Goebbels: A Biography (18 page)

During the summer of 1929, while he was hoping that Hitler would soon confirm his appointment to the job in Munich, Goebbels had been holding back—despite considerable reservations—from criticizing the Party leader’s unappealing policy of allying with nationalist forces. He does not seem to have realized, or else found too complicated and too troublesome, the twin-track strategy employed by Hitler—as in several other projects—of wooing the nationalist right while at the same time clearly distancing himself from it.

By September the Reich Committee for the German People’s Petition had assembled a bill to put before the Reichstag proposing a plebiscite aimed at preventing the Reich government from taking on any new burdens or commitments under the Versailles Treaty. The government would also be formally obliged to retract the admission of war guilt contained in the treaty, as well as to annul all of the previously
accepted commitments arising out of that admission. Government ministers and other representatives of the Reich who ignored these decrees and signed agreements with foreign states could be tried for treason. Goebbels published one of his speeches as a pamphlet, in which agitation against the Young Plan was given a pronounced “socialist” slant: Through reparations the means of production were being expropriated by foreigners, thus making nationalization impossible.
³⁸

The collection of signatures in support of a petition calling for a plebiscite on the Young Plan was carried out between October 16 and October 29. This drive was boosted by a smoothly functioning propaganda machine, with contributions not only from the participating organizations—the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, the NSDAP—but also from the press network controlled by Hugenberg, as well as a large amount of assorted propaganda material, together with funding, distributed by the Reich Committee to participating organizations.
³⁹

A common perception that this massive propaganda exposure was crucially important for the NSDAP’s transformation into a mass movement does not seem to stand up to scrutiny. The Hugenberg press, for example, was quite reluctant to give the NSDAP space for its propaganda during the referendum drive, and it appears that the Party’s participation in the campaign did little to increase sponsorship from industry.
⁴⁰

In private, Goebbels was skeptical about the whole venture, as his diary indicates. In particular, his entries at the time are full of complaints about inadequate financial support from the Reich Committee.
⁴¹
Hitler’s willingness to collaborate with the “reactionaries” still rubbed him the wrong way: “Hitler and Hugenberg shared a platform in Munich. Grr! […] Nothing more can be achieved by parliamentary means. The revolution must be on the march!”
⁴²

He wavered in his assessment of the outcome of the petition. Around the end of October and the beginning of November, he was sure that the necessary quorum for a petition (10 percent of those eligible to vote) would not be achieved and that the bourgeois parties could be blamed for this defeat.
⁴³
However, when the petition barely gained the necessary support—at 10.02 percent of the vote—to stage a plebiscite, he was cheering: “Hurrah! At least all that work wasn’t wasted. So now the dance can continue.” He cast aside his doubts: “We’ll be the winners, come what may.”
⁴⁴

The campaign against the Young Plan merged smoothly into the election campaign, in which the SA, aroused by Goebbels’s call for “mobilization,”
⁴⁵
again took a front-line role.
⁴⁶
In the Prussian local elections on November 17, 1929, the NSDAP in Berlin took 132,000 votes, or 5.8 percent, sending thirteen deputies to the city council. Its greatest successes came in middle-class districts such as Steglitz, Schöneberg, and Zehlendorf, the bastions of the “nationalist” middle class specifically targeted by the anti–Young Plan campaign. It was in proletarian districts such as Wedding, Prenzlauer Berg, and Neukölln that the NSDAP did the worst.
⁴⁷
For almost a year Goebbels took over the leadership of the small NSDAP section in the council, but he did not speak there once, essentially leaving local politics to Julius Lippert.
⁴⁸

On December 22 the plebiscite on the Young Plan bill failed: Despite the huge propaganda effort, no more than 13.8 percent of the vote was in favor.
⁴⁹
But the group that had established the Reich Committee—regarded by Goebbels with the utmost suspicion—did not dissolve it. So he decided to take provocative action that would drive a wedge into the coalition.

On December 29, under the headline “Is Hindenburg Still Alive?,” he mounted an attack in
Der Angriff
on the eighty-two-year-old president, predicting that in the case of the Young Plan, Hindenburg would once more do what “his Jewish and Marxist advisers prompted him” to do. This was accompanied by a cartoon lampooning the president. Goebbels calculated that, although the nationalists who had launched the plebiscite wanted to pressure the president into refusing to sign the Young Plan even if Parliament accepted it, they would not want to target the World War hero directly in their campaign. The calculation proved correct, as he learned early in January: “The Stahlhelm has us in its sights on account of the Hindenburg article. Hitler is completely with me on this.”
⁵⁰

Relentlessly, Goebbels added fuel to the fire: When the Young Plan was passed into law by the Reichstag on March 12, 1930, and the president immediately added his signature, he asserted in an editorial that “starting now we have a new enemy: Hindenburg.”
⁵¹
In a speech at the Veteran Soldiers’ House on March 14 he described the president as the “lackey of this crooked government and of crooked politics,”
⁵²
and he wrote in the next issue of
Der Angriff
that “Herr von Hindenburg” had “given himself the stamp of a Young-patriot.”
⁵³
For his December 1929 article, the Charlottenburg court of lay assessors fined him 800 marks.
⁵⁴
Goebbels accounted the verdict a moral victory: “A first-class funeral for Hindenburg.”
⁵⁵

On November 8, 1929, the Berlin Gau staged a commemorative ceremony in the Veteran Soldiers’ House for the dead of the Great War and those of the “movement”: Goebbels and Hermann Göring both gave speeches.
⁵⁶
Two days later there were three further memorial ceremonies, at the graves of Georg Kütemeyer and two other members of the National Socialist movement. “Dr. Goebbels three times made himself the interpreter between the dead and the living,” wrote
Der Angriff
.
⁵⁷

On these occasions, as so often at that time of year, Goebbels succumbed to melancholy: “It was a bright, sunny autumn day. And a sad sense of mortality came over me.”
⁵⁸

Two weeks later he heard from his eldest brother, Konrad, that their father, whose health had been a cause of concern for some time,
⁵⁹
was terminally ill. He went to Rheydt, where he found the dying man “completely emaciated, reduced to a skeleton, whimpering”: A week later came the news of his death.
⁶⁰
When he saw the dead man laid out, he “wept uncontrollably.” Commenting on the church funeral service, he observed how “empty and colorless […] all these forms” were. He spent two days in Rheydt with his family, who tried to console themselves by sharing their memories of the deceased.
⁶¹

Goebbels brought his father to mind again in the diary: He praised his morality, his sense of duty, and his devotion to principles. It had not been granted to him “to do great service for his country,” but the son found comfort in the thought that his father would “go on living in him and be resurrected in glory,” and this idea helped him to suppress his feelings of guilt—had he returned his love sufficiently? had he been ungrateful?—toward his father.
⁶²

Back in Berlin, a few days later he recorded in his diary a “strange dream” that sheds light on his state of mind at the time: He was “in a school, being pursued along wide corridors by a crowd of East Galician
rabbis. They kept on shouting their ‘hatred’ at me. I was a few steps ahead of them, shouting the same back at them. So it went on for hours. But they never caught up with me.”
⁶³

Repeatedly he had to deliver speeches at commemorative ceremonies: on December 18 at a memorial gathering for the SA man Walter Fischer; a few days later at the same man’s funeral; and on December 28 at the burial of Werner Wessel, brother of the SA leader Horst Wessel, who had died in an accident.
⁶⁴
The concentrated work of mourning in these months may have led him to develop a cult around the dead of the movement, a result of the mounting loss of Party comrades. Early in 1930, the violent clashes in Berlin provided him with a suitable icon for this cult: Horst Wessel. Since the beginning of 1929 Goebbels had often been thrown together with the young SA leader: “A brave lad, student, speaker, SA leader.”
⁶⁵
Raised in a middle-class family, Wessel had abandoned his law studies early, at the age of twenty-two, to devote himself entirely to the National Socialist cause. In May 1929 he had taken charge of an SA troop in the predominantly communist area around the Silesia Station. This troop rapidly evolved into the “SA-Sturm 5,” one of the most feared groups of thugs in the Berlin SA. It paraded with a trademark
Schalmei
band,
*
¹
which was a particular provocation to the communists, as they had made the
Schalmei
their own instrument. Wessel also composed song lyrics, including “Die Fahne hoch” (Raise high the flag), a song that was to acquire practically national-anthem status during the Third Reich.
⁶⁶

In January 1930, Wessel was attacked by two communists in his home and sustained a bad gunshot wound.
⁶⁷
The cause of the attack was a dispute over the rent between Wessel and his landlady, who then called on the local “commune” for assistance. As Wessel’s girlfriend was a former prostitute, it was not difficult for communist propaganda to depict the whole affair as a dispute between “pimps.” The weeks in the hospital, as Wessel’s life slowly ebbed away, and the circumstances of the assault stirred Goebbels’s imagination: “Like in a Dostoyevsky novel: the idiot, the workers, the prostitute, the middle-class family, endless pangs of conscience, endless suffering. Such is the life of this 22-year-old visionary idealist.”
⁶⁸

Wessel died on February 23, and Goebbels decided to make him the martyr figure of the movement.
⁶⁹
He had tried to do the same with Kütemeyer in 1928, but the circumstances surrounding his death remained unclear. Walter Fischer, the second National Socialist fatality in Berlin, had resigned from the SA by the time he was murdered, and was therefore effectively ruled out as a role model. But Goebbels was determined to make Wessel into a heroic legend, despite the murky background of his murder. On March 1 Goebbels spoke at his graveside, while communists and National Socialists clashed outside the cemetery.

Using the language of religious symbolism, Goebbels did his utmost to create a cult around the late Horst Wessel that immediately took on sacral overtones. He adapted the Catholic hope of resurrection, which he had encountered some months earlier in his father’s church funeral service, to the purposes of National Socialism. Goebbels designated Wessel as a “Christ-socialist,” and just as he had done with his friend Flisges in
Michael
, he elevated Wessel to the role of “redeemer” who had sacrificed his life for a Germany that would arise in the not-too-distant future: “Someone must set an example by sacrificing himself. […] Through sacrifice to redemption […] through struggle to victory. […] Wherever Germany is, you are there too, Horst Wessel!”
⁷⁰
He proclaimed “Die Fahne hoch,” the song written by Wessel, to be the anthem of the National Socialist movement.
⁷¹
In a contribution to
Der Angriff
Goebbels honored Wessel’s life as though summarizing the sufferings of Jesus: He had “drained the chalice of pain to the lees.”
⁷²

Goebbels had been making plans for a daily newspaper in Berlin since early 1929,
⁷³
and in the autumn of 1929 it had seemed that the project was in the bag. Goebbels had come to an agreement with Max Amann, head of the Party’s own Eher Verlag publishing house: The paper was to be published by Eher in Berlin; Hitler was to be named the publisher and Goebbels editor in chief.
⁷⁴
Hitler had decided in December that the paper should be printed in Berlin,
⁷⁵
but in January Goebbels learned to his dismay that the printing presses would not
be installed until September 1, 1930. “Those buffoons in Munich ruin every big plan we make,” he complained. For the time being, the
Völkischer Beobachter
would carry a special supplementary page for Berlin.
⁷⁶

Goebbels was in for another surprise in January 1930: The Strasser brothers’ Kampf-Verlag announced it was starting its own daily newspaper on March 1. Goebbels countered this move by proposing to expand
Der Angriff
as rapidly as possible into a daily, which could then be merged with the planned new daily newspaper.
⁷⁷
But it took Hitler a long time to make up his mind.
Disappointed
hardly does justice to Goebbels’s reaction to Hitler’s hesitation (“I’m sick of him!”); once more he considered resigning if the Party leader sided with the Strassers in this newspaper war.
⁷⁸

Finally, Hitler summoned Goebbels to Munich and decided that the Kampf-Verlag would not be permitted to publish a daily paper. Starting on March 1, he would start up a special Berlin edition of the
Völkischer Beobachter
instead. Both agreed that Goebbels should take over the Reich propaganda machine as early as the following week—eight months had passed since Hitler first held out the prospect of this appointment.
⁷⁹

But once again nothing came of it. Not only did the question of the Reich propaganda takeover drag on, but the Kampf-Verlag continued to refer to its forthcoming newspaper. Goebbels thought the reaction of Hitler and the
Völkischer Beobachter
was bush-league and felt himself “completely let down” by this behavior.
⁸⁰

In the middle of the month, when the conflict had still not been resolved,
⁸¹
he saw “anarchy in the Party”; he blamed Hitler entirely for “not deciding and asserting his authority.”
⁸²
In the end Hitler published an appeal in the
Völkischer Beobachter
,
⁸³
writing in favor of Goebbels and against the Kampf-Verlag. When the Strassers then intervened with Hitler, Goebbels immediately feared that he was about to “break his word” yet again.
⁸⁴
Hitler, he declared after meeting him in Nuremberg on February 21, “promises much and delivers little.”
⁸⁵

Goebbels was slow to grasp Hitler’s strategy in the Strasser crisis. This amounted to avoiding an open breach with the Strasser brothers, which could potentially have divided the Party. So he put up with their waywardness over press policy even at the expense of alienating Goebbels, the ambitious publisher of
Der Angriff
. He placated Goebbels
by complaining vociferously about the Strassers and kept him in check by holding out the promise of a daily newspaper and the position of Reich director of propaganda.

Heralded for weeks in advance, the first edition of the Kampf-Verlag’s daily newspaper, the
Nationaler Sozialist
, appeared on March 1. Goebbels’s disappointment was boundless: “Hitler has openly capitulated to these megalomaniac, cunning little Bavarians and their asphalt [i.e., metropolitan] followers. So I’ve sent him an urgent letter demanding that he should openly repudiate this insolent move, failing which I offer my resignation.”
⁸⁶
Hitler was extremely angry, but his overriding concern was to avoid choosing between Goebbels and Strasser. He repeated his promise to take steps internally to deal decisively with the Party publishing company and if necessary remove Strasser from his position as head of the Party organization. As usual, nothing actually happened.
⁸⁷

By the middle of the month Goebbels had to admit that
Der Angriff
and the
Völkischer Beobachter
in Berlin were being “pushed to the wall” by the Kampf-Verlag, while Hitler looked on passively: “For whatever reason—it doesn’t matter why—Hitler has broken his word to me 5 times. […] Hitler stands aside, he makes no decisions, he doesn’t lead, he just lets things drift.” He “no longer believed Hitler at all,” he declared at the end of the month: “What is it going to be like later, when he has to play the dictator in Germany?”
⁸⁸

At the beginning of March Hitler had once again—“for the umpteenth time”—told him that he was appointing him head of propaganda but had not acted on his promise.
⁸⁹
A few weeks later, when Himmler was urging Goebbels finally to take over the new position of propaganda chief, Goebbels was still waiting for the “call from Munich. If Hitler doesn’t make the first move, then it’s Götz von Berlichingen.”
*
^2
,
90
But in spite of all the pressure, the Party leader could not make up his mind to take decisive action against Strasser.
⁹¹
Goebbels was so worn down by the dispute that at the end of the month he was once more thinking of resigning as Gauleiter.
⁹²
But he could not bring himself to make the break with his idol.