B006OAL1QM EBOK (12 page)

Goebbels' immediate task during his first days in Berlin was to introduce discipline and efficiency. He went round to the office. It was in a disgusting condition:

Our ‘office’ was a dirty basement at the back of the Potsdamerstrasse. A kind of manager was based there with an exercise book in which he would enter debits and credits as best he knew. Masses of paper cluttered up the place, and in the ante-room numbers of unemployed Party members used to hang around gossiping and killing time. We used to call the place ‘the opium den’.
⁶

One of the first tasks was to secure a more suitable office:

On 1st January 1927 we turned our backs on the ‘opium den’ for good and occupied our new offices in Lützowstrasse. According to present standards they would seem extremely modest and primitive, but in those days it meant progress and quite a step forward.
⁷

But the
Gau
was in debt and the membership depraved. Schlange himself, who had been Gauleiter before Goebbels, was a Civil Servant and it had been easy enough to get him to resign by arranging for him to be warned that he would lose his main job unless he severed his connection with the Nazis. On the other hand Daluege, the S.A. chief, was just the kind of man Goebbels wanted to protect him at the provocative meetings by means of which he was planning to conquer Berlin for the Party. The Party membership in the capital was about a thousand. Goebbels stripped it down at once to 600 men by getting rid of the more idle riff-raff. He called these men together and told them they must each of them contribute three marks a month. The rest of the money needed to run the organisation he was to get by charging a low admission fee of a few pence to the Party meetings. The unemployed—always the main element on whom the Nazis relied for members—were admitted at half-price. He was determined to make these meetings of such a quality in both speech and action that they would soon be crowded if only initially through curiosity. He was determined to put on a show. As he said early on at a Party meeting: “The Berliners may insult us, slander us, fight us, beat us up, but they must talk about us.”
⁸

A story told by Otto Strasser shows that Goebbels' character was in no way modified by the weight of his responsibilities in Berlin. At his first public meeting he kept his audience waiting ten minutes or so by arriving late in a taxi. Even then he spread out the time entering the hall and taking the platform. Strasser spoke to him afterwards about the extravagance of hiring a taxi when the
Gau
was in debt. Goebbels replied impertinently. “You don't know much about propaganda,” he said. “Taxi be damned. I should have taken two, not one. The other for my brief-case. Don't forget you've got to impress people. And as for being late, I did that deliberately. I always do. You've got to keep them in suspense.”

The first task was to organise the kind of publicity which would attract an audience. “I don't mind admitting,” Goebbels wrote in
The Battle of Berlin,
“we meant to conquer the street. On the street we had to go for the masses and that was our only road to political power.”
⁹
The tempo of the capital fired him, he adds. He re-designed his posters to be provocative and amusing; they were both designed and worded to incite curiosity. Most posters placed round the
Litfassäulen
(the circular columns at the street-corners) were dully laid out with black and crowded type; this was especially true of the political posters. Goebbels had little money for printing though he was not the man to care whether he was in debt or not at the printers. He used large display type in blood-red ink to score the maximum effect through the space at his disposal, and he forced the eye to continue reading the smaller type by making his main titles extraordinary and inexplicable to read on their own. Passers-by bunked and paused to read more when they saw

THE KAISER OF AMERICA—SPEAKS—IN BERLIN

The rest of the information—an attack on the Dawes or the Young Plan as the products of American capitalism—was infiltrated in small type-face round and through the large-letter words, together with the notice of the meeting at which Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the new Gauleiter of Berlin, was to address all Berliners who would come.

If the posters were red so was the blood that began to flow as a result of Goebbels' organised attacks on the Communists. These were deliberately provoked because the Communists were prominent in Berlin and violence makes news. Goebbels knew that if his unemployed strong-arm thugs were to be kept busy, street-fights and organised demonstrations of violence at the meetings would be the surest and quickest way to bring the Party into the public eye and instil fear into the flaccid, bourgeois soul that he hated, with its love for peace at any price. On a gradually increasing scale the beatings-up began with the Communists as the chosen prey.

On 11th February 1927 Goebbels made one of his larger bids for publicity. He hired the famous Pharus Hall in a working-class district of Berlin. This hall was specially associated with Communist meetings and its choice for a big Nazi rally was in itself a deliberate act of provocation. Every member of the diminutive Nazi Party was ordered to parade with flags before the meeting began. “This was an open challenge,” writes Goebbels. “It was meant that way by us. It was understood that way by the opponent.”
¹⁰
This was to be a
Saal-schlacht,
a battle in a meeting-hall. Hitler had done the same thing for long enough in Munich. The Communists were present in force, and one of their number started the desired trouble by challenging the Chairman (Daluege) on a point of order. He was seized and flung out bodily by a group of Storm Troopers. Then the free-for-all began with bottles, chairs and knuckle-dusters. The water-bottles from the platform, says Goebbels, were flung in self-defence. The police, who had known there must be trouble at such a meeting as this, intervened. The Communists dispersed with their casualties, and Goebbels, as the principal speaker, rose at once to the occasion. He ordered the Nazi stretcher-cases to be put on the platform. He started an oration in which he spoke of the loyalty and the suffering of the Storm Troopers. He used the phrase “the unknown Storm Trooper” as a symbol of the occasion, pointing to one man, Albert Thonak, who lay writhing in agony, suffering itself put on display.
¹¹
Nor was Goebbels finished with this idea for propaganda. He used it again at another meeting, though in this case the wounded men, bandaged and on stretchers, were in reality unharmed actors dressed up for the occasion. But they helped to develop the S.A. man as both hero and martyr. After the Pharus meeting one newspaper called the Nazis bandits. Goebbels was delighted. Next time he laid out a poster he assumed the title Ober-Bandit Joseph Goebbels.

Goebbels now entered upon his second phase as a notorious and outstanding agitator. Soon after his arrival at the Steigers' flat he began to use a huge, three-sided mirror in the drawing-room before which he could rehearse his speeches. Frau Steiger was enchanted by her lodger. He reminded her, she said to Strasser, of Savonarola—so ascetic, so dedicated. Goebbels sat upstairs pondering his speeches. Looking back on this period, he wrote:

More and more I realised how important it is to speak so that people really understand one. And that is how I began to develop an entirely new style of political oratory. When these days I glance at the shorthand transcripts of my speeches in the pre-Berlin period and compare them with my later speeches, the older ones seem to me utterly tame and docile. I had not been caught yet by the tempo and the hot breath of the great city.
¹²

He wrote his more important speeches out in full, using multicoloured pencils to indicate various shades of emphasis and pause. He also developed his capacity for making unscripted, impromptu speeches to catch the spirit of the moment in a meeting.

He was wholly, absolutely self-conscious over his speech-making. He always considered his audience first: how to affect them, how to incite them. He developed little or no personal emotion while speaking, but he gave everything he had, physically and vocally, to rouse emotion in his audience. He pushed his fine, sonorous voice to its limits, and the effort of speaking to mass audiences for prolonged periods of up to two hours cost him a great deal. His small, fragile frame was shaken with nervous energy, and he developed the habit of weighing himself after his more strenuous performances. He claimed that he frequently lost two or three pounds in weight on these occasions. But several of those in a good position to know have admitted that he never expended his own emotions while he spoke. In this respect he was the reverse of Hitler. Goebbels always calculated his effects, and to those he knew well he was prepared to boast about this, saying, for example, before a meeting: “Well, which record shall I put on now?” He also cultivated the capacity to adapt himself to audiences, particularly those likely to be hostile. He became, in other words, completely professional, the master of his audience, proud and vain of his ability to establish himself immediately with the people in front of him. His effrontery dazzled his own adherents and those who came to his meetings out of curiosity. He was a success. The image of the lonely provincial clutching his suitcase on a Berlin bus rapidly faded before the image of the man of destiny standing astride the city of which he was to become the master. He found himself in tune with the spirit of the capital and alive with desire to conquer it.

To make his great public meetings more showman-like he developed Hitler's technique of ceremonial which stirred the hearts of his audience in advance of the speeches. He used banners, processions, marching, music and singing. Street parades normally preceded these meetings. Goebbels himself did not usually appear before the hall was crowded and ready. He would then make a dramatic entrance like an actor timing his cue; he always appeared surrounded by his bodyguard, and the Party supporters in the hall would receive him with prolonged cheering. The emotional ground was well prepared before the speech-making began to insert seeds of propaganda in the human soil.

On 1st May 1927 Hitler made his first speech in Berlin since Goebbels' term of office had begun. This took place at a mass meeting which had to be disguised as a private session for the membership, since at that time Hitler was still banned from public speaking in northern Germany. Goebbels arranged the meeting for him in the Clou, a large and well-known dance-hall in the centre of Berlin.

But Berlin was not composed entirely of men ready to fall at the feet of Goebbels the orator. The police had their eye on him and the more violent members of his Storm Trooper gangs. The main concern of the police was to keep the peace, and one of the easier ways of doing this was to ban demonstrations and public meetings that were likely to become the cause of trouble. On 5th May, four days after Hitler's so-called private conference, the police banned the National Socialist Party in the area of Greater Berlin. When the notice of suspension arrived from the Police Department a receipt had to be signed. But Goebbels knew what was in it and refused to accept it. He claimed that he sent a Storm Trooper in full uniform to return the letter to the police unopened with the remark: “We National Socialists refuse to recognise the ban.” Then he put the Party meetings underground, founding local clubs for apparently innocent, non-political ends such as sport and hiking. Although the Party uniform was banned, Goebbels managed to devise other ways of getting his men to dress alike. The ban on the Party (which involved a ban on Goebbels as a Party speaker) was followed by a further prohibition which prevented him from addressing any public meeting throughout Prussia. This was the severest blow the authorities could have dealt him:

Personally I was hit particularly hard by the ban on my speaking in public. At that time I had hardly any other means of keeping contact with the Party comrades. The spoken word to us was at all times more important than the printed word, and in those days we had not many words to print, our press facilities still being very poor indeed.
¹³

The only exceptions to the ban on Party members speaking in public were those who were also members of the Reichstag. Goebbels developed the practice of getting up in the body of the hall at meetings where Deputies were billed to speak and making lengthy debating-points. The police soon discovered what was happening; Goebbels persisted and was charged and fined for doing this. His reply to the ban on him as a speaker was to found
Der Angriff
and to initiate in it his campaign of ridicule against Bernhard Weiss, the Jewish Deputy Chief of Police in Berlin.

Der Angriff (Attack)
was established as Goebbels' own paper. It began as a diminutive weekly in contrast to the established National Socialist dailies, Hitler's
Völkischer Beobachter
and Strasser's
Berliner Arbeiter-zeitung
. As Goebbels himself wrote, the name of the new journal was a matter of importance:

I never forget how one evening we sat brooding—only a few of us— brooding over the name of our new paper. All of a sudden, I had a brain-wave: surely there could be one name only for our paper:
Der Angriff
. The very name had its propagandistic value, since to attack was really all we wanted.
¹⁴
The editor was a friend of Goebbels, Dr. Julius Lippert. Goebbels used his newly-established poster technique to launch the journal. The first of the blood-red posters announced the title of the paper only, with no explanation. A succeeding poster merely said: “The Attack will take place on 4th July.” A third poster announced that
The Attack
would appear every Monday.

One of the first attacks in the new paper was the campaign against Weiss, a humourless man with a pronouncedly Jewish face. He was a gift to Goebbels' crude cartoonists, and Goebbels himself never called him anything but Isidor Weiss—Isidor is to German ears an insulting name with a strongly anti-Jewish connotation—week in, week out, until the public believed this to be his real name and he became a kind of figure of fun. In 1928 Goebbels even published a pamphlet against him,
Das Buch Isidor
. He made Weiss into the scapegoat for every blow he wanted to deliver against the police. He slandered him by inventing endless charges which appeared in the
Angriff,
and when Weiss replied by attempting to defend himself Goebbels delighted in the additional publicity that he gained. He was not afraid of the police courts; they were places where he could show off his insolent wit and gain attention from the press.