Goebbels: A Biography (44 page)

For the regime, the Olympics represented a considerable increase in international reputation. This, as well as a few other factors, contributed to the sense that the regime was now by and large securely established. Political opposition had almost been eliminated; there was a ceasefire in the war against the churches; and mass unemployment had been considerably reduced by the rearmament buildup. Staged in the form of a celebration of national unity, the “election” and the Olympiad had provided plenty of opportunities to show off the supposed harmony between regime and people. Now, at the end of the summer, there began a period of some months when Goebbels could bask in the glory of success, collect rewards and approbation, and savor to the fullest the privileges that went with his status.

At the end of August he spent three days at the Venice Biennale with Magda. Goebbels was highly impressed by the city, which he found “absolutely stunning.”
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He noted with satisfaction the results emerging from the International Film Festival: Trenker’s
The Emperor of California
was declared the best foreign film.
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Flying back, he interrupted his journey to stay for a few days on the Obersalzberg. He discussed various political topics with Hitler, but there was also time for relaxation: “Bowling. But the Führer is the master of that, too.”
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The Nuremberg Party rally of 1936—Goebbels had tried in vain to persuade Hitler to shorten the program, in view of the recent Olympic upheaval, or even cancel the rally altogether
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—took the motto of “anti-Bolshevism.” Goebbels made his main contribution on September 10 with a speech on “Bolshevism, the World Enemy.” He had already belabored the theme in his address the year before, but now, against a background of ongoing international developments, the speech was the starting signal for a big anticommunist propaganda campaign.
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Hitler found the speech “classically good,” and as usual Goebbels could not get enough of the press response, which, being under the direction of the Propaganda Ministry, was outstanding.
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During the Nuremberg show, with its usual parades, military displays, solemn ceremonial, torchlight processions, receptions, and endless speeches, he found time, as we have seen, to cultivate the first tender links with Baarová.

On September 20 Goebbels left on his long-planned trip to Greece.
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In Athens on September 22, visiting the Acropolis, Goebbels experienced “one of the most profound and beautiful mornings of my life. […] Spent hours strolling through the most noble site of Nordic art. The Propylaea, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheion. I’m quite stunned. Over everything this deep blue Attic sky. […] How the Führer would love to be here with us!”
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The next day they went on via Thebes to Delphi: “That’s antiquity, our blessing and our great saving grace.” In the evening they boarded a little steamer in nearby Itea. Of the nighttime journey he noted that it had been sultry, almost unbearable, and Magda did not feel well. In fact, this is one of the very few entries in his detailed travel diary in which his wife gets even a brief mention. He does not seem to have shared with her the impressions that had moved him so deeply in the previous days but had quite deliberately chosen to enjoy these intense experiences alone. Significantly, it was Hitler he missed on his visit to the Acropolis.
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After a cruise of some days with the ship, during which he visited various excavations, he returned to Athens, from which he took his “melancholy” leave a few days later.
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Contrary to his principle of not accepting any pompous official honors,
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he had not been able to refuse the highest Greek order, which Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas bestowed on him in Athens. Goebbels had to “accept with a good grace.” Hardly had he returned
home when Alfieri gave him the Order of Mauritius. “Rather an embarrassing situation. But what can I do? Put a brave face on it and accept!”
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A month after his return, on October 29 and for the following three days Goebbels found himself at the center of numerous celebrations and honors. His thirty-ninth birthday coincided with the tenth anniversary of his tenure as Berlin Gauleiter, and this had to be celebrated in style. First he received a delegation of German artists, to whom he announced a donation of two million marks for the artists’ old-age fund, and then the twenty-eight oldest Party comrades in the Gau, upon whom he bestowed the Party’s Golden Badge of Honor. For Berliners who were not lucky enough to be able to congratulate the Gauleiter in person on his big day, lists were made available in the ministry to sign.

Finally, Hitler himself appeared at the ministry, and they both retired to Goebbels’s private office. Deeply moved, Goebbels cherished the precious moments: “And then he talks to me very nicely and confidentially. About the old days, how we belong together, what he says to me is so moving. Gives me his portrait, with a wonderful dedication. And a painting of the Dutch School. It is a wonderful hour alone with him. He poured out his whole heart to me.” There followed a torchlight procession in the Lustgarten, a military review of Hitler’s SS bodyguard, the Leibstandarte, and then at home he gave a reception, at which Hitler was present once more.
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The next day, at a reception in the City Hall, Goebbels presented himself completely as a “socialist.” He maintained in his speech of thanks that he felt “more closely connected to the poor of our own country than to the king of any other.”
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The City of Berlin turned over to him a “simple log cabin by one of the quiet lakes around Berlin,” as
Der Angriff
reported in a special jubilee issue.
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It was in fact a four-room timber house with various outbuildings, situated in the middle of a large forest plot on the Bogensee, about twenty-five miles north of the center of Berlin, directly on the newly completed Berlin-Stettin autobahn. He had the use of the house cost-free for life.
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After this, he visited an exhibition called “10 Years of Struggle for Berlin,” laid the foundation stone of a “Goebbels housing estate” in Friedrichshain, and placed a wreath on Horst Wessel’s grave. In the evening he made his way through a city decked out with flags in his
honor to the Sportpalast, where he and Hitler spoke: “He presents me in a way I’ve never heard before. I hadn’t expected that. I’m moved and touched. He finishes by calling for a ‘Heil’ for me. I’m so happy. Frenetic storms of applause.”
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The next day he made sure that Hitler’s speech was given due prominence in the press.
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On October 31 there was an SA roll call in the Lustgarten, and in the evening a “Party festivity” was held in the Deutschlandhalle. “I’m being spoiled with love and devotion. It’s so wonderful.”
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Gratefully he received “good wishes”
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from all sides, “mountains of letters, flowers and presents,”
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expressions of love “from the whole nation.”
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He was “completely stunned” and “deeply moved” by the many honors.
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There was still a “youth rally” to come, on November 1 in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo (Ufa cinema near the Zoo Station), where among other things Schirach “gave a lovely speech” in Goebbels’s presence. A Hitler Youth read out his Wessel obituary from 1930: “What a poem of an essay.” The festivities ended in the evening with a performance of
The Merry Widow
, which he attended in the company of old Party comrades at the Berlin Opera House.
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In the months after Mussolini’s victory in Ethiopia, and under the impact of the Spanish Civil War beginning in August, Hitler’s foreign policy underwent a change of direction. Precisely because Goebbels was excluded from the actual process of foreign policy planning and decision-making, he was all the more eager to collect in his diary any hints of the Führer’s intentions.

Until spring 1936, Hitler went on thinking that the chances of an Anglo-German alliance were improved by Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia and the international crisis it created. But now, viewing international affairs from the perspective of a comprehensive bloc formation, he began to push things in that direction. In autumn 1936 Hitler frequently evoked for Goebbels the inevitability of confronting “Bolshevism.” The topic had been the leitmotif of the Party rally and since then had been widely deployed by propaganda. In view of what Hitler saw as the distinct possibility that France would go communist and the fact that he did not expect German rearmament to be completed
until 1941, he began to pin his hopes on an anticommunist bloc including—first and foremost—Italy, and then Japan, and eventually Great Britain.
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As far as the understanding with Italy was concerned, Goebbels was only too willing to act as go-between. The annual Farmers’ Rally was a convenient occasion to bring together, through his mediation, Hitler and Goebbels’s Italian counterpart, Alfieri.
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Hitler wanted Italy to leave the League of Nations. “Then we’d have freedom of action. He doesn’t intend to do anything against Italy. Wants an entente of minds. Mussolini invited to Germany. Direct talks.”

On October 24 Ciano visited Hitler at the Berghof. During this conversation, according to Goebbels’s record, Hitler opened up to his Italian guest much broader vistas of German-Italian cooperation, which was to grow into a European anti-Bolshevist front. Furthermore, Hitler declared unambiguously that Germany would be ready for war in three to five years and designated the Mediterranean and Eastern European areas, respectively, as Italian and German spheres of interest.
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Mussolini picked up this clear signal a week later in a speech in Milan, where he talked of a “Rome-Berlin axis” around which “all those European states can move which have a will to cooperation and peace.” Goebbels interpreted this speech immediately as an obvious message “to Germany, Austria, and Hungary.”
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In mid-December he met the new Italian consul-general, Major Giuseppe Renzetti, a close friend of Mussolini’s whom he had already gotten to know in the 1920s as an important intermediary of “Il Duce”; he discussed with him possible ways of “supporting and promoting the German-Italian relationship.”
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Along with the improvement in German-Italian relations, the alliance with Japan was also strategically significant. Hitler had already told Goebbels in June that he believed a clash between Japan and Russia was inevitable, and once the colossus to the east began to totter “we must supply our need for land for the next hundred years.”
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On November 25 the Anti-Comintern Pact was signed with Japan in Berlin. The pact aimed to combat the Communist International by exchanging information. In a secret rider, both states agreed to remain neutral in the case of an attack by the Soviet Union and in addition pledged not to conclude any treaties contrary to the “spirit of this agreement.”
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In a three-hour speech on December 1, Hitler explained his view
of things to the cabinet; aside from the account given in Goebbels’s diary, no other record of this talk appears to exist. Europe, said Hitler, was already divided into two camps. France and Spain were the next victims of the communist drive for expansion. If communist regimes were to come to power there, it would lead to a Europe-wide crisis for which Europe was not yet militarily prepared.
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In the long run the “authoritarian states” (Poland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary) were not dependable either. The only “consciously anti-Bolshevist states,” apart from Germany, were Italy and Japan, and with them “agreements” would be concluded. “England will come in if France goes into crisis.”

When addressing his closest followers, at least, Hitler persisted in the notion that his increasingly aggressive foreign policy would still lead to an alliance with Great Britain.

In 1937, Goebbels made considerable efforts to establish his absolute leadership of cultural politics. This picture shows him with the architect’s model of an exhibition hall designed for the Berlin exhibition “Give Me Four Years.” On the right is State Secretary Walther Funk.

On January 30, 1937, Goebbels was among Reichstag members when Hitler addressed the house on the fourth anniversary of the “seizure of power.”
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In his speech, Hitler, among other things, unilaterally rescinded the recognition of the war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty that the German government had been forced to accept in 1919—a symbolic step toward annulling the peace settlement. At the same time, Hitler promised that “the time of so-called surprises is over”; however, his sharply polemical attacks on British Foreign Secretary
Anthony Eden made clear that he had certainly not been converted to pacifism.
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On the contrary: Just a few days earlier Hitler had remarked to Goebbels that he hoped “to have another 6 years,” but if a good opportunity arose, he would not want to miss it.
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Some weeks later he added that he expected—as Goebbels has it—“a great world conflict in 5–6 years. In 15 years he would have wiped out the Peace of Westphalia. […] Germany would be the victor in the coming battle, or cease to live.”
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It is against the background of this long-term perspective that Hitler’s foreign policy actions in the next few months must be viewed.

In the following months, between the beginning of 1937 and spring 1938, Hitler conducted a reorientation of German foreign policy clearly documented in the propaganda minister’s diary entries. The Führer largely gave up his hopes of an alliance with Britain and concentrated on his Italian ally.
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The joint engagement of the two states in the Spanish Civil War and the helpless efforts of Great Britain to establish a policy of “non-intervention” by diplomatic means formed the background to this change of policy.
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With regret, Goebbels observed the widening rift with Britain but placed the blame for it on the German ambassador in London, Ribbentrop, and not on Hitler.
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Hitler’s calculation was that before too long the new alliance would allow him to subjugate Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was already telling Goebbels on March 1, 1937, that it was necessary to have these two states “to round off our territory,”
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and it was in this light that Goebbels perceived the beginnings of Austria’s gradual isolation.
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This period of largely silent reorientation had an effect on propaganda policy. Goebbels had now entered a phase in which propaganda was no longer concentrated primarily, as in earlier years, on the stability of the regime at home or dealing with foreign affairs crises. Matters of cultural policy were now central to his work. Between the autumn of 1936 and the spring of 1938, his objects were to assert the absolute grip of National Socialism on the central areas of cultural policy and to give the regime as a whole a rounded cultural policy profile. Naturally, this effort was also calculated to distract attention from the tinderbox situation building up internationally.

The first priority was to dispel the influence of the Church on public life, as it was the only institution that contested, or was in a position
to contest, the claim to total power of National Socialism. One episode, on January 30, shows how urgent a task the regime considered this. Still in shock, Goebbels reported that after Hitler’s speech, the “inconceivable” happened. Hitler, “deeply moved,” had thanked the cabinet for their work and solemnly declared that in honor of the anniversary all cabinet members who were not Party comrades were to be accepted into the Party. But Reich Transport Minister Paul von Eltz-Rübenach flatly rejected this offer. He thought National Socialism would “suppress the Church”—and, what is more, he demanded a statement of Hitler’s proposed policy toward the Church.
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According to Goebbels, Hitler ignored this intervention, while the other cabinet members sat “as though paralyzed.” The “mood is ruined.” Inevitably, the minister had to resign on the spot.