Goebbels: A Biography (21 page)

In March 1931 the Republic resorted to tougher measures against the NSDAP. On March 18 the Berlin police imposed a public speaking ban on Goebbels, and on March 20 he discovered shortly before an event in Königsberg that the police had prohibited him from appearing “for fear of a breach of the peace.”
⁹¹

When an emergency decree promulgated by the Reich president at the end of March restricted the political parties’ right to demonstrate and campaign, therefore limiting the scope for SA activities, it was bound to exacerbate further the conflict between the “activist” political troops and the “legal” course pursued by the Party leadership. Goebbels saw this as a confirmation of his radical approach: “Long live legality! It’s sickening! Now we’ll have to find other ways of working.” Too many mistakes had been made in the past: “Above all getting too close to the enemy. Now he is swindling us. That’s Göring’s doing. We should have remained an ominous threat and an enigmatic sphinx. Now we’re out in the open. […] Change of approach! Back to stubborn opposition. Struggle, work, action, not negotiation.”
⁹²

With such pronouncements Goebbels projected himself as the spokesman of the SA, but as a Party Gauleiter he inevitably found himself caught between the two front lines, engendering mounting suspicion both in Munich and within the Stennes circle: “There’s a stink in the SA again. Stennes won’t give it a rest. But Munich is making major blunders, too. Headquarters is bringing us down again.” He heard from an SA leader that there was a “strong clique” working against him in Munich. “Hierl, Rosenberg etc., but Strasser, too.”
⁹³
On a trip to East Prussia at the end of March he learned from the Danzig Gauleiter, Albert Forster, that there was a similar “stink in the SA” in his area. Stennes, thought Goebbels, was operating everywhere behind the scenes.
⁹⁴
Goebbels was truly prescient in foretelling “the very grave crisis the Party will one day have to go through.”
⁹⁵
But this did not stop him from leaving the capital in these critical days and fulfilling electioneering engagements in Saxony.

On March 31 Hitler unexpectedly called Goebbels to Weimar. The next day he learned there from Röhm that Stennes had been dismissed for open rebellion. However, Stennes had not reacted passively but had gone on the offensive, sending in the SA to occupy the Party’s Berlin headquarters and the editorial offices of
Der Angriff
. On April 1 the paper carried a statement by Stennes. Berlin, said Goebbels, was “an anthill.”
⁹⁶
But he came down unequivocally on Hitler’s side—“despite all criticisms.”

Goebbels suspected that behind the Berlin putsch was the figure of Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, a former Free Corps and secret society leader who had placed himself at the head of an oppositional group within the SA. What he was certain of, however, was that this was “the biggest, and perhaps the last, crisis of the Party.” In the evening both he and Hitler participated in an event at which Goebbels declared his loyalty “to the leader without reservation.”
⁹⁷
Overnight he drove with Hitler to Munich. The putsch was put down from there. Hitler and Goebbels expressed themselves on the subject in the National Socialist press. In
Der Angriff
Hitler announced that he had given Goebbels “plenipotentiary powers to cleanse the National Socialist movement of all subversive elements,” but the Party newspaper also—to Goebbels’s vexation—gave Stennes space to air his views. Goebbels promptly fired the business manager of
Der Angriff
, Ludwig Weissauer.
⁹⁸

The plenipotentiary used the special authority given to him to exclude the “traitors” from the Party. The issue of
Der Angriff
on April 4 was once again totally under Goebbels’s control and appeared with the banner headline “The End of the Mutinous Gang.” The page contained a two-column spread by Hitler appealing to Party comrades. Goebbels therefore had good reason to regard the revolt as having been “suppressed” after just a few days. Nonetheless, it stuck in his craw that Göring in Berlin had tried to play the leading role himself
in the battle with Stennes: “I’ll never forgive Göring for this! People make you despair. He’s a lump of frozen shit.”
⁹⁹

All the same, Goebbels took his time returning to Berlin. He spent Easter with Hitler in Munich and the surrounding area and only set off for the capital again on April 8. He was hoping, therefore, as in the two previous Stennes crises of 1928 and 1930, that his geographical distance from the scene would prevent him from being drawn too much into the conflict. For all his loyalty to Hitler, he had to be careful not to sever his links with the SA completely. Thus on his return to Berlin he declared that he was ill: He kept engagements and issued statements but avoided public appearances.
¹⁰⁰

His collaboration with Stennes’s replacement, Paul Schulz, seemed to get off to a good start; moreover, he established that the Party organization had survived practically unaffected by the crisis.
¹⁰¹
He called on the authority of the state, in the form of the police and some bailiffs, to enforce the return of the office furniture Stennes had removed.
¹⁰²
In
Der Angriff
of April 7 he wrote a long declaration of loyalty to Hitler, embracing his “legal” policy.
¹⁰³

During the Stennes putsch he had kept faith with Hitler; now he laid the blame for the insurgency squarely at the door of headquarters in Munich, this “palace party.”
¹⁰⁴
A few days later, in time-honored fashion, he conspicuously demonstrated reconciliation with the SA by mustering 4,000 of them in the Sportpalast for a “general roll call.”
¹⁰⁵

By amending standing orders, the Reichstag had in February 1931 introduced restrictions on parliamentary immunity and made it easier for the law to prosecute members. Furthermore, Parliament decided to permit the courts to force the Reichstag member Joseph Goebbels to appear before them if he persisted in ignoring official summonses.
¹⁰⁶
A new tidal wave of trials was now about to engulf Goebbels.
¹⁰⁷

On April 14 there were two cases to answer: One involved a further insult to the deputy commissioner of police, Bernhard Weiss, for which Goebbels was fined 1,500 Reichsmarks; the other, obstructive
public comments on the banning of uniforms, attracting a fine of 200 Reichsmarks.
¹⁰⁸
The next case came two days later: “These trials are killing me.”
¹⁰⁹
He was fined 2,000 and 500 Reichsmarks, respectively, by the Berlin regional court for another “Isidor” insult to Weiss and for incitement to violence against Jews, both of which had appeared in
Der Angriff
the previous June.
¹¹⁰

When he failed to turn up at a court hearing at the end of April—it concerned still more insults printed in
Der Angriff—
having set off for a conference in Munich instead, the Berlin public prosecutor sent an official by plane to Munich. Goebbels was arrested the same day and brought back to Berlin on the night train in police custody.
¹¹¹
There he was fined another 1,500 Reichsmarks, and two days later he was sentenced to a fine of the same amount and a month’s imprisonment.
¹¹²
Two days after that he was fined a further 1,000 marks.
¹¹³
Goebbels complained in an editorial in
Der Angriff
about the fines that were piling up. In doing so, he also inadvertently revealed that the law’s relentless pursuit of him really was hurting him.
¹¹⁴

After the elections of September 1930, Goebbels had set about seriously expanding the Reich propaganda machine in Munich. In November 1930 he acquired a deputy there, Heinz Franke, who soon had a staff of around ten. The propaganda department’s activities included, among other things, putting out a series of publications, organizing school events, and producing films and gramophone records.
¹¹⁵

In a circular of January 1931 Goebbels expressed himself highly dissatisfied with the performance of the Gau propaganda offices: “The aim of the Reich propaganda office is to create a first-class apparatus functioning in accordance with headquarters directives like a flawless precision engine, and the Reich office does not intend to allow itself to be diverted from this goal by recalcitrant or incompetent Gau propaganda sections.”
¹¹⁶

After a press and propaganda conference
¹¹⁷
in Munich on April 26, 1931, Goebbels published “Guidelines for NSDAP Propaganda Management” in
Wille und Weg
(Will and Way), the Reich propaganda office’s newly founded newsletter. In particular, he described in detail
the responsibility of Gau propaganda directors, who “in practical terms” were subordinate to the Reich propaganda office, and he gave instructions for the conduct of meetings, sending Party speakers out to the Party organization around the country, and producing leaflets.
¹¹⁸
His self-confident manner here hardly endeared him to the Party. It was nothing new for him to find at the conference that he had not exactly gone over well among the Party’s more senior functionaries, and that he had been the subject of malicious gossip: “Nobody likes me.”
¹¹⁹

After the Munich conference he had a long talk with Hitler. Hitler declared that he was “completely free of suspicion about me, and condemns in the sharpest terms all the agitation against me in the Party. I ask him if he has full confidence in me, and he comes out wholeheartedly on my side. ‘Berlin belongs to you, and that’s how it will stay!’ ”
¹²⁰

In the following weeks critical remarks about Hitler abounded in his diary. While he considered
Mein Kampf
“honest and courageous,” he also found “the style […] sometimes unbearable.” Furthermore: “You’ve got to be tolerant. He writes the way he talks. The effect is direct, but often also inept.” Commenting on a meeting with Hitler in the Kaiserhof Hotel a few days later, he wrote: “He hates Berlin and loves Munich. […] But why Munich, exactly? I don’t understand it.”
¹²¹

In May 1931 the Stennes trial took place, threatening to plunge Hitler into considerable difficulties thanks to a statement Goebbels had made some years earlier. The danger avoided at the Leipzig Treason Trial now appeared to rear its ugly head again. So it was not surprising that Goebbels anticipated Hitler’s testimony “with a racing pulse.”
¹²²
The situation was that members of the infamous SA Stormtroop 33 were on trial once more; this time the charge was attempted homicide. The secondary charge maintained that the SA violence was systematic and that the leadership of the SA and the Party were ultimately behind it. Among those subpoenaed were Stennes, who was now sidelined, but who had been in charge of the SA in eastern Germany at the time of the assaults in question; and Hitler, as head of the whole Party.

To Goebbels’s surprise, Stennes claimed in court that in his time the Party had followed a strictly legal course. Hitler, who gave his evidence quite tamely, was confronted with a passage from
Der
Nazi-Sozi
, a leaflet written by Goebbels, stating that the National Socialists wanted “revolution”: “Then we’ll send Parliament to hell and found the state on German muscle and German brain-power!”
¹²³
Goebbels’s radicalism made Hitler uncomfortable: “I did not have all the contents of the leaflet in mind at the time I appointed Goebbels,” he responded. “In any case, today he is strictly required to follow the line laid down by me and nobody but me.”
¹²⁴
In the evening when they were sitting together in the Kaiserhof, Goebbels remembered that he had cut the offending passage out of the second edition. “Hitler positively dances with joy. That vindicates us.” For the time being, the danger that Goebbels might be called as a “witness for the Crown” against Hitler’s claim to pursue a law-abiding policy had been averted.
¹²⁵

On June 9 Goebbels participated in an NSDAP leadership conference at the Brown House in Munich, which also included Frick and the “revolting Göring.” The potential for conflict was substantial: “Strasser opens the attack on Hitler. He wants a General Secretary—Strasser himself, naturally—to be appointed. He would be in charge of organization and propaganda. Party to be divided into three areas: S.A., state (Hierl), and fighting movement (Strasser). Plus a commissar in Prussia. So they want to make the boss honorary chairman and sideline me.” Göring and Hierl had supported Strasser, but Hitler had defended himself “cleverly and emphatically” and “rejected the move on its face.” Goebbels kept his head down during this attack and stayed silent, reasoning that “I haven’t got many friends in the Party. Practically no one apart from Hitler. They all envy me my success and my popularity.” After the conference, Hitler assured him that he was completely behind him.

At the behest of Göring’s wife, Carin, the two rivals met in June and agreed to a kind of ceasefire.
¹²⁶
But Goebbels was reminded in the following weeks how insecure his position was within the Party. At the end of June rumors reached him that Hitler wished to replace him as Gauleiter of Berlin. He suspected the source was somebody in Munich headquarters.
¹²⁷
Finally, he published in
Der Angriff
a short notice in which he confirmed in ironic fashion his intention of staying in Berlin for the duration: “I am not ill. I could become so by laughing myself sick over the unholy amount of activity being put into kindly talking me away from Berlin.”
¹²⁸

In July he stumbled upon evidence of a “widespread conspiracy”:
“S.S. (Himmler) maintains a spy bureau here in Berlin to keep me under surveillance. They are putting out the craziest rumors. I think it’s an agent provocateur operation.” He decided to try to bring down Himmler, “that crafty swine.”
¹²⁹
A few days later he found an opportunity to bring the affair to Hitler’s attention. The latter reacted “with horror” and ordered an “immediate end” to the bureau, not without “assuring [Goebbels] of his full confidence.”
¹³⁰
That seemed to put an end to the rumors of his removal from Berlin. He was clearly not willing to entertain the fairly obvious idea that in spying on him Himmler might be doing the Party leadership’s bidding.

In all these disputes it became clear how small Goebbels’s power base within the Party actually was during this phase of the NSDAP’s rapid expansion into a mass movement. In Berlin he had to appear as a radical hothead in order to keep the SA on board, but this in turn created tensions around his attitude to the “legal” course chosen by the Party leader, upon whose support he was so highly dependent. The conflicts he had to endure with leading Party comrades such as Göring, Strasser, and Himmler showed the danger he ran of isolating himself within the Party.