Goebbels: A Biography (29 page)

On the evening of February 28—Hitler and Prince Auwi were visiting—Hanfstaengl called Goebbels at home with the startling news that the Reichstag was on fire. It transpired that what was thought at first to be just some “crazy fantasy” was actually true. They drove quickly to Parliament: “The whole building is in flames. Inside. Göring already there. Papen, too, whom I meet here for the first time. Fire set in 30 places. Carried out by communists. Göring is furious. Hitler in a rage. […] Now is the time to act!”

While Hitler and von Papen were conferring, Goebbels was at the Gau headquarters taking the first steps to quell a supposed communist uprising. Later they met up again in the Kaiserhof in high spirits: “Everybody’s beaming. That’s exactly what we needed. Now we’re sitting pretty. Perpetrator caught. 24-year old Dutch communist.”
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Goebbels’s diary entries show that from the point of view of the Nazi elite, the Reichstag fire was a unique stroke of luck, presenting the National Socialists with the perfect excuse to proceed against the left, particularly the KPD, with the utmost brutality. All that we learn from the diary about the actual culprit is that it was the twenty-four-year old Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, later condemned to death by the Reich Supreme Court for this act. In Goebbels’s notes there is not the slightest hint that the Nazi leadership seriously thought that Lubbe’s action was intended by the KPD as a signal for revolt. And the turn of events clearly caught communist leaders themselves completely unawares. The action taken by the new regime that night was prompted not by genuine fear of a communist uprising but by a sense that fate had played right into their hands.

Too good to be true? There is nothing whatsoever in Goebbels’s diary to support the suspicion, still often mentioned to this day, that the Reichstag fire was staged by the Nazi leadership. But this omission is not conclusive; it is quite possible that the real perpetrators
behind the arson attack (Hitler? Göring?) left Goebbels in the dark about their plans, and it is also conceivable that even if Goebbels had been initiated into these plans he might have feigned innocence in the diaries.
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After their nocturnal meeting in the Kaiserhof, Hitler and Goebbels went to the editorial office of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, where Hitler personally recast the next morning’s edition. Goebbels then returned to the Gau headquarters, designed a poster, and wrote a “fabulous article” to appear in the next day’s
Angriff:
“Time to make a radical end! What more are we waiting for? A twenty-four-year-old foreign communist acting for Russian and German agents of this world pestilence setting fire to the Reichstag!”
³³

That same night there was a wave of arrests of communist functionaries. The entire left-wing press was banned, and before the day was over a cabinet meeting chaired by Hitler passed a decree, endorsed by the president, “for the protection of people and state.” The decree suspended the fundamental rights of the Weimar constitution, enabled the Reich government to seize the reins of power in the various states in the case of serious disturbance to public order and security, and imposed heavy penalties for contraventions.
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The peak of the National Socialist election campaign was reached on March 4, which was designated “the day of national uprising.” The great event was completely focused on Hitler personally, who was now presented with almost religious fervor as the savior of the nation. The radio transmitted a speech given by Hitler in Königsberg, once again introduced by Goebbels.
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The plan for the spectacle had been announced to
Angriff
readers a week earlier: “From our suffering Eastern Frontier the gospel of a reawakened Germany will be proclaimed, and the whole German people will be aural witnesses to this unique, unprecedented mass event.”
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The speech was not only broadcast but also conveyed by loudspeakers distributed throughout the Reich; they were placed in fourteen city squares in Berlin alone, to which the ranks of uniformed NSDAP members marched to take up their positions. The population had been exhorted to decorate their homes with flags. To “issue
a wake-up call to the sluggish and the indecisive,” as the
Völkischer Beobachter
described Nazi intimidation, “Hitler Youth and SA men” patrolled the streets. Bonfires were lit all over the Reich. After Hitler’s speech his audience in Königsberg sang the famous “Niederländisches Dankgebet” (Dutch Thanksgiving Prayer), while the crowds listening to the broadcast transmitted over loudspeakers joined in with the singing.
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It is difficult to imagine anything more emotionally overblown than Goebbels’s introduction to Hitler’s appearance: “Throughout East Prussia the bells are ringing from church towers across the broad fields, over the great silent woods and the mysterious stillness of the Masurian Lakes. […] From the Maas to the Memel, from the Etsch [Adige, South Tyrol] to the Great Belt, all of Germany is now bathed in the light of the fire of freedom. The day of national uprising has arrived. The people arise, the storm breaks forth.”
*
^,
38

After such all-out preparations, on election day Goebbels was full of confidence: “It will be a great victory.”
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Indeed, the NSDAP and the new government really had pulled out all the stops to ensure success—and not only with a massive propaganda effort. The liberal
Frankfurter Zeitung
described the situation in the capital as follows:

Today there were hardly any black-red-gold flags to be seen in the Reich capital, no red ones, none with the symbol of the three arrows [flag of the antifascist organization Iron Front]. KPD and SPD flags were not allowed. […] The intensive propaganda of the right had succeeded in creating a nervous, feverish atmosphere. Nonsensical rumors were flying around. Auxiliary police were deployed (a measure never before needed on election days), a signal to the population that danger must be in the air: Every policeman on watch on Sunday was armed with a carbine. The feeling of oppression among the population was great.
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With all these advantages, the National Socialists succeeded in gaining 43.9 percent of the ballot. Together with their allies, the DNVP,
campaigning as the “Black-White-Red Fighting Front,” they formed a majority of nearly 52 percent.

The outcome was certainly a considerable success for the National Socialists, but taking into account the huge obstacles placed in the way of the left, the high level of support the Nazis enjoyed from powerful financiers, and the Nazis’ hold on broadcasting, the increase of six and a half points over the previous record result of July 1931 was hardly sensational. The landslide expected and publicized in advance by the Party leadership did not materialize. In its triumphalist tone, Goebbels’s diary entry on the evening of election day seems to betray a need to talk up the victory—especially given that in Berlin, with 34.6 percent, his performance was once again substantially below the Reich average.
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After the election Goebbels was mainly preoccupied with the question of whether and in what way Hitler would keep his preelection promise of government office. At the beginning of March the difficulties involved in building up the promised ministry loomed so large that he felt like abandoning the whole project.
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On the day after the Reichstag election, when Hitler again talked over “his” ministry with him, he still “had his doubts,” because he wanted “the whole thing. Press, radio, film, propaganda.” With Funk, his future state secretary, he visited the Reich government press office on the Wilhelmsplatz, where he was soon to be installed: “Wonderful Schinkel building.” In the days that followed, progress was made with planning for the new ministry, and in order to lighten his load as Gauleiter Goebbels appointed a deputy, the former Gau business manager Artur Görlitzer.
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On March 11 the cabinet agreed to form a Reich ministry for popular enlightenment and propaganda.
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“I’m so happy. What a [career] path! Minister at 35. Unimaginable.”
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Meanwhile the new rulers were getting on with their “cold revolution,” Goebbels’s term for the coup d’état by which the regime was displacing other political institutions. As the new jargon had it, the latter were being “coordinated” or brought into line.
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From the beginning, the Reichstag fire emergency decree was applied very widely; governors were dispatched to the different states, most crucially to
the second-largest state, Bavaria.
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There were local elections in Prussia on March 12. The NSDAP
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in Berlin, with the benefit of massive state backing, achieved 38.2 percent of the vote and became the largest party, slightly ahead of the DNVP.

On the same day, in connection with National Remembrance Day, Goebbels took part in a memorial ceremony at the Linden Opera, where, he proudly remarked, he was already allowed to sit “among the ministers”—although he did not feel exactly positive about the event: “To me Hindenburg is like a mythical monument. Almost unreal. Next to him Hitler seems like a boy.” He disliked the order of ceremony: “I’ll do all this much better later on.”
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On March 14 he received via the state secretary in the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the announcement of his appointment as a minister of the Reich. The next step was an appointment with the “Old Gentleman.” The swearing-in ceremony was followed by a conversation with Hindenburg, who said “flattering things about my work.”
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He joined his first cabinet meeting the next day. “Everybody is very nice to me,” he commented in his diary, but he did not have much of a clue about the content of the session.
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The following day he addressed the press in Berlin, explaining the duties of the new ministry. The creation of his department, he expounded, “was a revolutionary act of government, in that the new government intends no longer to leave people to their own devices. This government is a people’s government in the truest sense of the word.” The ministry would forge “active contact between the national government as the expression of the people’s will and the people themselves,” which for Goebbels clearly amounted to a “coordinating of the government and the people.” He explained the title of his ministry as follows: “Popular education is essentially passive, while propaganda is active. We can’t stop at telling the people what we want to do and informing them about how we’re doing it. This information must be accompanied by active propaganda on the part of the government, propaganda aimed at winning people over.” The plan was to “work on people until they accept our influence, until they begin to grasp in terms of ideas that what is taking place in Germany does not just
have
to be accepted but that they
can
accept it.”
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The new government now proceeded to expand its power base in a relatively rapid series of steps, with the rank and file of the Party staging great spectacles and mass actions as an introduction to carefully targeted government measures. Goebbels was to play a central part in this gradual escalation of the regime’s power and the process of “coordination.”

His first great undertaking as head of propaganda for the regime was to make the arrangements for March 21, the ceremonial opening of the Reichstag. While the date of this event related to the anniversary of the opening of Parliament in 1871, the site of the ceremony, Potsdam, had special associations with Prussian monarchical and military traditions. In the Potsdam Garrison Church two Prussian kings, Frederick William I and Frederick II (the Great), were interred, and until the end of the First World War it was here that the flags and battle standards captured by the Prussian army from the Wars of Liberation onward were displayed. Here the alliance between National Socialists and national conservatives was to be valorized and celebrated. This was to be expressed above all by a solemn handshake between chancellor and president, where Hitler, in dark morning suit and top hat, would bow deeply to Hindenburg, wearing the uniform of a field marshal of the Kaiser’s army. Accordingly, Goebbels’s plan was that the formalities should be “grand and classical.”
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One day before the event, however, Hitler and Goebbels decided not to attend the church service in Potsdam the next morning, opting instead to make a pointed statement by visiting the graves of SA members in the Luisenstadt cemetery in Berlin. The ostensible justification for this was that the two Catholics were both regarded by their church as “apostates.” As a result, they arrived in Potsdam around half past eleven.
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Everything there was “hustle and bustle,” Goebbels noted. Hindenburg seemed to him “almost like a stone monument.” Goebbels was carried away by the show he himself had staged: “Then Hitler speaks. His best speech. At the end everybody very moved. I have tears in my eyes. This is how history is made. […] Army, S.A., and Stahlhelm march. The old gentleman stands and salutes. Sheer ecstasy at the end.”
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Immediately after the Potsdam ceremony, Hitler’s ministers agreed on further emergency laws. They concerned the creation of special courts, prosecutions to deal with “treacherous” attacks on the new government, and a further penalty that Goebbels was particularly eager to see. Goebbels commented, “I act as a firebrand. String ’em up, string ’em up!”
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Two days later he attended the Reichstag session held in the Kroll Opera House, which had been turned into a temporary parliament and was now surrounded and sealed off by SA guards. The session opened with a speech by Hitler in which he gave a preview of the work of the government. But the main object was to force through the Enabling Law. The required two-thirds majority was achieved only because the Communist Party members had been arrested, and great pressure was put on members of the bourgeois centrist parties to vote in favor.

When the leader of the Social Democrats, Otto Wels, set out the reasons why his party had voted against the Enabling Law and voiced a challenge to this burgeoning dictatorship, Hitler made another speech, a direct response to Wels. By Goebbels’s account, he “gave Wels a fierce lambasting. You don’t often see such a slaughter. Hitler in full force. And a huge success.”
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