Goebbels: A Biography (32 page)

In late May Goebbels set out for Rome on his first journey abroad as a Reich minister. He was not the first member of the new government to visit the Italian capital. In April and May Göring and von Papen had both been there, and just before Goebbels’s visit, Göring had returned to the Eternal City in connection with foreign policy negotiations. The immediate objects of Goebbels’s trip were to promote personal connections with leading representatives of the fascist
regime and to study some of its cultural institutions which he had long regarded as role models. Ultimately what concerned him was a series of practical questions arising out of ongoing projects in his domain. Beyond all this, in general the idea was for Goebbels to help break down the foreign affairs isolation in which the new German government found itself. However, Goebbels was not to play a major part in shaping the political relations between the two countries.

Crossing the border by train at the Brenner Pass on May 28, he noted with gratitude that Mussolini had sent a saloon car to meet him. In Bologna he encountered “effusive hospitality,” and after a further overnight journey he arrived in Rome, where he was greeted with a “great fuss.” For the next few days, it was a matter of getting through a crowded engagement schedule.

After some briefing by the German ambassador, Ulrich von Hassell (“an uninspired petit bourgeois,” “completely incompetent,” “has got to go”), Goebbels had initial discussions with Italian foreign minister Fulvio Suvich, a “wily native of Trieste” who was by no means well disposed toward Germany. They talked about the “global situation,” dwelling briefly on Mussolini’s “Four-Power Pact,” which was nearing ratification at the time.

At the ensuing audience in the royal palace he gained a “good impression” of the Italian king. Afterward he was taken on a tour around the Italian capital: “Eternal Rome. […] Just looking gives me a warm feeling. Such a fulfilment of long-felt yearning.” There followed a reception given by Mussolini, his longstanding hero, whose aura he obviously found spell-binding: “He’s short. But a huge head. Quite classical-looking. Is like a friend to me right away. ‘Il dottore.’ We hit it off immediately. And talk for an hour. About everything. He’s quite delighted with my explanations.”

The next morning he breakfasted with the president of the organization for artists and professionals, Emilio Bodrero, and met several prominent Italian intellectuals. In the evening he was invited by Mussolini to a dinner in the Grand Hotel. “Great gala event. Mussolini leads Magda in. She performs wonderfully well. He looks magnificent. Charming to Magda.”

Other visits followed the next day, including one to the L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE), the Italian propaganda organization, whose director he had met in April in Berlin,
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as well as the
head office of the fascist leisure organization Dopolavoro, which impressed Goebbels very much: “We must do something like that. The people at leisure. Sport, recreation, hospitals, tourism.”

The next day’s visits included the Fascist Revolution exhibition: “Fascism is modern and has close ties with the people. We should learn from it.” After a visit to the German Academy and a speech to the Roman section of the NSDAP Foreign Organization and German expatriates (“In great form. […] Rapturous success”), he left Rome the same day to head back north.
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Two points emerge from Goebbels’s report on this varied program of visits: first, how easily impressed he was by the Italians’ charm offensive. He was simply not capable of perceiving that all the carefully chosen visits and receptions, the many honors, presents, and gestures of political goodwill were not about Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the brilliant propaganda expert and hero of the Nazi revolution, but part of the Italian regime’s efforts to improve its relations with Germany. A second important point is that the significance of the role played by the German propaganda minister in shaping Italo-German relations stood in inverse proportion to the amount of ceremony surrounding Goebbels’s reception in Rome—something that becomes clear from reading Goebbels’s diary, where he indulges freely in self-satisfied reflections on his pompous welcome in Italy.

The fact is that while he was in Italy—behind his back—the German and Italian regimes were making decisive progress toward political agreement. The agreement in question was the Four-Power Pact, a project pursued by Mussolini since 1931, and to which he returned in March 1933. According to the pact, the four leading West European countries—Britain, France, Germany, and Italy—were to take the lead in ensuring the security of Europe and revise the Versailles Treaty. After many months of negotiation, however, the original draft had been reduced to a collection of declaratory compromise formulae that in no way reconciled the political interests of the participating nations. On the German side, Göring had conducted the concluding negotiations during his Rome visit on May 19 and 20. The decision to join the pact was made at the end of May, while Goebbels was in Italy. It was made in Berlin after intense consultations involving Hitler, Neurath, Göring, and Werner von Blomberg, and the treaty was finally signed on June 7 in Rome. Goebbels was
not informed by Hitler until the day before—although he had been in the dictator’s company almost without interruption since his return from Italy. Goebbels noted the news laconically in his diary, but it cannot have escaped his attention that his Italian visit had been first and foremost what would nowadays be called a public relations event.
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The Reich conference of NSDAP leaders took place in Berlin in mid-July. Goebbels held forth on the need to “cleanse the Party” and to take action “against the arrivistes,” a matter he had been pursuing for some weeks for Hitler’s benefit, and very publicly.
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So, for example, in several speeches in May and June Goebbels had stressed that the Party must not be “distorted” by mass recruitment. On May 21 at a general parade of members of the Nazi industrial cell organization in the Grunewald Stadium, he had exclaimed: “Don’t admit to this movement either communists in disguise or the covert petit bourgeois. This movement is revolutionary and will remain revolutionary. The revolution is not over yet.” That the National Socialists were serious about their “revolution” and that they intended it to continue was another leitmotif of his speeches in those weeks; it united him with SA boss Röhm, who also never ceased to beat the revolutionary drum at the time.
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At the leaders’ conference in mid-June, Goebbels proposed a concrete move: a decree to regulate the “incorporation of new Party comrades into the National Socialist organization,” a suggestion that was taken up by Hitler.
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It was with satisfaction that Goebbels listened to Hitler’s speech that same day, in which he not only told the Party leaders about purifying the Party but also committed them to a slogan that was music to Goebbels’s ears: “The revolution continues.”
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Goebbels also used the leaders’ conference to announce a social “relief drive” for the coming winter, which soon appeared in his notes under the motto “war against hunger and cold.” All in all, at this conference he had succeeded in projecting himself as the exponent of a radical, “socialist” Party line.
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During this time the “coordination” of political life was making
rapid progress. On June 22 the SPD was prohibited from all further activity. After the Stahlhelm had been incorporated into the SA on June 21 and the “Fighting Squads” of the Nationalists had been banned, the German Nationalist Party effectively disbanded itself at the end of June. At the same time, the head of the DNVP, Hugenberg, stepped down after causing some irritation at the London Economic Conference. Reporting on the cabinet meeting of June 27, at which Hitler announced this development, Goebbels simply noted laconically: “Hitler conveys Hugenberg case. No tears shed.”
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But something did come out of this for Goebbels, as Hitler told him the next day: “Hugenberg’s official residence. Fabulous!”
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So by the time Magda came back from vacation Goebbels was able to surprise her with a present: the keys to Hermann Göring Strasse 20, where, however (under Albert Speer’s direction), rebuilding was still going on. Goebbels enthused in his diary about his “fairy-tale palace,” set in a “glorious park.”
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By the middle of the month it was ready for them to move in, and they gave a housewarming reception that was attended by Hitler.
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The NSDAP was also making progress with consolidating its power: On July 5 the Center Party dissolved itself. Three days later came the signing of the Concordat with the Vatican; Catholicism as a political factor was thereby neutralized. On July 14 the cabinet imposed a law forbidding the formation of new parties.

Meanwhile, Hitler had introduced a change in the process of taking over power. The phase that saw the regime gradually extending its power by means of carefully targeted “actions” by the Party rank and file, combined with legal measures, was, by the middle of 1933, slowly coming to an end. Goebbels grasped that Hitler had decided against any continuation of the National Socialist revolution, a deliberate challenge to Röhm, whose fast-growing SA threatened to become an unpredictable power factor.
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Goebbels, now swiftly changing course, began to retreat from the emphatically “revolutionary” position he had been preaching in the previous weeks. In
Der Angriff
of July 11 he wrote an article expounding once more the need to “purify” the Nazi movement, which had expanded greatly in the previous few months. But this time his arguments were directed against the Nazi industrial cell organization, which he accused of “Marxist tendencies.”
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The press was instructed to syndicate this contribution.
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He struck the same note in a radio broadcast a few
days later, the text of which was also reproduced across the German press. “Fabulous response in the press,” wrote the delighted propaganda minister. In any case, it was now on record that he had placed himself on the right side in any forthcoming conflict over the future of the “Nazi revolution.”
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He rapidly abandoned the revolutionary rhetoric he had deployed in the previous weeks.

Credit 11.1

Goebbels appearing on an unaccustomed foreign political stage during the meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva, September 1933. Whereas he believed that he had impressed foreign critics and skeptics there, in fact his appearance was simply a maneuver staged by Hitler in order to distract the international public from his imminent spectacular break with the League of Nations.

Early in July 1933, Goebbels and his wife planned to add to their family. The way that Goebbels recorded this decision in his diary suggests that it was mainly his idea: “I have resolved with Magda that we want another baby. A boy this time.” The wish soon came true: Magda was already pregnant before the end of July.
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On July 11, Magda went off alone on a three-week summer vacation
in Heiligendamm; Goebbels stayed behind in Berlin. They saw each other only twice in that time: once when Goebbels made a little detour from Hamburg to the Baltic seaside resort and again toward the end of the month, when he went to the Derby in Hamburg and stopped off briefly to see Magda.
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Goebbels’s diary entry about his short trip to the Baltic shows that things were not altogether ideal in their marriage: “All this work and a certain sense of weariness had made us drift apart slightly. We’ve got to get back to the way we were. We’ve promised each other as much.”
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In mid-July, though, he and Magda had a serious argument: She wanted take on a role in public life by becoming the patron of an official Nazi fashion design office. “Magda must act in a more reserved manner. This won’t do. In this respect she causes me nothing but trouble.”
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The argument continued the next day, and Magda refused to go with him to the Bayreuth Festival as planned. So Goebbels went to Bayreuth alone. Hitler, whom he met there for lunch, was “appalled that Magda isn’t with me” and arranged for a plane to bring her from Berlin. Late in the afternoon, just as the intermission following the first act of
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
began, Magda arrived at the Festival Theater. “She’s more beautiful than all of them,” observed Goebbels, but also: “Very depressed mood.”

After the performance Hitler invited them in for coffee in the little house he used when in Bayreuth: “He makes peace between Magda and me. A true friend. He backs me up, too: There’s no place for women in political life.” The argument with Magda flared up again later, but eventually they reconciled. The question of Magda taking on a public function outside the Goebbels household, however, did not go away.
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At the beginning of August he went on vacation to Heiligendamm with Magda, but various engagements interrupted his time there. He used his stay to start writing a new book, with the working title “Path to Power”; this was probably the inception of
Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei
. A few visitors came over to Heiligendamm. Leni Riefenstahl, for example, whom he had met with frequently in Berlin, dropped in for two days, no doubt to talk about filming the Party rally, and he met the actor Werner Krauss, by whom he was so deeply impressed that he instantly appointed him deputy head of the Reich Theater Chamber.
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On August 6 he attended a conference of Gau and Reich leaders on the Obersalzberg, where Hitler gave a three-hour speech. According to the text of the address printed the next day in the
Völkischer Beobachter
, Hitler’s topics included the autobahn construction project and the establishment of a Senate. Goebbels added something that was passed over in the
Völkischer Beobachter
report: “Sharply attacked the churches”; “we ourselves will become a church.”
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On August 20, while Goebbels was busy in Berlin, Magda went to Munich, where Hitler met her and then escorted her to Berchtesgaden. Goebbels arrived two days later. Goebbels had several important discussions lined up on the Obersalzberg, including one with Göring, “the old horror.” Goebbels was annoyed by Göring’s wish to become a general: “Why not go straight to field marshal?” But the three of them—Goebbels, Göring, and Hitler—were united in their negative view of Rosenberg and his Party Foreign Office, and in their criticism of conditions in the German Labor Front. Its director, Robert Ley, was “not up to it. Bad ambience. We are concerned about his Labor Front. A lot of Marxism.”
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On the afternoon of August 24, Goebbels, Magda, and Hitler went to view a site above Walchenfeld House, where the Goebbelses planned to build a house.
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Afterward he had a “thorough discussion with the boss” covering a series of essential points.

After agreeing that Goebbels would give a key speech at the next Party rally on the topic of “the race question and world propaganda,” they went on to discuss the further consolidation of the regime. They agreed, for example, on the future of the individual German states: “Got to go. As soon as possible. We’re not here to conserve them, but to liquidate them.” All Gauleiters should become governors, and in addition there should be a “Senate of the N.S.D.A.P.” to guarantee “the stability of the regime.”
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They also talked over the question of what to do about the presidency once the eighty-five-year-old Hindenburg left office, probably not too far away. In March, Hitler, still undecided about this, had considered appointing Prince Auwi as Hindenburg’s successor, not least because he hesitated to take over the presidency himself if it meant making the obvious candidate, Göring, Reich chancellor.
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Now though, in August, Hitler was saying that when the time came he wanted to be “proclaimed” president immediately; his assumption of office was then to be blessed retrospectively
by a plebiscite.
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He also announced to Goebbels his stamp of approval for two pieces of legislation, relating to the press and to the cultural chamber.

On August 25 Goebbels left Berchtesgaden for Munich: “Magda is staying on.”
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In the evening Hitler followed him to Munich, and they traveled to Berlin together. Around August 28 Hitler returned to Berchtesgaden, and Hitler and Goebbels met up again on August 31 in Nuremberg. Magda stayed on the Obersalzberg during this time.