Goebbels: A Biography (20 page)

It was not only the law that was putting pressure on Goebbels at this point but his own people as well. Just as the election campaign was getting under way, a conflict broke out that was extremely dangerous for Goebbels and the NSDAP: The SA was flexing its muscles. On August 7 Goebbels met Stennes and other SA leaders, who bluntly presented him with their demands: “The gentlemen want to be in the Reichstag and don’t wish to be subject to Party discipline, and since this has been turned down, they’re staging a kind of mini–palace revolution. […] Stennes has told me brazenly and sanctimoniously that if they were to quit, the SA would drop from 15,000 to 3,000 men.”
¹⁷

The same day, Goebbels phoned the head of the SA, Franz Pfeffer, who had undertaken a similar initiative, in his case against Hitler himself: “He is subdued. Hitler tore him to shreds. Called the whole move mutiny and conspiracy.” Goebbels told the Berlin SA leader Ernst Wetzel that he considered Pfeffer a “schemer” who had led the SA to the point of “rebellion.”
¹⁸
In the middle of that month, he met Pfeffer, who “surely must have realized” that the SA “had overshot the mark on this question of the nominations.”
¹⁹

The SA revolt was to break out openly at the end of the month. On August 27 Goebbels heard “the first report of a rebellion planned by
the S.A.” His initial reaction was incomprehension: “They propose to give us an ultimatum [parliamentary candidate nominations] and lash out if they don’t get their way. In the middle of the battle. […] Stennes squats like a spider behind the scenes.”
²⁰
Some hours later—despite the worrisome news, he had gone to a campaigning event in Dresden—he learned that “the affair is worse than I feared. The Standard leaders have joined forces and openly rebelled against [the] Gau and Munich.”

Back in Berlin, he jotted down the next day: “Terrible disappointment. Talks with Stennes. He shamelessly states his demands: 3 nominations. Money, political power.” Stennes had openly threatened to break up an event planned for the Sportpalast the next day. Goebbels made a decision: “Pretend to give in. Take revenge on September 15.” Unfortunately, he was committed to another work trip, this time to Hamburg. After many fruitless attempts, he finally got a call through to Hitler. But the telephone conversation took a disappointing turn: Hitler “hasn’t grasped the situation at all. Takes it too lightly.”

Only just arrived back in Berlin, he noted on August 29: “Chaos. A shock troop from Standard IV set on demolishing our office and beating up Wilke and Muchow. It takes all my authority to make them see reason. Stennes wilfully lets the affair come to a head and then sees he’s out of his depth.” Under the circumstances, Stennes was prepared to compromise: “His demands are diminishing by the hour. Endless telephone calls to Munich. Can’t get ahold of Hitler. And the others are dimwits.”

Goebbels decided to act on Stennes’s suggestion that he should address the SA that evening. As
Der Angriff
reported, he used the event in the Sportpalast to “hold [to account] the rumor-mongers in Jewish pay who are now trying to sow discord in the National Socialist ranks just before the election.” Furthermore, he wrung a statement out of Stennes that he published in
Der Angriff:
The rumors of a mutiny by the Berlin SA were “all lies”; the SA stood “loyally by the Party and its leader.”
²¹
Goebbels regarded the pledge he had made to Stennes as null and void, since it had been obtained “by coercion and was therefore invalid.”

For a while, things seemed to settle down—in any case, Goebbels was determined not to let the Berlin crisis ruin his election campaign plan, so he duly set off for Breslau on August 30. It is tempting to think that in these stormy days his external commitments were not at
all unwelcome, as they prevented him from being pulled into the Berlin quagmire. During the last Stennes crisis, in the summer of 1928, he had not even thought it necessary to break off his vacation in Bavaria. However, that night in Breslau he received alarming, if not entirely unexpected, news: “S.A. has stormed and demolished office. S.S. defending, two injured.” He decided to return to Berlin. There at midday he met Göring and Hitler: The latter had come up from Bayreuth. In the evening they toured the SA drinking haunts together. Although Hitler was “greeted with enthusiasm” everywhere, the prevailing “mood was subdued.”

Late in the evening he received a visit—clearly an unexpected one: “Around 10 o’clock the Berlin SA leaders turn up at my place—Hitler talks to them. He’s not in good form.” There were signs that the atmosphere was deteriorating: “The vulgar behavior of these people. They tell him what’s what.” Goebbels could not resist adding, “In many ways they’re not entirely wrong. […] Poor Hitler! That’s the price you pay for years of negligence.” In the end Stennes too had a talk with Hitler; it lasted until dawn but achieved no clear-cut result.

That morning Goebbels had yet another court appearance to make: He received a six-week prison sentence and a fine of 500 marks for his repeated smears against Deputy Police Commissioner Bernhard Weiss.
²²
“Went during adjournment to Hitler, who is with Göring. New situation. I urge reconciliation, otherwise we’re facing disaster. The rebellion is already spreading to the countryside.” A decision was reached at four that afternoon: Hitler dismissed Pfeffer, took over command of the SA himself, and simultaneously decreed an improvement to the SA’s finances, to be funded by raising special levies from the Party.
²³
The SA leaders accepted the proposal the same afternoon, and Goebbels tried to represent the last-minute compromise as a defeat for the SA: “Revolution is held indoors.
*
¹
Stennes has submitted.”

In the evening there was a gathering in the Veteran Soldiers’ House to make a conspicuous show of celebrating the reconciliation. The SA, Goebbels wrote, which “just before had been intent on an explosion, is now sitting horror-stricken and weeping. Hitler speaks.” The Berlin police recorded that after a lengthy speech Hitler issued a call for loyalty from the SA, “raising his already strained voice to the
pitch of an almost hysterical shriek.” Following him as speaker, Goebbels had delivered some “sentimental remarks” intended to “draw a line” under the whole affair. Goebbels’s own comment on his address was triumphant, however: “I speak. Everything goes fine. That’s the end of the Stennes putsch. The consequences will be seen after September 14.” But he omitted to say that Stennes spoke after he did, announcing Hitler’s new arrangements and proclaiming himself the victor.
²⁴

A few days later Goebbels conspicuously demonstrated the reconciliation to Berliners. He wrote that he had moved around Berlin with the SA the whole day, from morning until the late evening: “Both a battle march and a triumphal and celebratory procession. It was glorious. Right through the red citadels.”
²⁵
On September 10 Hitler spoke at an event in the Sportpalast.
²⁶
It was the high point of the election campaign. Afterward, Goebbels was sitting with the Party leader: “Boss wants me to hang on in Berlin. I must do that, although I don’t really feel like it anymore.” At least Hitler had recognized that he bore “not an iota of guilt” for the recent events and that it had been more about “a structural flaw in the organization.” Now the “influence of the political leaders” would have to increase.
²⁷

The next day Goebbels had a long discussion with Stennes, with whom he “gradually got into contact.”
²⁸
He had no choice: The SA was essential for his strident style of agitation. On the other hand, if he was too closely identified with the SA and overplayed the part of a radical, he would inevitably come into conflict with the Party leadership.

As Goebbels had expected,
²⁹
the NSDAP enjoyed some spectacular results in the election of September 14, 1930, taking 18.3 percent of the vote. Without a doubt, the Party had now become a mass movement. All the same, the results in Berlin were distinctly below average for the Reich as a whole: The Party achieved only 14.6 percent in the capital.
³⁰
Nonetheless, in the Sportpalast on the evening of election day there was an air of “excitement as in 1914.”
³¹
Goebbels celebrated the victory in
Der Angriff
with the assertion that “in the long run a National Socialist government in Germany is inevitable.”
³²
In
his view, now was the moment to draw a line under recent disputes. At the Gau day on September 17 he magnanimously announced a “general amnesty”
³³
and put intense effort into reinforcing the settlement between the Party and the SA, on whose loyalty he ultimately depended. On September 20 he had a long, “open and amiable” talk with Stennes,
³⁴
but after a few days he began once more to doubt that Stennes would sustain the peace.
³⁵

On September 25 Goebbels went to Leipzig with Göring to appear as a witness in the so-called Leipzig Treason Trial. The German public was taking an intense interest in the case: Three Reichswehr officers stationed in Ulm had attempted to organize a National Socialist cell within the army and were now being tried for treason. To clarify where the NSDAP stood in relation to the constitution of the Republic, the court had called in leading National Socialists as witnesses. Coming immediately after the surprising success of the Party in the Reichstag elections, their court appearances promised to give important clues as to the Party’s future direction.

Hitler was the first to deliver his testimony. He declared unequivocally that the NSDAP aimed to achieve power purely by legal means. Goebbels was in the public gallery with Göring, listening to Hitler’s evidence. He had reason to fear that the state prosecutor’s material aimed at disproving Hitler’s assertion would include some of his own “revolutionary” writings. This fear proved to be unfounded. In the end, Goebbels was not called as a witness.
³⁶
Once again, any open disclosure of the differences between the “legal” Hitler and the “revolutionary” Goebbels was avoided.

After its election successes, the elite of the NSDAP began—in keeping with their “legal” policy—to sound out the chances of joining a Brüning-led coalition. On one of his visits to Berlin, Hitler let Goebbels know his three conditions. The Party would demand three ministries: “Foreign Affairs (Rosenberg); Ministry of the Interior (Frick); and Ministry of Defense (probably Epp)” as well as the withdrawal of the Center Party from the coalition government in Prussia, which it shared with the SPD and the DDP. It seemed that some quite fantastic vistas were suddenly opening up for Goebbels’s personal future: “If we participate, then for a start I’ll gain power in Prussia. Then there’ll be a clearing-out.”
³⁷

Hitler, seconded by Frick and Strasser, had confidential discussions with Brüning on October 5. The NSDAP drew a blank: There
was no possibility of its taking part in a Reich government.
³⁸
Goebbels was one of the first to be told: “We remain in opposition. Thank God.”
³⁹
Goebbels still hoped his chance would come with the collapse of the coalition in Prussia, the largest German state.
⁴⁰
But there was a long way to go before that. Until the opening of the new Reichstag, Goebbels lacked immunity from the law, and the authorities used the situation to increase pressure on him. To avoid imminent arrest, on October 10 Goebbels escaped to Weimar.
⁴¹
He was back in Berlin for the opening of the Reichstag on October 13 and managed to evade the agents of the law waiting for him to enter the building.
Der Angriff
revealed some of the details of this hide-and-seek game a few days later.
⁴²
Goebbels’s parliamentary privileges were now restored to him.
⁴³

He soon had a chance to strengthen his position as a publicist. After some unpleasant clashes—“that loathsome Amann! I hate him”
⁴⁴
—in September he reached an agreement with the Eher Verlag whereby Eher and the Gau would jointly publish
Der Angriff
as a daily paper. Goebbels was jubilant: He was now “in sole charge, commercially and intellectually, I’m completely independent.”
⁴⁵
At the beginning of October 1930 he signed the definitive contract with Amann: “But he’ll do the dirty on me all the same.”
⁴⁶
However, starting on November 1
Der Angriff
did indeed appear as a daily paper.
⁴⁷

In November he discovered in Munich what Hitler planned to do about the SA crisis that was still smoldering: “Röhm is coming back. From Bolivia, where he’s been working with the army. He’s very nice to me, and I like him. An open, straight military type.”
⁴⁸
Röhm came to Berlin at the end of the month. “He’s a lovely chap,” wrote Goebbels, “but no match at all for Stennes.”
⁴⁹

Ernst Röhm had actually gone to Bolivia as a military instructor after a disagreement with Hitler in 1925 over the incorporation of his creation, the Frontbann (a surrogate organization for members of the prohibited SA), into the re-founded NSDAP.
⁵⁰
Hitler’s decision to put Röhm in charge of the SA, which he pushed through despite some resistance at the SA leadership conference on November 30 in Munich, was bound to lead to further conflicts over the medium to long term. The self-confident Röhm was not the man to play second fiddle to Hitler. But in the short term, Hitler’s aim was to keep Stennes and his henchmen in check by appointing Röhm.
⁵¹

Goebbels had his own prescription for keeping the SA under control in Berlin: permanent violent activity to reinforce the internal cohesion of the SA and to satisfy the hunger for action among the young brownshirts, as most of them were unemployed. He hoped that this would give the rapidly expanding and heterogeneous organization some sense of momentum.

In November 1930 he found a new target in his war against the “system”: the American film
All Quiet on the Western Front
, based on the 1929 novel of that name by the German antiwar writer Erich Maria Remarque, a realistic description of trench warfare. Goebbels saw the film as an attack on the honor of the German front-line soldier, and it was obvious to him that Jewish machinations lay behind the movie project. The screening of the film in Berlin must be prevented at all costs; that was his aim.

On December 5 he and a large group of supporters went to an evening screening of the film. They swung into action: “After only 10 minutes the cinema is like a madhouse. The police are powerless. The embittered crowd act against the Jews. The first incursion into the west [of the city]. ‘Jews out!’ ‘Hitler is at the gates!’ […] Outside, the box offices are under attack. Window panes tinkle. The screening is canceled, and the next one too. We have won.”
⁵²

A few days later, after specific exhortations from
Der Angriff
to do so, National Socialists organized further riots at a screening of the film in the west of Berlin.
⁵³
On the Wittenbergplatz Goebbels addressed more than twenty thousand supporters, by his own estimate (the
Berlin Lokalanzeiger
newspaper put the crowd at about five thousand). A procession of demonstrators formed and succeeded in breaking through the police barrier and on to the Kurfürstendamm.
⁵⁴
The same scene was repeated the next day. This time the police employed force in an effort to disperse the demonstrators—Goebbels reckoned there were forty thousand of them—trying to gain access to the Kurfürstendamm, and eventually the law officers drew their weapons. The next morning the chief commissioner of police imposed a ban on demonstrations. Goebbels was delighted: “Our ordinary N.S. people dictate government action.”
⁵⁵
In the end the film was banned on the grounds that it “was a threat to German prestige”—
for Goebbels this was a “triumph”:
⁵⁶
“The Republic is enraged by our film victory. […] In the eyes of the public we are the men of strength.”
⁵⁷

The new year began with further acts of violence by the SA. On January 3 the Gauleiter made a laconic entry in his diary: “2 Reichsbanner shot dead by our people. That creates respect. The others start terror actions; we act only in self-defense.” Seeing the film
Afrika
on the same day seems to have confirmed his belief that he was on the right track: “Fight, fight is the cry of the creature. Nowhere is there peace, just murder, just killing, all for the sake of survival. As it is with lions, so it is with human beings. We alone lack the courage to openly admit the way things are. In this respect wild animals are the better human beings.”

Around the middle of the month Hitler assured him that the Party in general was in good shape; however, there was “a danger that everything will take too long, so that the Party might lose its dynamic and stall. The answer is to raise the level of activity.”
⁵⁸
This was an endorsement of Goebbels’s mode of operation. A few days later, on January 22, a debate with the communist politician Walter Ulbricht in the Friedrichshain hall ended in a brawl.
⁵⁹
The
Vossische Zeitung
reported that the rioting “was like nothing ever seen before at a political meeting”: More than 100 people were injured.
⁶⁰

The riot was the prelude to a whole series of violent outbreaks, as reported in
Der Angriff
over the next few days. One public site after another became the setting for a pitched indoor battle.
Der Angriff—
naturally blaming the opposition—declared that it was “open civil war”; force had to be used in confronting the “blood-terror of the communists.”
⁶¹
“Drop Your Weapons!” demanded the headline of an editorial in the
Vossische Zeitung
, reacting to the violent clashes between National Socialists and communists that took place over the weekends of early February.
⁶²

With the increasing deployment of the SA, Goebbels felt it advisable to forge closer links with Stennes again. In January he invited Stennes and his wife to an evening gathering in his new apartment and voiced his satisfaction at having “gotten much closer to the SA leader.”
⁶³
But a few days later, at an SA parade, Stennes again aroused Goebbels’s suspicions.
⁶⁴
All the same, he supported Stennes’s attempts to bring the Berlin SS unambiguously under his control.
⁶⁵
In February the two men had further talks, after which they were agreed on the basics: “We form a partnership. S.A. and I. That’s power.”
⁶⁶

While he was making approaches to the SA and following an ever more radical course, Goebbels increasingly distanced himself from Göring, who had a special role to play in the capital, above all setting up contacts among the nationalist and conservative elites. From the beginning of the year his complaints about Göring became more voluble. Nonetheless, in the course of 1930—after many difficulties—Goebbels was at least able to establish reasonable personal relations with him.
⁶⁷
In April 1930 they even went on a vacation to Sweden together.
⁶⁸

Early in January 1931, just after a minor dispute brought on by Göring’s desire to exclude him from a soirée with the army chief of staff, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord,
⁶⁹
Goebbels heard from a mutual acquaintance that “G. has given way to the vice of morphine again”;
⁷⁰
feigning concern, he passed this information on to Hitler two weeks later.
⁷¹
Goebbels eagerly collected negative observations and complaints about Göring;
⁷²
objected that he “went snobbing around too much in alien circles”; criticized Göring for visiting the court of the exiled Kaiser (“what does Doorn mean to us?”); and accused him of being too optimistic about political questions.
⁷³
In a lengthy talk with Hitler, he discovered they were largely of one mind in their unfavorable opinion of his rival, whom Hitler accused of megalomania.
⁷⁴
In mid-March there was a frank discussion between Goebbels and Göring in which the two initially hurled serious accusations at each other but then parted “as semi-friends.”
⁷⁵

Goebbels’s newly awakened radicalism widened the contrast with Munich. He was not pleased that at this time Hitler seemed completely taken up with the new headquarters in the renovated Brown House (once the Palais Barlow) in a prominent position on the Königsplatz, into which the NSDAP had moved in January.
⁷⁶
When in February he heard from Stennes that SA leader Röhm was possibly homosexual—the very person whom, a few weeks earlier, Goebbels had warned about a Berlin SA leader with the same reputation!
⁷⁷
—he unleashed even more of his anger on the Party leadership: “Revolting! Hitler not taking enough care again. We can’t have this, the Party as the El Dorado of the 175ers.”
*
^2
,
78

In a meeting with Berlin SA leaders in his apartment, Goebbels discerned a “strong antipathy to Munich,” but as for himself, he “was
on good terms with the men.”
⁷⁹
In Munich at the beginning of March, he found himself agreeing with the Party leader on many questions, but he also concluded that Hitler was “too weak and too keen on compromise. Wants to achieve power at any price, and wants it right away.”
⁸⁰

In the Bavarian capital he raised with Röhm the subject of the tensions in the SA, particularly the critical relations between SA and SS. “Röhm sees things the right way, but Hitler won’t hear a word against the SS. His hobbyhorse. The bodyguards!” In the dispute between the SA and the Party he saw himself in the noble role of “mediator.” He resolved to “support Stennes’s legitimate demands on behalf of the SA” but also to combat with all his might any tendency “to mount a putsch against the Party or Hitler.”
⁸¹

A few weeks later it was all Goebbels could do to prevent Röhm from dismissing Stennes. As on numerous other visits to Munich, Goebbels convinced himself that the blame for Hitler’s less “activist” attitude was due to the insidious influence of his coterie, the terrible “Munich milieu”: “Afternoon in the café. Boss as bourgeois. Terrible to see him among these Philistines.” On the other hand: “If it comes to a breach, I’ll stand by Hitler, although I think there’s so much that needs reforming at a lower level.”
⁸²
Ultimately, it was because—for all his doubts—he was always determined to stick to Hitler that his relationships with other National Socialist politicians such as Stennes, Göring, and Röhm were so fraught: He was not interested in being drawn into internal Party alliances that might ultimately land him in a confrontation with the Party leader. As he saw it, he owed his place in the NSDAP primarily to his special relationship with Hitler, and in no way would he permit any other political ties within the NSDAP to jeopardize this privileged position.

The extreme adaptability of the Berlin Gauleiter was also apparent in another area. His own view of the Party’s economic policy was that it was badly in need of revising. After the September 1930 election he had written two editorials for
Der Angriff
calling for the Party to be more specific in its pronouncements on economic questions. He held that the Party’s twenty-five points, dating from 1920 and declared sacrosanct by Hitler (they included a demand for “a share of large companies’ profits” as well as land reform), could only be a “framework.” Goebbels called on leading Party comrades to assemble in order to “resolve by discussion and exchange of ideas the problems
that are in part still contentious or unclear today.”
⁸³
And in fact such a session did come about, in December 1930. After consulting “Hitler and a large number of experts,” Goebbels came up with a definition of socialism that immediately met with Hitler’s “enthusiastic” approval: “placing the concept of the people above that of the individual.” Goebbels was certain that “this will find its way into the program.”
⁸⁴

However, collective deliberations about a future economic program, let alone concrete policy decisions, were not the style favored by Hitler, who was fundamentally more inclined to take a tactical line on such questions. In January 1930 he set up a new economic policy unit at headquarters under Otto Wagener, who then went to work—in competition with other parts of the NSDAP machine—on an economic program. In March 1931, Wagener submitted a paper envisaging a private-sector economy under the supervision and direction of the state. Goebbels was appalled: “Not a trace of socialism left.” He wrote a scathing critique of the paper and tried to encourage Göring to oppose it, but he was not high on socialism. “G. is all about encouraging economic activity,” was Goebbels’s summary of Göring’s pro-business attitude.
⁸⁵

What is more, in spring 1931 Hans Reupke, another newly appointed economic adviser, produced a leaflet in which he—Reupke was a board member of the Reich Association of German Industry—clearly departed from the earlier nationalization plans of the NSDAP. For Goebbels this was a “downright betrayal of socialism.”
⁸⁶
A few days later he discussed the economic policy with Hitler and allowed himself to be persuaded that Reupke had already been “shaken off.”
⁸⁷
In reality, Hitler never adopted any precise economic program for the Party. Engaging his consultant, Reupke, to write a paper was a clear signal that he wanted nothing to do with socialist experiments. Goebbels gave up trying to induce the Party to clarify its economic policy. It even seems that on his way to state power he ceased to care very much which economic and sociopolitical concepts were deployed to achieve it.

Goebbels’s self-presentation as a radical, engaged in a daily struggle and under constant threat at his position in the front line, is exemplified by an episode he contrived in March 1931. On March 13, he records in the diary, “someone tried to kill me with a bomb.”
⁸⁸
A package that his office thought looked suspicious was found to contain
“explosives”: No one was injured. The next day
Der Angriff
gave this incident headline treatment.
⁸⁹
A few weeks later it emerged, either as a result of police inquiries or of a leak by former Party employees, that the assassination attempt had clearly been faked by Goebbels himself—and quite crudely at that. The “explosives” consisted of some jumping jacks and a little gunpowder.
⁹⁰
That Goebbels wrote up the “assassination attempt” in his diary as a genuine threat shows his relationship to the truth: Having acted out a charade for public consumption, he then recorded it as a fact in his diary.