B006OAL1QM EBOK (17 page)

Although there was at times little to choose between the methods used by the Communists and the National Socialists to exploit the political situation, Goebbels did everything he could to dramatise the violence he himself incited in the bitterest of his opponents. The Nazis always deliberately provoked trouble.

The following October he boasts of how he organised the break-up of a political meeting. Hundreds of National Socialists were issued with forged passes to a joint debating session staged by the Nazis together with the Nationalist Party, most of whose own members were left outside the hall waving their genuine passes in indignation. This meant, in effect, that the hall was virtually filled with National Socialists long before the debate was due to start. Goebbels then arrived with his entourage and was carried shoulder-high into the hall amid shouts and cheers. “I myself,” he writes, “am surrounded by a ring of S.A. men, stout as oaks. It will be no pleasure surely for the Nationalists to make a speech against the Nazi Party in this hall.” In the end, the Nationalist speakers were howled to silence, and the chairman of the meeting had to call on Goebbels to restore order. Outside the sound of the Horst Wessel Lied left no doubt which of the two parties was the better and less scrupulously organised. Goebbels, elated with his success, rushed round to ensure that a million (Goebbels' figure) extra copies of the National Socialist papers would be on the streets to reinforce the victory.

The violent break-up of meetings extended even to the Prussian Diet, where on 25th May Goebbels was among those who incited a bloody battle with the Communists who were flung bodily out of the Assembly. The victorious Nazis sang the Horst Wessel Lied on the scene of their triumph. 1932 was also a year of violent street-fighting between the Communists and the National Socialists. In Prussia alone 461 political riots took place in fifty days, 1st June-20th July, with 82 killed and 400 seriously wounded. The Ruhr was another centre for violence, and on Sunday 10th July a pitched battle between the Nazis and Communists took place in Altona, a suburb of Hamburg, in which nineteen people lost their lives and nearly 300 were wounded. Goebbels himself describes the violence of his reception in Elberfeld and Düssel-dorf, his old district as a Nazi organiser:

We fight our way through the seething mob at Düsseldorf and Elber-feld. A wild trip! We had no idea that the situation would turn out to be so serious. Innocuous, we drive into Hagen quite openly, uniformed, and in an open car. The streets are swarming, full of the mob and Communist rabble. They block the thoroughfare so that we can neither advance nor go back. There is nothing for it but to drive straight ahead at full speed and give them to understand we don't care a fig for them! We dash straight through. Each of us has his revolver ready and is decided to pay for his life, if needs be, as dearly as possible. The meeting place lies on a hill with a wood in the background. The Communists have ingeniously set fire to this wood, so that the holding of the meeting is rendered impracticable. But speeches are delivered, in spite of this. The enemy is not to have the fun of beating us. Ten thousand are present on the hillside. Our S.A. men blanch with rage.
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On 15th July he was stoned out of Rheydt, his native town. He was not to forget this insult in a hurry.

Yet the Communists were turned to account in the final dealings with Schleicher, who was convinced in the end that National Socialism must not be allowed to disintegrate. Were it to do so, he realised all too well that the only place appropriate for the rowdies of the streets, the private armies of unemployed men and hysterical youths would be in the ranks of the Communist Party itself. Goebbels hastened to point this out to the wavering democrats. Without National Socialism, he alleged in January 1933, there would be twelve million more Communists in Germany. But the unemployed rabble that made up the greater number of the Storm Troopers were quite unfitted to accept the strict ideological discipline imposed by the Communists.

Goebbels still recognised that speaking, not writing, was the essence of effective propaganda. Hitler had said so in
Mein Kampf,
and it was indeed fortunate for Goebbels that his personal ambitions were equally divided between recognition as a great orator and as a great writer. The Nazis were never to succeed with the printed word to the extent that they succeeded with the spoken word, where the situation was totally different because the dramatic utterance of the living performer could be designed to steal the attention of an audience excited by the contagion of mass enthusiasm. Like Hitler, though so different in his style and manner of speaking, Goebbels was perhaps happiest before an audience. In any case, he claimed that though the National Socialists had many good speakers at their disposal they had virtually no good journalists. Then he makes a revealing statement (1st October 1932):

In many cases our journalists do not understand that in election times papers have to give themselves up to propaganda almost exclusively. These writers are generally too sincere and more like scientists than propagandists.

Our propagandists are better. Day by day, and evening by evening, they are in direct contact with the masses. They are masters of their job, the elite of our Party. The best platform speakers that Germany has ever produced are to be found on our side.

Goebbels had no illusions about the nature of propaganda. If journalism was degraded to a science, propaganda was raised to an art!

The thirteen months from 1st January 1932 to 30th January 1933 saw an orgy of speech-making. Goebbels turned the whistle-stop system of American campaigning into the flight-stop system of the Nazis. “A critical innovation,” he writes in March. “The Leader will conduct his next campaign by plane. By this means he will be able to speak three or four times a day at various places as opportunity serves, and address about one and a half million people in spite of the time being so short.” The flights were often terrible, but Hitler seemed to enjoy them. On 8th April, when storms grounded all aircraft over western Germany, Hitler flew to Düsseldorf to fulfil his engagement to speak. “The small sporting monoplane leaps and tosses,” complains Goebbels, on the way to Dresden, six months later. But the Leader came down safely from the clouds to address an audience claimed to be thirty thousand at the Stadion. These ‘propaganda flights' were Goebbels' idea; they were minutely planned by him and carried out with the help of the National Socialist Flying Corps.

But the greatest meetings of all were those staged by Goebbels in the Sportpalast, the vast arena in Berlin, which held some 12,000 people. The Nazis adopted it as their principal platform. Goebbels writes:

The Sportpalast is the great political platform of the capital, and we have made it into what it now is. There is something quite unique about it. When one enters it on an overcrowded occasion one is immediately affected, as it were, by the mass emotional content of the place.
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Later he claimed that “the use of the Sportpalast is having a lasting effect on public life. Its platform is truly the platform of the people.” It was here on Sunday 22nd January that Hitler made his last public speech, an address to the Storm Troopers, before he became Chancellor. This followed a day of marching directed against the Communists, who had planned a counter-march which seemed to make a street-battle inevitable, especially as the Nazis intended to begin their demonstration outside the Communist Party headquarters. Schleicher, faced with the problem of public safety, prohibited the Communists from assembling, but permitted the Nazis to do so. With armed police protection and escorted by armoured cars, the Nazis flaunted their victory in the face of the Communists on their own ground, the Bülowplatz. Goebbels could afford to laugh; he knew now that Schleicher's days were numbered and that it was only a matter of waiting impatiently for the President to call on Hitler to become Chancellor.

Behind the propaganda, the demonstrations, the street-fights, the funerals and the shouting lay the philosophy of Nazism itself—if it could be called a philosophy. It sharpened itself against the whetstone of both its success and its setbacks. It was completely opportunist. But certain principles underlie Goebbels' presentation of the Nazi case in their relentless pursuit of power. Goebbels says significantly that it is always necessary to be “strict in principle” but “elastic in application”. “Tactics,” he explains elsewhere, “are more a matter of intelligence and instinct than of character. One sometimes has to go a roundabout way to attain a great goal. Most people,” he goes on, “do not understand the difference between strategy and tactics.”
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What he seems to mean by this is that you must as a tactician use any means you can devise to gain your ultimate objective as a strategist!

What the Nazis wanted was a single simple act—an Enabling Bill giving Hitler dictatorial power—"the contest for power, the game of chess”, as Goebbels calls it.
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This they eventually achieved in March 1933. It was the sound barrier through which the Nazi machine had to penetrate, and the way through was opened when Hitler became Chancellor. Until that time the heat had to be kept full on. “The Party must always be kept with the steam up,” says Goebbels.
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The policy was one of attack. Attack represented strength. “We must make up our minds to live dangerously,” he writes.
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And again: “We are always strongest in the offensive.”
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It was right to be “everlastingly worrying on the heels of the Government”.
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In any situation, however adverse, aggression was the rule. On one occasion Goebbels found a policeman had confiscated his car because it was parked in front of an hotel entrance. He immediately created a scene, lost his temper and turned the situation into a public exhibition in which he called the policeman a Communist and began to incite the people attracted by the shouting against the Government. The result of this, he boasts, was that the police thenceforth left his car strictly alone. Aggression pays! “One must never allow oneself to fall back on mere defence.”
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The Party, therefore, was constantly being rallied, and enemies created for it to fight. The enemies were the Government, the Communists and the Jews. Meanwhile, to overawe them and the weak and vacillating bourgeois (“who is unable to understand the present situation”) came the arrays of marching men (“two hours of eternal marching, tall, fair, the best of our German youth … with them one can achieve a revolution”).
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And behind the marching men came the sudden violences—"outside in the corridor the slandered Klotz is being flogged by a few hefty members of the Party”.
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“A National Socialist only feels himself when he is at liberty to make a fight of it.”
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Violence had always to be engineered against the Communists in the streets and alleyways and meeting-halls. Bloodshed became normal.

The Nazis made great play with their direct contact with the people. “We must appeal to the primitive instincts in the masses,”
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writes Goebbels, and throughout the diary he never stops emphasising that the Nazi strength lay in its direct dependence on the will of the people. Just as enemies had to be incited to give the S.A. and the S.S. someone to fight, so the ambitions of the Nazi had to be made to seem dependent on the support of a proletariat. “One must never fall out of touch with the people,” says Goebbels.
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“The people are the beginning, middle and end of all our endeavours.” The people did not include, of course, the Jews, the Communists, the Social Democrats and the bourgeois. They were those who could be induced, bribed or browbeaten into supporting the ambitions of Hitler and his associates. “The Poll! the Poll! It's the people we want” expresses exactly the reason for these constant references.
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But the Nazi proletariat had its symbolic representatives. “A simple workman comes up to the platform and hands me his wedding-ring. It is a wonderful people for whom we are fighting!”
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The attitude of the Nazis to both the industrialists and the intelligentsia was equally opportunist. Power, as Goebbels remarks wryly, begets money; but when you have not yet achieved power you are always in need of it.

Deliver an address to the leaders of industry in the afternoon. The more desperate their situation, the better they understand us.

Speak to the working classes in the evening. The S.A. takes forty minutes to march in.
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Goebbels was careful to adapt his style when he was called upon to handle the selected audience of influential people.

In the evening at the Hotel Prinz Albrecht. I address a small circle of invited guests. Here, also, problems of National Socialism are beginning to attract interest, although these people approach them in their own manner, with a slight degree of hauteur, and from a considerable distance.

They seem utterly unable to grasp that we really embody something essentially new, that we cannot and will not be compared with any other party, that we are aiming at a totalitarian State, and must attain absolute power in order to achieve our aims.
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Goebbels makes some interesting remarks about the ideal human material for whom the Nazis were searching to increase their supporters. “A man of good character,” he says, “without necessarily great insight into things is always better than an intelligent man without much character.”
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And again: “Politics turn far more on character than on intelligence: it is courage that conquers the world !”
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Seeing that Goebbels had no doubt at all of his own intelligence, it is clear that all the Nazis wanted were malleable men who once their sights had been levelled allowed themselves to be used as human weapons against their nation's opponents. “A few flames burn brightly, the others only reflect their light.”
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