Goebbels: A Biography (42 page)

On October 2, 1935, Magda gave birth to the son they had longed for. They intended to call him Helmut. When Goebbels visited Magda in the hospital, he was overjoyed: a “Goebbels face. I’m happy beyond words. I could smash the place up for joy. A boy! A boy!”
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The next day Goebbels heard the news that Italy had begun its long-anticipated assault on Abyssinia.
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When the League of Nations then imposed sanctions on Italy, Goebbels ordered the press to take a more strongly pro-Italian line, a direction for which he had obtained Hitler’s approval.
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Some days later he attended a talk given by
Hitler in the Reich Chancellery to the assembled cabinet and top military men: “All this is coming three years too soon for us. […] We can only rearm and prepare. Europe is on the move again. If we’re clever, we can be the winners.”
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The international sanctions
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against Italy, which were to go into effect on November 18, had only a marginal impact on Italy’s ability to make war on Abyssinia, and by May 1936 the country was taken. As far as the foreign policy of the Reich was concerned, however, the war was an opportunity to exploit the rupture between Italy and the Western powers to avoid attracting too much attention as it continued to rearm.

The forced pace of rearmament and the regime’s measures to make Germany economically more self-sufficient resulted in, among other things, reduced food imports, leading to supply bottlenecks and forcing Goebbels, starting in autumn 1935, to deal with growing complaints from the public about the deteriorating food situation.
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Incorrigible complainers, said Goebbels, were using the temporary butter shortage to sow discontent among the “national community.”
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When his appeals failed to achieve results, his tone became shriller: He contended that such shortages had to be accepted for the sake of Germany’s striving for economic self-sufficiency. The “eternal gripers” were therefore sabotaging the policy of building “fortress Germany.”
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The propaganda arm was now increasingly forced to explain to the population the background to the critical shortage of foodstuffs and to try to steer consumption in the right direction.
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Useful in this respect, as well as supplying a distraction from everyday adversity, were the numerous celebrations and mass events that began with the Party rally in September and were continued by the Party throughout the autumn and winter. Much of public life had already taken on a ritualized complexion.

While the harvest festival on the Bückeberg at the beginning of October
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offered the opportunity to spread a reassuring message about the food supply, the opening of the Winter Relief campaign in the Kroll Opera on October 10, where in the presence of Hitler Goebbels delivered the usual report, was about communicating “national solidarity.”
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At this point a new cycle of meetings began, which—with a break at Christmas—lasted until March 1936. The meetings, numbering probably more than a hundred thousand, not only served
to extol Winter Relief as “socialism in action” but also ensured the continuous briefing of the public on the food situation while in general underlining the Party’s closeness to the people.
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However, the newsletter of the Party propagandists clearly indicates that the willingness of the public to take up “invitations” to such events was on the wane.
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The suggested remedy was to reinforce the appeal of advertising “by increasing the personal impact” on the individual citizen,
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although at the same time there was a warning against open threats on campaign leaflets (“those who fail to attend the meeting will be putting themselves outside the national community”)
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and “overemphatic” propaganda.
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Soon after the launch of the collecting season, Goebbels took part in other large-scale central events such as the commemoration of the Munich putsch in November
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and, a few days later, the anniversary of the Reich Culture Chamber. Goebbels enhanced the anniversary by publicly presenting the Reich Cultural Senate he had recently formed. This presentation had been preceded by another dispute with Rosenberg: To Goebbels’s surprise, at the previous Party rally Rosenberg had announced that there was to be an NSDAP prize for “art and science” and that he was going to create a Reich Cultural Senate.
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Since Goebbels had long been nursing the idea of setting up a committee with the same name, he appealed to Hitler and at the end of November got him to ban Rosenberg’s Cultural Senate.
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Thus Goebbels, in his speech on November 15 at the anniversary celebrations of the Reich Culture Chamber—attended by Hitler along with many other prominent figures—was able to ceremoniously proclaim the founding of “his” Reich Cultural Senate. He used the speech to come out in opposition to “mysticisms which seem designed only to confuse public opinion”—a sideswipe at Rosenberg, to whose “cultic nonsense” Hitler had clearly expressed his animus some months earlier in the presence of Goebbels.
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“Leadership of culture definitely with me,” wrote Goebbels as this day ended.
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The year went out on the note of the “Volk Christmas,” an action carried out by the Party across the whole Reich, whereby over five million children received presents at thirty thousand ceremonies. Goebbels attended one such event, in the Berlin Friedrichshain hall. In his speech, broadcast to the nation, he described Christmas as a Christian festival but at the same time claimed it for National Socialism, which in the form of the “national community” had given the
command to love your neighbor a “new and unexpected content” in the form of the national community.
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He himself celebrated Christmas with his family.
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Obviously, although he had just advocated an anti-Christian position, Goebbels did not have much time for the idea of turning Christmas into a Germanic “yuletide festival,” as advocated by the anticlerical wing of the Party. For him in 1935, a traditional Christmas, “the most German of all festivals,” was still indispensable.

Credit 15.1

During a trip to Greece, in September 1936, the Goebbels and Hoffmann families admire the Zeus of Artemision statue in the National Museum in Athens. By 1936, the Nazi regime seemed to be solidly established, both at home and abroad. For Goebbels, there were many opportunities to enjoy the fruits of success.

On February 4, 1936, the eve of the opening of the Winter Olympics in Garmisch, Goebbels was at an evening reception with Hitler when some “sad news” reached them. Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of the Swiss NSDAP, had been assassinated in his hometown of Davos. The perpetrator was a Jewish student named David Frankfurter. “The Jews
are going to pay a high price for this,” wrote Goebbels.
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Yet large-scale vengeance was ruled out because of the coming Olympic Games: For weeks the Propaganda Ministry had been commanding the mass media to exercise restraint over the “Jewish question” for the duration of the Games.
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Thus the press reaction was—as per instructions—relatively muted.
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On the evening of February 5 Goebbels, Magda, and Hitler left by special train for Garmisch. Goebbels spent the next two days there, attending the opening ceremony (which he regarded as a “rather old-fashioned ritual”) and was pleased to see that nearly all the participating nations “marched past the Führer giving the Hitler salute.” He watched a few events and generally enjoyed the “glorious snow landscape.”
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On February 8 the Goebbels couple moved on to Munich, where there were a few social occasions to attend in the days that followed: the Press Ball, the Artists’ Festival, and an Olympic reception given by the Reich government at which Goebbels made a speech about international understanding.
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On February 11, with other high-ranking Nazi officials, they boarded the special train bound for Schwerin, where Gustloff’s funeral was taking place. Goebbels noted with enthusiasm that at the burial ceremony Hitler gave a “radical, trenchant speech against the Jews.”
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The concurrence of prescribed state mourning, ongoing state business, and the Olympic Games imposed a complicated itinerary over the next few days that Goebbels was forced to undergo, to the point of physical exhaustion. They went via Berlin, where they stopped off briefly, back to Garmisch, where they arrived on the morning of February 13 and watched several sporting events together. But by the following night Goebbels was off again to Berlin by sleeping car. Magda stayed on in Munich for a while.
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On Saturday morning, February 15, together with Hitler Goebbels opened the International Automobile Exhibition in Berlin.
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They both returned by sleeper car that evening to Garmisch, where they attended the closing of the Winter Olympic Games: “Fine victory ceremony. […] Everybody is praising our organization. And it certainly was brilliant.” There followed another overnight trip to Berlin, this time accompanied by Magda. Goebbels now became unwell: “I dose myself with alcohol because of the flu. Slept like a log.”
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Some days after the end of the Winter Games, Hitler prepared to take the next step in his revision of the Versailles Treaty: the reoccupation of the Rhineland, demilitarized since 1919. This would be a breach not only of Versailles but also of the Locarno Pact. A first hint of Hitler’s intention is found in Goebbels’s diary as early as January 20, 1936, reporting that Hitler had announced over lunch that at some point he was going “suddenly to resolve the problem of the Rhineland zone.”
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A month later, in conversation with Goebbels, Hitler came back to the subject: “He is pondering it. Should he remilitarize the Rhineland? Difficult question.” Evidently Hitler no longer feared that the Western powers would seize on a German military incursion into the Rhineland as a welcome opportunity to switch their focus away from the Abyssinian conflict and onto the situation in Central Europe. And there would be a pretext for the occupation of the Rhineland: The Franco-Russian Pact concluded in May 1935 was about to be ratified. Goebbels commented after this conversation: “The situation is ripe just now. France won’t do anything, much less England. But we’ll wait and see, and keep calm.”
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On the evening of February 28, when Goebbels and Magda were about to leave for home after an event in the Deutschlandhalle, “there’s a call from the Führer, I’ve got to go with him to Munich. He wants me at his side while coming to his difficult decision about the Rhineland.” Naturally, Goebbels complied instantly: “So, it’s all change. Get packed, and off we go. Magda’s coming with us.”
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During the rail journey through the night and later in Munich the debate continued, until on Sunday, March 1, Hitler struggled through to a solitary decision—as usual in such critical situations. As he told Goebbels (and contrary to the latter’s advice),
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he was going to act in the next week without waiting for the decision of the French Senate, expected on March 12.
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In the afternoon Goebbels flew to Leipzig, where he gave a talk to the foreign and domestic press (not on the subject of the coming conflict, of course), while Magda took the overnight train to Berlin with Hitler.
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On March 2 Hitler summoned to the Reich Chancellery Goebbels; Göring; the minister of war, General Werner von Blomberg;
the head of the army, General Werner von Fritsch; the head of the navy, Admiral Erich Raeder; and Ribbentrop to inform them that on the coming Saturday in the Reichstag he would announce the remilitarization of the Rhineland. At the same time, the Reichstag would be dissolved and new elections would take place under the watchword “foreign relations.” To maintain the element of surprise, members of the house would be invited on the Friday evening to a “beer evening.”
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Only on that day, March 6, did Hitler officially tell his cabinet, who—apart from a few who were in the know—were “immensely astonished” by this latest decision of the “Führer.”
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In the course of this week, which was highly charged with tension, Goebbels had already begun to prepare his Propaganda Ministry for the election campaign to come. Early in the morning he directed two planeloads of journalists to the Rhineland, their destination a secret until the last minute.
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On Saturday, March 7, in his speech to the Reichstag, Hitler announced—wrapped up in orotund assertions of his will to peace—the annulment of the Locarno Treaties, which he justified by reference to the Franco-Soviet military pact. The high point of the speech was his statement that the German government “has today resumed full and unrestricted sovereignty over the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland.” At that same moment, German troops—numerically relatively weak—began their march into the territory on the left bank of the Rhine.
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Goebbels recorded a “frenzy of enthusiasm” after the speech, not only among Reichstag members but also in the “newly liberated” Rhineland. His mother, who called him from Rheydt, “went wild,” and his old teacher Voss, who happened to be in Berlin, was “in raptures”; later in the evening, Goebbels took him along to meet Hitler. Goebbels learned from Hitler that there would be no serious international repercussions; France merely planned to raise the matter at the League of Nations.
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A few days later the election propaganda campaign began with a vengeance. Goebbels himself spoke in the weeks to come at mass events in, among other places, Potsdam, Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Koblenz, and Cologne.
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Mobilizing the masses in centrally organized meetings throughout the Reich, partly characterized by peace declarations but also by a renewed sense of national self-confidence, was meant to strengthen the
hand of the regime in the international negotiations that now followed.
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A hastily convened London meeting of the Council of the League of Nations on March 19 passed a resolution
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condemning the German action as a clear breach of the Locarno Treaties. A compromise proposal by the Locarno powers based on this resolution—met by Goebbels with the response “They’ve gone mad”
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—was rejected by the German side, which put forward its own “peace plan” instead, the draft of which Hitler had discussed on March 31 with Göring, Goebbels, and Hess.
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It was no accident that the confident rejection of the Locarno powers’ offer of negotiation came on March 31: Two days earlier, the regime had staged the “election” as a huge spectacle expressing the solidarity of the “national community.”
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The campaign had begun its final phase on the afternoon of March 27, a Friday. All newspapers had been instructed to foreground the mass meetings arranged over the next two days.
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Hitler began the program with a visit to the Krupp Works in Essen, broadcast by all German stations and relayed in “community reception” over loudspeakers. The meeting in Essen was introduced by one of Goebbels’s commentaries, and at 3:45
P.M
. precisely he also gave the command over the loudspeakers to “hoist flags,” whereupon, according to the
Völkischer Beobachter
, in an instant “the whole of Germany […] was like a hurricane of swastika flags.”
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Hitler’s speech, in which he among other things declaimed his desire for peace and called for solidarity in the nation, was followed by other events featuring the Party elite. There was a mass meeting in the Berlin Sportpalast at which Göring spoke, while Goebbels addressed an audience of several hundred thousand in Düsseldorf.
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Goebbels had named the day before the election “the People’s Day of Honor, Peace, and Freedom.” The high point was another evening speech by Hitler in Cologne, which was again broadcast in public places and was meant to end with a “gigantic chorus of 67 million Germans.” The press had called on the public to gather in the large city squares and join in with the singing of the “Dutch Thanksgiving Prayer.”
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The country went to the polls on the Sunday. “A Nation Privileged to Serve by Voting for the Führer,” ran the headline in the
Völkischer Beobachter
.
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Once again, the results of the vote were massively manipulated:
“Terror, pressure on voters, falsifying of ballot papers reached unheard-of proportions this time,” reported informants for the SPD in exile.
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The published result—a “yes” vote of 99 percent—did not record the numbers of “no” votes separately but merged them with the figure for spoiled ballot papers: Blank ballot papers were interpreted as approval, and observers working for SOPADE
*
reported that even those voting slips not explicitly marked with the word “No” were counted as a “Yes.” Despite great pressure, more than four hundred thousand people had chosen not to vote at all.
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However, the regime felt that the outcome of the vote had strengthened its position vis-à-vis the Locarno powers. Goebbels commented: “The Führer has united the nation. It’s more than we could have hoped for in our wildest dreams.”
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In the end, it transpired that Hitler’s bluff had worked: No sanctions were imposed by the European powers, and there was no practical outcome from the talks between the British and French general staffs.
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Tolerating the German march into the Rhineland underscored the decay of the security system established at Locarno.