B006OAL1QM EBOK (16 page)

On 5th December Goebbels convened a conference of the Party leaders at the Kaiserhof on Hitler's behalf, sending a telegram to all the Reichstag deputies to attend. Here the whole business of coalition was hotly debated, and Hitler refused to let Strasser discuss any terms with the new Chancellor, Schleicher. Two days later, on 7th December, Hitler and Strasser confronted each other at the Kaiserhof. Hitler accused Strasser of disloyalty and of scheming with Schleicher behind his back, and staged one of his great outbursts of fury, refusing to listen to Strasser's assertions that he had been loyal to the Party. At last Strasser challenged him:

“Do you really mean what you are saying?”

“I do,” shouted Hitler, nodding his head vigorously.

Strasser simply reached for his brief-case and left the room. He was white with rage. At his hotel he wrote his letter of resignation, got into his car and drove away south from Berlin. He took no further action in the Party's politics, and every attempt to get him back proved hopeless. Messenger after messenger was sent in vain by his friends and supporters urging him to return to renew the fight. Goebbels then set about destroying the remnants of support for Strasser's policy of coalition. It was thought that about a third of the Reichstag National Socialist deputies were among those initially prepared to support him.
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The one thing Hitler did not want was the Reichstag to be dissolved yet again, and his almost bankrupt Party to be faced with the cost of yet another election. It was about a month later that the celebrated lunch took place on 4th January at which Hitler met von Papen at the house of Kurt von Schroeder, one of the most prominent bankers in Germany. This lunch proved to be yet another turning-point in the developments which led to the rise of the Nazis to power, though von Papen has sworn on his word “as a Christian and a gentleman” that the meeting proved to be of no importance whatsoever, but was merely an attempt by Schleicher to get him disgraced in the eyes of Hindenburg.
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Otto Strasser, however, claims it was at this lunch that Hitler learned the President had no intention of dissolving the Reichstag, and so was encouraged to persist with the intransigent attitude which only three weeks later was to give him the Chancellorship. Goebbels did his best to keep the meeting secret, but the press learned of it and blazoned it on the front pages of the morning papers.

After this lunch it was only a matter of three weeks before Hitler was to be Chancellor with von Papen in his Cabinet.
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Hitler was prepared to compromise to the extent of bringing certain members of the opposition into his Government. He knew that once he was in power he could shape the destiny of Germany and the nature of her Constitution as he willed. Meanwhile, the policy so persistently advocated by Goebbels had triumphed, and the main struggle was almost over, for all that remained to be done now was to ease out the Ministers who for the time being gave an air of coalition and legality to Hitler's Government. Von Papen and his eight colleagues in the Cabinet, who faced only three National Socialist Ministers, had yet to learn how worthless their apparently overwhelming majority was in fact to prove.

In his own specialised field in the development of Nazi policy, the department of propaganda, Goebbels was prepared to admit only Hitler as his superior. Otherwise, he himself, of course, was supreme artist. In the diary he constantly states his views about propaganda methods, party tactics and the principles of authoritarian rule. In all these matters he experiences a Machiavellian delight in thinking up ways and means of being successful. The only thing of which he is scarcely conscious is the despicable self-portrait that so frequently emerges from his own self-satisfaction.

He records with pride the praise given him in March 1932 by a visiting representative of the
Popolo d’ Italia
. The journalist, he says, was dumbfounded and exclaimed that Goebbels had created “the vastest and most up-to-date propaganda in Europe”. For Goebbels “propaganda must be raised to a political art”. Already in January 1932 he claims that he was discussing with Hitler the idea of founding a Ministry for Popular Education with full control of the press, cinema, radio, educational establishments, the arts, culture and the machinery of propaganda.

Meanwhile, as the Party's Head of Propaganda, he used every device, old or new, to impress the German people. “I hope,” he says in February, “to achieve a masterpiece of propaganda for this year's elections.” In May he writes that he considers “the main burden of the work will rest on the propaganda. Our technique has to be worked out to the minutest particular. Only the most up-to-date and expert methods will help us to victory.” When it was all over and Hitler safely installed, he boasts: “Our propaganda is acknowledged not only by the German, but also the international press, to be a model, and unique. We have gained such extensive experience in this matter during the past election campaign that we are able to win a victory over our adversaries without difficulty by our superior methods”.
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Chakotin, in his book
The Rape of the Masses,
quotes Goebbels' claim that in the presidential campaign he would use “American methods on an American scale”, although when Hitler was in fact defeated he raged that the other side had used these same American methods at the instigation of the Jews and with the help of Jewish money.
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Throughout 1932 he constantly complains of the lack of money to develop his ideas and staff his department, and he appropriated for his purposes every financial windfall on which he could lay his hands. Like an advertising agent, he would ponder for hours to get the right kind of slogan for the posters. He liked the abruptness, for example, of “Make an end of it!” The Party, of course, had its fighting newspapers, such as Goebbels' own paper,
Der Angriff,
which now appeared daily. But in addition to these obvious means of propaganda, Goebbels, whenever the money came his way, resorted to additional modern methods to reinforce his campaigns. In February 1932 fifty thousand midget gramophone records attacking the Government were released; they could be slipped into an ordinary envelope. This device was successful enough to be repeated later. Although talking-films were barely established in Europe, Goebbels had himself filmed making a ten-minute speech for open-air projection in the public gardens and squares of the larger cities. This device, too, proved successful and became standard practice. He did not need the Russian cinema of Eisenstein and Pudovkin to teach him what this medium could do in the hands of a propagandist of genius. In January 1933 he writes:

In the evening we go to see the film
Rebel
by Luis Trencker. A first-class production of an artistic film. From it I can imagine the film of the future, revolutionary in character, with grand mass-scenes, composed with enormous vital energy. In one scene, in which a gigantic crucifix is carried out of a small church by the revolutionaries, the audience is deeply moved. Here you really see what can be done with the film as an artistic medium, when it is really understood. We are all much impressed.
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But the Party's financial resources at this stage did not permit the full use of the cinema; that was to come. Radio, again, was difficult for the Party to use. None the less in September Goebbels reports that his “broadcasting organisation” is working finely, except that it has not got the use of a transmitter! The following year, soon after Hitler had become Chancellor, he writes:

As an instrument for propaganda on a large scale the efficacy of the radio has not yet been sufficiently appreciated. In any case our adversaries have not recognised its value. All the better; we shall have to explore its possibilities.
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His imagination was fired by the possibilities of film and radio once he was in contact with them, but he had to content himself now with the more startling development of the resources he could afford. His placards and posters flared out to such an extent that he frequently ran into censorship trouble. In Berlin, on 4th April, he claims the city “is hardly recognisable”. “Our posters blaze forth on every advertising pillar.” In June he boasts that he has composed “placards, which, unless they are forbidden, will turn the entire city upside down”. He still used red colours so that his posters should stand out boldly against the conventional black of the rest of the circular street hoardings.

At one celebrated public meeting he used an ingenious method to score a victory over the Government. He issued a challenge to Brüning, the Chancellor, to take part in a public debate with him. It was most unlikely that a man in the Chancellor's position would have accepted such a challenge, but in fact Goebbels never gave him a chance to do so. The big posters announcing the Chancellor's refusal were out within an hour of Brüning's first knowledge of the challenge. For Goebbels had his own idea about how the debate was to be conducted. When he appeared that evening, a number of large suitcases were brought up on to the platform after him, and he set his audience laughing when he said that, in spite of the Chancellor's refusal to appear, he had brought him along none the less. As his assistants began to unpack the suitcases, Goebbels added: “In here I have got Herr Bruning, or at least all that matters of him!” The cases contained large disc recordings of Bruning's speeches, and from then on Goebbels conducted a debate with the absent Chancellor by switching the recordings on and off. This original kind of performance delighted the audience and scored a propaganda victory as sheer entertainment. Incidentally, the B.B.C. was later to adopt the same device in its broadcasts to Germany during the war, using recordings of Hitler's propaganda speeches and broadcasts against him with interpolations of the truth.

Another example of strategy was Goebbels' handling of the elections in the smallest of all the German states, Lippe-Detmold, the population of which was only some 150,000. This election came early in January when the Nazis were still smarting under their defeat in the November elections. Goebbels realised that during this period of stalemate with the Government what the Party needed was a resounding victory in a local election; only a few weeks before they had dropped nearly 40 per cent of their votes in Thuringia. So he decided to concentrate all his propaganda resources on this minute section of the German population. Hitler, Göring and other leaders went round, speaking in inns and village halls, and even canvassing for votes from door to door. Thousands of Storm Troopers invaded the neighbourhood, and every opposition poster was torn from the walls. Although Magda, his wife, was seriously ill in Berlin, Goebbels concentrated for two weeks on the conquest of the Diet of Lippe. He won. In
Der Angriff
of 20th January he wrote: “The decision of the citizens of Lippe is not a local affair. It corresponds to the sentiment prevailing throughout the country. Again the great masses of the people are on the move— in our direction.”
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It was a brilliant idea, and it succeeded. The German press, which had laughed at the whole affair, found their laughter turned against them.

The National Socialists were also masters of the art of ceremonial. Their genius for pageantry and for the generation of mass emotion through the combination of elaborate processions, stirring music and dramatic speech-making has probably never been equalled; it reached its height in the great Nuremberg rallies of the pre-war years. Goebbels himself was not only an eloquent orator on such occasions, but an adept at exploiting the easy emotions that are available to the propagandist when people are gathered together to do honour to this or that. For example, Goebbels loved funerals. During 1932 he saw to it that every funeral possible of an S.A. or S.S. man who had been killed in street-fights or ambushes was turned to advantage. “In the churchyard by the graveside I give full vent to my grief and indignation” (26th January 1932). “At noon we bury our murdered comrade, Koester, in a churchyard outside Berlin. Our S.A. men are pale with rage and indignation … I express all the hatred and rage that weighs upon my heart. Ten thousand people listen with boundless resentment” (25th June 1932). But he went even better on 11th November:

At Schöneberg (suburb of Berlin) we bury Reppich, the Storm Trooper who was killed during the strike. Forty thousand people are present at the funeral. He is being laid to rest like a prince. Over the cemetery aeroplanes are circling with Swastika flags swathed in black as a last greeting to the dead. The Storm Troopers present are much moved.

Most useful of all were the funerals of the Hitler youth. In January 1933 Goebbels claimed the “whole population of Berlin” followed one boy to his grave. “We march behind the coffin of this murdered boy through eternal walls of men for two and a half hours.” The sixteen-year-old youth sacrificed to Hitler is returned “to the motherly bosom of the earth”. Even more effective, though much simpler, was the funeral of a small boy of the
Hitlerjugend
who was stabbed a year earlier in the Moabit suburb of Berlin, the district with strong Communist associations. Goebbels refers repeatedly to the marks made on a white wall by “his little bloodstained hands”. These marks, he says, are like the
Mene Tekel
at Belshazzar's feast. Although at that period prohibited from speaking in public by Berlin's Deputy Chief of Police, who was still the famous ‘Isidor’ Weiss, Goebbels could scarcely be stopped from orating over the grave of this poor child.

We bury the “Hitler boy” Norkus on a biting cold day. From the bottom of my heart I speak to the children and the men gathered round the narrow coffin. The boy's father, a simple workman, is brave beyond words. Grief-stricken, with an ashen face, he raises his hand in salute to the strains of the Horst Wessel Lied and sings with bitter pride and deep wrath “Hold high the flag !”
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