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If hot water is the revolutionist's element, as Bernard Shaw's rebel, Jack Tanner, claims, then Goebbels was fortunate during this period. In January 1932 he was called as a witness in a case of assault against some Jews of which Count Helldorf, the S.A. Leader in Berlin, was being accused; Goebbels was thought by the police to have been involved himself. After refusing for a while to give evidence at all unless the police revealed the source of their information against him, he eventually appeared:

I then direct my attention to the Attorney-General, and overwhelm him with my indignation. At last I give my evidence as insolently as I can, and am dismissed after having been fined 500 Reichsmark for contravention of a regulation. The defendant S.A. men shook with laughter.
⁴⁸

Immediately after the case Goebbels was prohibited from speaking in public by his old enemy Weiss for a period that amounted to about three weeks. This did not, of course, stop him speaking elsewhere. In February he was excluded from the Reichstag for causing an uproar and (falsely, as he claims) insulting the President. In April the Supreme Court of Justice indicted him for high treason. (“The accusation covers forty pages. A bothersome affair!”) He made himself immune from proceedings for a while by accepting the mandate of the Prussian Diet—that is, the privilege accorded to a Party member who has been allocated a seat in the Government. In May the case was dropped. In July he was stoned out of his native town of Rheydt. In September he claims that the “bourgeois press” had obtained a decree threatening to fine him 300,000 Reichsmark and to have him imprisoned because of his organised boycott by the Nazis of all papers that were consistently attacking the Party. This case also came to nothing. In November the Government forced
Der Angriff
(which was frequently suspended from publication for the tone of its articles) to publish a special edition on the eve of the General Election with an appeal of an anti-Nazi nature in it. Goebbels agreed to publish the edition, but had the whole issue secretly thrown into a canal in the night. “Let it sink!” he wrote. No doubt the water was hot.

But ceaselessly aggressive tactics paid in the end. On 30th January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor, and the balance of the world was changed overnight. Those who had brought this change about thought, no doubt, that they could control it. Hitler's first Cabinet had only three Nazi Ministers in it. But the days of both the Cabinet and the Reichstag, as representative of democratic government in Germany, were numbered. As Goebbels put it less than three months later, on 22nd April:

The Leader's authority is now completely in the ascendant in the Cabinet. There will be no more voting. The Leader's personality decides. All this has been achieved much more quickly than we had dared to hope.
⁴⁹

The intermediate weeks saw the rapid stripping of German democracy, such as it was. Göring, in a powerful position as head of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, set about reform with a will. Anti-Nazis were removed from offices of importance both centrally and regionally. The heads of the police force were replaced by Nazis. Papers which had consistently attacked the Party (such as
Vorwärts
and the
Acht-Uhr Abendblatt)
were prohibited from publication and on 24th February the police raided the Communist headquarters in Berlin. Then, on 27th February, the sinister affair of the Reichstag fire took place, followed by Göring's immediate suppression of the “entire Communist and Social Democrat press” (as Goebbels puts it) and a direct attack by the Nazis on the Communist Party with the aim of its complete elimination. The Nazis claimed that the Communists had been about to stage a revolution of their own.

Goebbels' account of the fire itself is brief, and his view of its cause succinct:

Work at home in the evening. The Leader comes to dine at nine o'clock. We have some music and talk. Suddenly a phone call from Dr. Hanfstaengl: “The Reichstag is on fire!” I take this for a bit of wild fantasy and refuse to report it to the Leader. I ask for news wherever possible and at last obtain the dreadful confirmation: it is true! The great dome is all ablaze. Incendiarism! I immediately inform the Leader, and we hasten at top speed down the Charlottenburger Chaussee to the Reichstag. The whole building is aflame. Clambering over thick fire-hoses we reach the great lobby by gateway number two. Göring meets us on the way, and soon von Papen also arrives. That this is the work of incendiaries has been ascertained to be the fact at various spots. There is no doubt that Communism has made a last attempt to cause disorder by means of fire and terror, in order to grasp the power during the general panic.
⁵⁰

This atmosphere of domesticity disturbed and shocked by a surprising event is borne out by Hitler's friend and photographer Heinrich Hoffmann,
⁵¹
who was present at the Goebbels' flat when the fire was discovered. Hitler, accompanied by Goebbels, went to the offices of the
Völkischer Beobachter
and issued a new editorial demanding vengeance.
⁵²

There can now be no doubt at all that Goebbels himself was implicated with Göring in the Reichstag fire plot.
⁵³
They needed some incident which would afford the Nazis an excuse for suppressing the Communists in the cause of public safety. The Communists still commanded some six million votes in Germany. This, it appears, is what happened. There was an underground passage linking the Palace of the President of the Reichstag with the Reichstag building. During the night of the 27th, members of the S.A. led by Karl Ernst, trusted assistant of Count Helldorf, Leader of the S.A. in Berlin, entered the Reichstag along this passage and prepared certain furniture and fittings for the flames with a chemical solution; a young madman, van der Lubbe, an alleged Communist, immediately admitted incendiarism when he was found half-naked in the burning building. He was a willing tool of the S.A., and longed for fame and martyrdom. The Nazis saw to it that the Reichstag fire was regarded as a symbol of the incipient Communist revolution which their vigilance had frustrated. Hitler himself wanted an immediate Communist blood-bath, but was restrained by his Cabinet. Yet when the trial connected with the fire was held later in Leipzig, all four of the Communist leaders accused of implication were acquitted, and only van der Lubbe, who had admitted his guilt from the start, was sentenced and executed. All the Reich Court permitted itself to say was that the fire could have been an act perpetrated by Left radical elements with a view to overthrowing the Government and seizing power. But the fire served its purpose well, and the first stages in the establishment of a police state were secured. Hindenburg, as President, signed an emergency decree “for the Protection of People and State”, and Göring, as the Minister in charge of the police, took over. Communists were arrested by the police, or, what was far worse, seized by the S.A. and viciously maltreated. The Communists were the excuse for a temporary suspension of civil rights which was to become permanent. They were only the first on the list of parties and organisations to be suspended.

Karl Ernst was subsequently to be killed by the Nazis during the Röhm purge the following year. Gisevius, the former Gestapo official who was to become one of the leading agents among the German underground, gave evidence at the Nuremberg Trials which affirmed that it was Goebbels himself who had planned the whole operation of the fire with Ernst on 18th February, supervised the selection of the S.A. men to take part and advised Ernst that the police would not investigate any use to which the President's passage to the Reichstag might be put. After all, the President was Göring himself.

Goebbels, like Hitler, wanted to make the fire the occasion for a blood-bath. Later he boasted that it was he who had advised Hitler to hang van der Lubbe in public in front of the gutted building.

Curt Riess ingeniously reminds us that Dostoevsky's nihilist hero Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky in
The Possessed,
which Goebbels had read with so much enthusiasm ten years previously, was himself an incendiarist by inclination. Did Goebbels, he queries, get the idea originally from his reading of Dostoevsky?

While the excitement about the fire was at its height, the elections for the Reichstag came round once more. Goebbels arranged a vast torchlight procession to act as the culmination of the month's campaign for votes in which every device of processions, demonstrations, marching, orations to cheering crowds and the sinister intimations of violence and beating-up had been used to effect a favourable poll. The results could only be described as disappointing for the Nazis, the more so considering that their opponents had been deprived by violence of any effective campaign. The Nazis polled only 43.9 per cent, or just over 17 million of the 39 million votes cast. Coupled with the Nationalists, Hitler was only able to muster a bare majority in the House. But with the Communist representatives proscribed, they had now in fact little to fear, and Goebbels in his diary has no qualms about presenting the vote as an overwhelming victory: “The victory is ours. It is far greater than any of us had dared to hope. But what do figures signify any longer? We are masters of the Reich and of Prussia; all other parties have been definitely beaten.”
⁵⁴

Events followed quickly. On 14th March Goebbels was appointed Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
⁵⁵
The Ministry he had spent so much time planning when its existence was still a dream had now at last materialised. In a speech made only two days after his appointment he explained why propaganda was so necessary to the regime. “A government such as ours which has to take such far-reaching measures … must make propagandistic preparations in order to draw the people to its side … Public enlightenment is essentially passive; propaganda is active … we are determined to work on the masses until they have fallen to us.”
⁵⁶

There is some evidence that Goebbels would have preferred a ministry with greater executive power, and later he was continually to show his ambition to control the internal affairs of Germany. He remained Gauleiter for Berlin for the rest of his life, and this office, especially during the war, enabled him to control the civil population in certain respects. But Hitler recognised that Goebbels could serve him best in the field where his real genius lay, and the new ministry was created especially for him. He was given the Leopoldpalast on the Wilhelmplatz, opposite the Chancellery, in which to set up his Government department. It was here that he built up the network of controls that made him master of every medium of expression Germany possessed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment

T
HERE WAS DUST
in the curtains of the house on the Wilhelmstrassc which had once been a royal residence. “A beautiful building by the great architect Schinkel,” writes Goebbels, “but so old-fashioned we shall have to have it adapted to our requirements.”
¹

Goebbels decided that this beautiful house had to be stripped as clean as Germany herself by the revolution. Down with the curtains, and off with the stucco—"I cannot work in the twilight.” The horrified officials of an older régime stood around, hindering, expostulating, holding up the builders whom Goebbels had rushed in. No matter.

I simply take a few bricklayers from the S.A. and have the stucco and wainscoting knocked off during the night; newspapers and documents as old as the hills are taken down from the shelves, where they have lain musty and dusty for years and are flung downstairs pell-mell. Only clouds of dust attest the bygone splendours of bureaucracy! The worthy gentlemen who come next to be evacuated are much astonished by what they find next morning. One of them, horror-stricken, stammers: “Herr Reichsminister, do you know you may be put into prison for this?”
²

Goebbels just laughed. Dismissals were easy enough to effect just now. This was a time for new men. “Here and there an official offers resistance, but slight pressure suffices to bring him to his knees.” It was all done in no time.
³

Everyone was tense with the excitement of opportunity. “Is it not as if the wings of History touched us!” murmurs Goebbels as on 12th March he watches the Leader (“trembling with the emotion and solemnity of it all”) reading a proclamation that new flags with swastikas on them are to be “flown over the nation.”

These early days were filled with public events that served in some measure to hide from people who were not yet ready to accept the Nazi régime the radical transformation that was in fact going on. Arrests, dismissals and reappointments of reliable Nazis in positions of authority were daily occurrences. Goebbels was well aware even before the creation of his ministry gave him immediate powers that the radio and the press were the first problems to tackle. The Nazis, though constitutionally still holding less than half the seats in a democratically elected Reichstag after the election in March, skilfully used the powers that they had acquired to frustrate any attempts at opposition. “Göring is cleaning out the Augean stables,” says Goebbels. “Names of great importance yesterday fade away today to nothing.”
⁴
Both before and after the election the Nazis carefully alternated public ceremony and rejoicing with various acts of suppression and oppression, especially of men remaining critical of them in positions of influence in the press and the radio. “One ban follows another very quickly,” he writes on 15th February. By the end of the month some 60 Communist and 71 Social Democrat papers had been suppressed and their leading editors and writers confined in Göring's prisons and concentration camps. By the end of April virtually all but Nazi papers had disappeared.

Of particular significance, so it seemed to Goebbels, was the annual Potsdam ceremony associated with Frederick the Great. The father-figure of Hindenburg (“What a happiness for all of us to have this venerable and remarkable man still over us,”
⁵
says Goebbels with suitable reverence, for Hindenburg helped the Nazis to seem respectable) was to stand side-by-side with Hitler in what was planned by the new Minister as a ceremony “to be held for the first time after the National Socialist style…. At these great State festivals the most minute details are important.” This was on 21st March; on 20th March Hitler had pushed the Enabling Bill through which gave him as Chancellor great personal powers.

On our way from Berlin to Potsdam we pass through huge crowds of cheering people. Potsdam is smothered in flags and green garlands. Only with difficulty can the road be cleared for the Cabinet and the Members of Parliament to pass. We are nearly suffocated by the multitude. Hindenburg enters the Garrison Church
(Garnisonskirche)
together with the Leader. A deep silence reigns. Briefly and solemnly the President of the Reich reads his message to the Members of the Reichstag and the German people. His voice is clear and firm. In our midst stands a man who unites whole generations.

Then the Leader speaks. His tone is dominating and when he ends we are all greatly moved. I sit near Hindenburg and observe tears in his eyes. All rise from their seats and enthusiastically acclaim the ancient Field-Marshal, who shakes hands with the young Chancellor….

He stands there at the salute; the whole scene is bathed in sunshine; the hand of God is held in invisible benediction over the grey town of Prussian grandeur and duty.
⁶

During the ceremony Hitler and Goebbels very pointedly left the Church service in order to pay an official visit to the graves of men whom they wished to be regarded as Nazi martyrs.

The day ended with a performance of
Die Meistersinger,
and after that Goebbels gave a lavish party for the builders, bricklayers and decorators who had transformed his ministry in such record time, and helped him “play that trick on the bureaucrats”.

Triumphal speaking tours of Germany were undertaken by Hitler and Goebbels (often together) both before and after the March election. Goebbels was determined that no one should be left out of the atmosphere of victory and rejoicing. Twice during this period of flushed celebration, in February and again in April, he revisited Rheydt where only a few months before he had been received with insults and violence. How different now. With Magda and his baby daughter in a basket, Goebbels arrived from Dortmund and surprised his mother. The following day the town seems to have become so excited by his presence as to be, he says, “in a state of incredible commotion”. In April he revisited Rheydt officially as Minister;
⁷
there is a certain sinister quality amounting almost to vengefulness in the reason he gives for this:

I put up with being accorded a great reception in my native town in honour of my mother, who has been calumniated, slandered, belittled and persecuted in this place for years, and has suffered unspeakably from it. One knows what this sort of thing is like. To be a social outcast is to be mortally stricken. It is torture for an old woman to have heard nothing for years but remarks of pity, or indignation, on account of an unruly son who lives at daggers drawn with Church, State and Society….

That is why I have come to Rheydt to show her this day that all she has had to suffer for my sake, and for our cause, has not been in vain.
⁸

Hitler and his colleagues were vigorously pressing forward with the policy of
Gleichschaltung,
which meant bringing everything into line with National Socialist ideas. With this in mind, Goebbels assembled representatives from the film industry and the film press in the Kaiser-hof Hotel and spoke to them at length about the future of film production in Germany. He began by reassuring his audience about the stability of the new régime, and went on to explain how much both he and the Führer enjoyed films and how much they were prepared to do for the industry. Films in the new Germany were to have an important cultural and artistic mission. It all sounded very rosy, especially to those who had themselves used those very terms in the criticism of films that had been vulgarised by the box-office. Then Goebbels surprised everyone by giving a list of the films he considered the German film-makers should emulate. They were
Battleship Potemkin, The Nibelung Saga, Anna Karenina
and
The Rebel
—the first a famous production made in Soviet Russia and all of them films with which Jews had been prominently associated as producers or directors. This initial meeting with the film industry representatives put up the signpost, but Goebbels was too preoccupied to set up full-scale machinery to reorganise film production at this stage. It was not until September that the Reich Film Chamber was created to control the activities of the industry.

The main channels for Nazi propaganda, however, were initially the press and the radio. With the press Goebbels had had long experience, and it was merely a matter of quickly silencing and eliminating hostile newspapers and journals. Broadcasting, on the other hand, in 1933 was still something relatively new in society, though Goebbels was already well prepared to take it over and develop it to the full.

The task was not difficult because the German radio was organised on a unified national basis not unlike, in some respects, broadcasting in Britain under the B.B.C. In 1928 the German Post Office obtained considerable powers over the ten provincial companies which provided the broadcasting service in various regions of the country, and it drew the licence fees paid by the public owning receiving sets. There was no commercial radio in operation. The Post Office also controlled the National Broadcasting Company, which owned the majority of the stock of the regional companies, and it both owned and operated the national transmitters responsible for putting out the companies' programmes.

As soon as his ministry was created, Goebbels took control of the machinery of broadcasting on behalf of the State, reconstituting the National Broadcasting Company and putting it under his ministry. Nazis were put in key positions. As soon as possible the transmitters were increased both in number and in power, and the radio manufacturers were vigorously pressed by the Ministry to make special very cheap ‘people's' radio sets
(Volksempfänger)
on a vast scale. In the year 1933–34 German homes owning a radio set increased by over a million, making the total sets in use in excess of six million. By 1938 the figure was 9½- million, and after this even smaller and cheaper sets were made available for the workers so that radio would be virtually in every home. In addition, on every important occasion (such as a speech by Hitler) a special loud-speaker organisation was established to instal equipment in such places as schools, factories, offices, public halls and in the open air. By 1935 the Nazis could boast that when Hitler chose to broadcast he could have an audience of not less than 56 million Germans. Goebbels said: “With the radio we have destroyed the spirit of rebellion.”
⁹
Or, as one of his assistants put it even more pungently: “Real broadcasting is true propaganda. Propaganda means fighting on all battlefields of the spirit, generating, multiplying, destroying, exterminating, building and undoing. Our propaganda is determined by what we call German race, blood and nation.”
¹⁰

Nor did Goebbels leave the habit of listening to chance. A system of local ‘wireless wardens' was established to keep contact with the public, send in reports, and see that all important broadcasts were known of in advance and made available through the loud-speakers set up in public places.

In April, only a month after becoming a minister, Goebbels began his organised boycott of the German Jews. This was a deliberate act of blackmail. The Nazi leaders were alarmed at the vivid pictures of violence and oppression in Germany which filled the world press. Goebbels immediately attributed these reports to the Jewish exiles whom Nazi violence had driven from their homeland, and he seized the opportunity to punish the Jews who were still left in Germany. “Generosity does not impress the Jews,” he wrote. “One has to show them one is equal in everything.”
¹¹
So the boycott was officially organised, though news of it only served to make the Nazis more than ever suspect abroad.

On 1st April, initially for one day only, all Jewish shops were closed by force, and Storm Troopers stationed in front of their entrances. It rested with the Jews left in Germany, Goebbels proclaimed, to persuade their kinsmen abroad to stop the talking. Otherwise the closure would be repeated, and in any case kept in the background, as he put it, in the form of a permanent threat. The following day the Nazi press, in calling off the boycott, boasted that the Jews had now learned their lesson.

One of the more astute decisions made by Goebbels at this time was to adopt 1st May, the traditional day of celebration for the Communists, as the day of national rejoicing for the Nazis. The Communists, faced with suppression, might have tried to exploit it as the occasion for a rally, but Goebbels was determined to take the day over in as large a way as possible. He makes this massive celebration the climax of his published diary. The festival, organised on a lavish scale, was planned on paper by 26th April, rehearsed on 28th April, and mounted in the grand manner he understood so well. It was above all to be a rally of the workers! Delegations were sent from every part of the Reich, and the day had naturally been proclaimed a public holiday by a special Act of the Reichstag put forward by Goebbels himself on 24th March.

The swastika flags and banners curled in the air and the children paraded. “I speak to them from the depth of my heart,” writes Goebbels. “It is easy to speak to children if one understands their little souls.”
¹²
Goebbels' stepson Harald presented a large bunch of roses to the ancient President Hindenburg as he sat side by side with Chancellor Hitler. Then the entourage moved to the Tempelhofer Feld where the great mass demonstration of the representatives of the German workers waited. Hitler and the President received the delegations that had come in by air, and the rest of the day was spent in eating and speech-making. At night Goebbels claims a million and a half people were assembled on the Tempelhofer Feld, while similar organised assemblies took place on varying scale throughout the country. Searchlights swung across the heads of the multitude. “One recognises nothing but a grey mass, shoulder to shoulder.” A radio-link established exact synchronisation with all other assemblies throughout the nation when Goebbels proclaimed a minute's silence for a mining disaster which had most opportunely occurred that very day. Hitler then spoke in praise of the dignity of labour and of how the worker was to be the essential factor in the new Germany. A million and a half voices joined in singing the Horst Wessel anthem. Before presenting Hitler to his vast audience, Goebbels saw that the sun would soon break through the clouds. He timed his own speech so that the God-given light should stream down on Hitler as he took his place on the speaker's rostrum.
¹³