployment rose from over one million to over six million. Hitler's prophecies of the result of the Government's evil policy seemed to have been fulfilled, and the Party which had only won 800,000 votes in the 1928 Reichstag elections polled 6,401,210 in 1930. Membership of the Party rose— 17,000 in 1926; 176,000 in 1929; 389,000 in 1930; 800,000 in 1931.

As Dr. Bullock points out, the Nazi Party was never a party in any proper sense of the term. It was a conspiracy to gain power, and to achieve this it needed men, money and votes. The men, apart from the leaders themselves, were the Storm Troopers and the Party's paid agents; the money, apart from the minor dues paid by the members, consisted of the subsidies supplied by industrialists who regarded the Nazis as their tool; the votes, apart from those cast by the members themselves, were the results of discontent and uncertainty among the German people. All these elements were essential links in the chain, for Hitler was determined to keep his conspiracy legal and constitutional, winning support from every section of German society—the possessors and the dispossessed alike. At every stage he was against the use of force on a level that would result in a direct clash with the Army and the Police—the legal forces of the State. He confined his use of force to opponents who had no such sanctions at their disposal. For the rest, he relied on the power of propaganda.

When Goebbels unpacked his modest belongings in Berlin, among them was his inscribed copy of
Mein Kampf
. The first part of this extraordinary book was published in the summer of 1925; the second part, written in Berchtesgaden, did not appear until two years later. Among its wilful misinterpretations of history, its ravings in long, turgid and often illiterate German, occur sections which have a certain Machiavellian lucidity, and these are the pages that deal with propaganda.

Hitler prepares his readers for this with precepts that turn on the fundamental principles that enable a leader to impose his personality on the masses. They prefer, he says, like women, a strong man to a weakling. They do not want to read; they need to be influenced by a living presence: “The great masses of a nation will always and only succumb to the force of the spoken word.” The leader himself can only generate passion in his followers if he has it himself: passion is the prerequisite of his leadership. He must have the fanatic's view of life. Writers, he says, are seldom leaders. Their attitude to their audience is too generalised and abstract. In his Preface he says:

I know that fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.

It is clear from this that Hitler set great store by oratory and the personal magnetism of the agitator. When he comes, therefore, to the subject of propaganda he treats it wholly from the point of view of a means to an end. It is not, he says, applicable to the intellectual. It is designed for the masses, like a poster or an advertisement:

The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses….

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If this principle be forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will not be able to digest or retain what is offered to them in this way. Therefore, the greater the scope of the message that has to be presented, the more necessary it is for the propaganda to discover that plan of action which is psychologically the most efficient.

Propaganda is not concerned with the truth in general, but the truth as interpreted in the interests of the propagandist:

Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; but it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side….

As soon as our own propaganda makes the slightest suggestion that the enemy has a certain amount of justice on his side, then we lay down the basis on which the justice of our own cause could be questioned.
³

It is interesting after this to note that Hitler constantly singles out British propaganda during the First World War for praise.

In the second volume of
Mein Kampf
Hitler returns to the subject again; he says that he personally took charge of the Party's propaganda when he first joined it. He explains in detail how he learned to master audiences through constant public speaking, and how superior in its effect this method of approaching the public is to mere writing:

These gatherings brought me the advantage that I slowly became a platform orator at mass meetings, and gave me practice in the pathos and gesture required in large halls that held thousands of people….

An orator receives continuous guidance from the people before whom he speaks. This helps him to correct the direction of his speech; for he can always gauge, by the faces of his hearers, how far they follow and understand him, and whether his words are producing the desired effect. But the writer does not know his reader at all. There fore, from the outset he does not address himself to a definite human group of persons which he has before his eyes but must write in a general way.
⁴

In a later chapter he explains how the Party should be organised and differentiates between followers and members. Members are active workers who understand the leadership principle and can practise it within the orbit of the Party. The follower is merely a convert who takes his place in the ranks. The quality of the membership of any Party depends on the degree of struggle there is. Success merely leads to softening and poor quality membership. Strife breeds toughness, keenness and alertness; the Party must always be fighting an enemy. Hitler might well have been writing especially for Goebbels in Berlin when he dictated this paragraph to Hess in Berchtesgaden:

As director of propaganda for the Party, I took care not merely to prepare the ground for the greatness of the movement in its subsequent stages, but I also adopted the most radical measures against allowing into the organisation any other than the best material. For the more radical and exciting my propaganda was, the more did it frighten weak and wavering characters away, thus preventing them from entering the first nucleus of our organisation.
⁵