Goebbels: A Biography (19 page)

The end of March 1930 saw the collapse of the grand coalition—consisting of the Center Party (Zentrum), the socialists (SPD), the German Democratic Party (DDP), and the German People’s Party (DVP) under the Social Democrat chancellor Hermann Müller—following a disagreement among the parties over the question of funding unemployment pay. The background to this dispute was the dramatic rise in the unemployment figures since the winter: The world economic crisis was having a massive impact on Germany. In this situation Hindenburg called on the Center Party’s Heinrich Brüning to form a government, but explicitly told him not to aim at a coalition but rather to resolve any conflicts by using the emergency powers of the president under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. There is no doubt that the president’s objective was to permanently exclude the Social Democrats from power, make Parliament redundant, and introduce an authoritarian regime subject to his consent.
⁹³

Early in April, when the SPD confronted the new government—exclusively formed from the bourgeois parties—with a motion for a vote of no confidence, the DNVP was in a position to tip the balance. If it went along with the vote, another election would follow.

After a long discussion with Hindenburg on March 31, this was Hitler’s preferred option, as he told Goebbels the same day. Goebbels was delighted with the news: “New elections will give us about 40 seats. That will be amusing!” It seemed to the National Socialists that the rapidly deteriorating economic situation would give their party the opening they were looking for.
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But in the end the DNVP voted against the no-confidence motion. “The boss is as angry as hell,” noted Goebbels. He did manage to find something positive in this turn of events, namely “our withdrawal from the Reich Committee.” But he was suspicious about the Party leader’s next few maneuvers. “Hitler-Hugenberg talks. Hitler says he’s prepared to hold off the announcement about withdrawing for two weeks. Hugenberg plans to bring the cabinet down by then. I don’t believe it. The boss is on the wrong wavelength.”
⁹⁵

When Strasser’s
Nationaler Sozialist
ignored Hitler’s wishes and publicized the NSDAP’s exit from the Reich Committee before the agreed two weeks had elapsed, Goebbels went on the offensive against
Hugenberg and the DNVP in
Der Angriff:
The party was a “superfluous and harmful outfit”; in his last contribution to the Reichstag, the party’s leader had acted out “a tragicomedy about misunderstood leadership.”
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But the DNVP had also reneged on its agreement with Hitler: In the decisive vote on the budget on April 12, their parliamentary party voted for the government bill and thus saved Brüning’s government.
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Goebbels wrote that Hitler, who had come to Berlin, had no doubt “indulged in too many illusions. But on the other hand the party [DNVP] is finished. There’s bound to be a split. All grist to our mill.”
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At the end of April Hitler decided to oppose Strasser publicly and hand the long-promised control of Reich propaganda over to Goebbels. Hitler used the NSDAP leaders’ conference, which took place on April 26 and 27 in Munich, to stage a fundamental “settling of accounts” with Gregor Strasser, the Kampf-Verlag, the “drawingroom Bolsheviks,” and other undesirable elements within the Party. After Hitler’s speech Goebbels observed that “Strasser and his circle” were “shattered.” After his tirade, Hitler took the decisive step: As Goebbels tells it, he “gets to his feet again and amid a breathless hush announces my appointment as Reich head of propaganda. It serves the others right. Strasser is as white as a sheet. He stammers out a few sentences at the end, and then it’s all over. We have won all along the line. […] Goebbels triumphans!”
⁹⁹
He seems to have forgotten that it had taken more than a year for the Party leader to confirm his appointment as head of propaganda—which can be traced back ultimately to an agreement between him and Strasser—and that Hitler only did so when it proved useful to demonstrate his power over Gregor Strasser and his brother.

Goebbels effectively began to run the Munich propaganda operation in May.
¹⁰⁰
As planned, he now traveled every other week to Munich for a few days, working with Himmler on getting the Party propaganda machine up and running. He hoped to bring it “up to scratch” by the autumn. In this he relied a good deal at first on Himmler, whose praises he sang constantly even as he treated him condescendingly like a kind of servant-pupil.
¹⁰¹
The runup to the
election in Saxony was to be his first test as head of propaganda, but his view of it was quite relaxed: “Well, if it doesn’t work out, it’s all the Saxons’ fault.”
¹⁰²

As chief of Reich propaganda, he did not by any means have the whole of the Party’s propaganda operation under his thumb: The Eher-Verlag under Amann remained independent; Strasser’s Reich organization office was responsible for radio, film, and popular education; and Goebbels also had no responsibility for the training of speakers, which duties were under the “Reich propaganda department II.” It was thus inevitable that there would be friction with the “megalomaniac Party comrade Fritz Reinhardt,” who was responsible for this area of operations.
¹⁰³

Goebbels’s conviction that he had totally routed the Strassers at the leaders’ meeting in April seemed to be corroborated when Hitler visited Berlin on May 2—Goebbels was proud to receive him in the new and greatly extended Gau office
¹⁰⁴
—and ostentatiously banned the evening edition of the
Nationaler Sozialist
. Under this pressure, Strasser agreed with Hitler a little later that he would sell his share of the paper to Amann; he finally shut it down on May 20.
¹⁰⁵
But to Goebbels’s great consternation, the
Nationaler Sozialist
continued to appear after the stated deadline. Hitler was very critical of Otto Strasser, but he was not prepared to deal with him severely.
¹⁰⁶

On May 21 and 22, Hitler had lengthy talks with Otto Strasser, who, as he told Goebbels shortly afterward, made a very bad impression on him. This conversation was an important influence on Strasser’s decision to break with the NSDAP for good. After quitting the Party at the beginning of July, he went on to publish a transcript of the discussion, replete with details embarrassing to Hitler.
¹⁰⁷

At the Berlin Gau Day on May 28, Goebbels took a tough line with the
Nationaler Sozialist
, preventing the Party organization from advertising the paper in any way.
¹⁰⁸
However, Hitler wanted to postpone a public reckoning—as promised to Goebbels—with the internal opposition until after the Landtag elections in Saxony on June 22. But the deadline came and went, and to Goebbels’s chagrin
Hitler took no action.
¹⁰⁹
All he did was exclude a few minor rebels from the Berlin Party organization.
¹¹⁰
Hitler did not dare take on Otto Strasser, but he told Goebbels that Gregor had in the meantime very openly distanced himself from his brother.
¹¹¹
“I don’t trust those crafty Lower Bavarians,” noted Goebbels.
¹¹²
But in fact Gregor Strasser would go on to relinquish his position as publisher of the
Nationaler Sozialist
by the end of June.
¹¹³

At the general meeting of Party members on June 30 and the Gau Day of July 2, Goebbels once more raked the
Nationaler Sozialist
group, the “literati clique,” fiercely over the coals.
¹¹⁴
The next day, under the headline “The Socialists Are Leaving the N.S.D.A.P,” Otto Strasser and his supporters announced that they were leaving the Party. Goebbels was relieved: “This clears the air.”
¹¹⁵
A few days later he proclaimed the end of the crisis: “Otto Strasser has lost out completely.”
¹¹⁶

Credit 7.1

Goebbels’s public appearances in Berlin were strongly marked by his liking for sensation-loving dramatization and his vain self-presentation. Contemporaries were fully aware of the clownish aspects of his campaigns: “We Berliners are not impressed by Chaplin; we are quite used to other grotesque comedians.” Cartoon inspired by Chaplin’s visit to Berlin, March 1931.

In mid-July 1930 the Reichstag was close to dissolution: The majority in Parliament rejected Hindenburg’s attempt to use his presidential decree under Article 48 to push through Brüning’s budget proposals in spite of their failure to gain parliamentary approval. For Goebbels personally, one immediate result would be the loss of his parliamentary immunity from the law: “If the Reichstag is dissolved they’ll arrest me right away. It’s shitty.”
¹

On July 18 a majority in the Reichstag vetoed Hindenburg’s emergency
decree. The president had previously instructed Brüning to announce the dissolution of Parliament in the event of such a block. Goebbels, now a wanted man again, managed to leave the Reichstag building unhindered. He and Göring took the night train to Munich,
²
where Hitler held a meeting: Apart from Göring and Goebbels, the attendees included Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Frick, Gregor Strasser, Konstantin Hierl, and Franz Ritter von Epp. The discussion centered on the distribution of seats in the next Parliament. A tour of the Palais Barlow on the Königsplatz, bought by the Party in May, had been arranged for the occasion. Once the renovation was complete, it would become the site of the new headquarters. Goebbels found the place “ostentatious and spacious.” He took careful note of Hitler’s disparaging remarks about Gregor Strasser.
³

At headquarters over the next few days Goebbels adjusted to working with the election campaign machine, but the atmosphere of Munich did not suit him: He could “not work in Munich. It’s disorderly and disorganized.”
⁴
But he had to stick it out for a few more days, since a meeting of Gauleiters was scheduled for July 27, when the basic decisions about the election campaign would be made. Goebbels was officially entrusted with running the central election campaign, and then discussion moved on to the nomination of candidates. Goebbels boasted in the diary that he had thwarted various maneuvers by Strasser, pushed through the candidacies of his Berlin Party comrade Martin Löppelmann and that of his old boss Axel Ripke, and prevented “many another dubious blessing,” though he could do nothing about certain “dead losses.” He had spoken out explicitly against Reventlow, but the latter—like his enemy Münchmeyer—was re-nominated.
⁵

For the time being, Goebbels swallowed his reservations about Munich. He decided to rent an apartment in the Bavarian capital at the Party’s expense and “gradually move to Munich” after the election.
⁶

Following the guidelines established at the Gauleiters’ meeting, Goebbels now exercised a decisive influence on the election campaign. However, the Reich propaganda department’s management of
the campaign was far from optimal: The Party’s propaganda machine was not yet streamlined enough for that.
⁷
At Goebbels’s suggestion, the whole campaign was fought under a single slogan: “The fight against the Young parties.” The plan was to attack the SPD above all, but also the Center Party, the DVP, and the DDP, thus targeting the government parties that had voted in the Reichstag in March for the restructuring of reparations under the Young Plan. In terms of content, then, the new head of Reich propaganda continued along the lines that had been central to the Party’s agitation in previous years.

Typical of the campaign was a poster featuring the massive figure of a martial-looking worker wielding a huge hammer with which to smash some creatures representing the “Young parties” (“Pulverize them!”) or another showing a caricature of a Social Democrat functionary willingly carrying out the Young Plan by shifting billions of marks abroad: “Stop! That money belongs to hardworking people.” Aside from this, the NSDAP’s most important campaigning methods consisted of mass rallies and propaganda marches.
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While he was working on the campaign, Goebbels was deluged with court cases. On August 12 he had to appear in a court in Hanover to answer a charge of slandering the Prussian prime minister, Otto Braun. Goebbels managed to extract his head from this noose not by denying the remarks, which had been an accusation of corruption, but by claiming that his remarks did not refer to Braun at all but rather to the former Reich chancellor Gustav Bauer. And he actually got away with this charade; the court found him not guilty.
⁹

Potentially more threatening was a summons from the Leipzig High Court, which wanted to question him about a speech he had made in 1927 in which he had speculated about a possible SA putsch—or at least, that was how the law perceived it. He was investigated on suspicion of high treason. When cross-examined at the end of July, he pretended that he could not remember the speech. The case was eventually dropped for lack of evidence.
¹⁰

Meanwhile, there was a development in the appeal hearing connected with the “Hindenburg trial.” Goebbels had already learned from his defending counsel that Hindenburg had indicated to his state secretary, Otto Meissner, that he wanted to drop charges. Goebbels’s lawyer worked with the Reich president’s office to draw up a corresponding statement.
¹¹
The hearing was postponed;
¹²
when it finally took place, on August 14, the state prosecutor revealed to an
astonished public a letter from Hindenburg stating that
¹³
on the basis of the explanation he had received from Goebbels he had concluded that no insult to his person had been intended, so that he was no longer inclined to press charges against the National Socialist politician.
¹⁴
Instead of the fine of 800 marks the court had earlier imposed on him, it now brought in a verdict of not guilty: “Hurrah! Great result!”
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But Goebbels did not get off so cleanly in every case. On August 16 the court of lay assessors in Charlottenburg ruled against him because of an article in
Der Angriff
in December 1929 in which he called members of the Reich government “hired traitors.” However, the court did not wish to sentence him to six months’ imprisonment, as the public prosecutor had demanded, but thought that a fine of 600 marks would suffice.
¹⁶
On the same day, two other fines were imposed on him.