Goebbels: A Biography (50 page)

There was one reason above all for his family’s extremely lavish lifestyle: It served to confirm his success and his unique greatness. First and foremost, however, it reflected recognition by his political idol, Hitler, to whose generosity he owed all this. And the more recognition and affirmation Goebbels received, the more he cut loose from the mundane ties binding him to the people around him.

Even after many years of activity as propaganda minister, the need for further recognition and success was the most important driving force behind Goebbels’s restless work. He never tired of celebrating his unusual success as a politician, propagandist, journalist, and orator; carefully documenting this was a central motive for his regular diary entries. It did not bother him that the overwhelming response his work met with in the German media was imposed and carefully orchestrated by his own ministry: For him, the fine, staged illusion was the same as the real thing. It is true that the emotional thrill of
success, which he wanted to feel always, was often disturbed by other moods, particularly when autumn was approaching or the weather was dismal. At these times he was overcome by a melancholy, brooding feeling.
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But he knew the antidote: “Work. Medicine for melancholy.”
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Credit 17.1

A rare snapshot: Goebbels’s secret mistress, Lida Baarová, at the premiere of Leni Riefenstahl’s film
Olympia
, April 20, 1938.

At the end of September 1937, the Third Reich reached the highest point so far in its efforts to achieve international recognition: a state visit by Benito Mussolini, which “Il Duce” began in Munich on September 25. The program opened with a tour of the new showcase state buildings in the Bavarian capital, and on the following days Mussolini dropped in on Wehrmacht maneuvers and visited the Krupp Works.
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As on previous encounters, Goebbels positively
melted under the impact of the Italian charm offensive: “You can’t help really liking him. A great man! […] Alfieri tells me that Mussolini is quite taken with me. And I am with him.”

Il Duce’s visit continued in Berlin, where he was to celebrate the German-Italian alliance at a gigantic rally. Goebbels had the honor of receiving Hitler and Mussolini at the entrance to the Maifeld, the great parade ground in front of the Olympic Stadium. His words of greeting were broadcast on all stations: “I report: on the Maifeld in Berlin, in the Olympic Stadium and the spaces around the Reich Sports Field, 1 million people; on the route from Wilhelmstrasse to the Reich Sports Field 2 million people, so in all 3 million people gathered for this historic mass meeting of the National Socialist movement.”
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A glance at the newspapers around that time reveals that the appearance of the three million—a majority of Berlin’s population—was not exactly a display of spontaneous popular enthusiasm. On September 26, for example, there was an article in the
Völkischer Beobachter
peremptorily commanding “the working Berlin population” to attend the rally en masse. The guarantee of “en masse” participation was achieved—to mention only one detail of the nearly perfect planning for this event—by the German Labor Front. After work ended early, they made the staff fall in and marched them en masse to their allocated sector of the approach roads. It was not easy to escape: If you felt ill, for example, you had to request special permission to leave from the works organizer.
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On the evening after the mass rally
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at which Mussolini and Hitler had celebrated the friendship between their two countries, Goebbels noted Hitler’s reaction to Mussolini’s demeanor: “He will never forget our help for him. Acknowledged it openly. And will go all the way with us to the end as a friend. And there’s nothing else he can do. England wants to destroy him. He has to stick with us. That’s the best basis for friendship.” But Goebbels added: “But let’s hope he’s not deceiving himself.”
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A choral festival attended by Hitler and Goebbels in Breslau at the end of July at which thirty thousand people took part;
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the Party rally with its strong anticommunist message;
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and the sealing of the partnership with Italy—all were part of the consolidation of the regime’s new foreign policy turn, which Hitler had prepared in 1937 with his swing toward Italy. The Third Reich was now openly on the path of expansion. The objects of this policy were primarily Austria and Czechoslovakia.

The pretext for a contrived clash with Czechoslavakia was provided in autumn 1937 by an incident in Teplitz-Schönau, where Karl Hermann Frank, a leader of the National Socialist–oriented Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP, Sudeten German Party), was arrested after a violent altercation with a Czech security agent. Thereupon Goebbels started a press campaign against what he called the “Prague rabble.”
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The intense polemical pressure of the German media, coupled with the aggressive behavior of the SdP, led to a sharp reaction on the part of the Czechs: The Prague government postponed the local elections that were in the offing and banned all political meetings. Goebbels called off the campaign on November 3 after representations from Karl Henlein: The head of the SdP feared events might escalate out of control, something that would not suit the Reich government at this juncture.
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There was now an attempt by the Germans to prevail on the Czechoslovak government, by diplomatic means, to act against those German-speaking newspapers, the “émigré press” published by anti-Nazis who had fled the Reich to Prague. The threat to resume the anti-Czech press campaign lurked in the background. The Czechs then promised to put pressure on the newspapers in question.
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On November 5 Goebbels was at Hitler’s lunch as usual: “We talk over the situation: restraint on the Czech question, because we’re not yet in a position to follow through with any consequences.” Goebbels then went home; his diary entry indicates that Hitler was “busy with General Staff discussions.”
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In fact, this was the afternoon when Hitler held the conference that paved the way for war, informing War Minister Blomberg, Foreign Minister Neurath, and the heads of the
army, navy, and air force of his political and strategic plans. A summary is preserved in the well-known memorandum by his Wehrmacht adjutant Colonel Hossbach, who took notes for his own use.
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Hitler made clear at the beginning of his talk that this was by way of “a testament he was setting out in case of his death.” He went on to cite the Germans’ “lack of living space” as the central problem of the future; only “the way of force” could solve this problem, and that could “never be risk-free.” Starting from this premise, it could only be a matter of deciding “when” and “how.” The optimum time for a German war of conquest would be in the years 1943 to 1945, at a juncture, that is, when rearmament would be complete (scenario 1); after that point, time would be working against Germany. However, there were two possible circumstances that would make it necessary to strike earlier: If France was paralyzed by a civil war (scenario 2), or if there was a war against Italy (scenario 3). In both cases the “moment for action against Czechoslovakia would have come”; if France was embroiled in war, Austria should be “overthrown” at the same time. Hitler thought it possible that scenario 3 might come about as early as the summer of 1938. He was therefore reckoning with the possibility that the alliance with Italy might trigger concrete action quite soon.

The discussion demonstrates not only Hitler’s grim, long-term determination to wage war but also shows that he was already thinking that solving the “problem cases” of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the medium term was possible only through conventional military surprise attacks in the context of a convenient European situation in which France was incapacitated. At this point he does not seem to have had in mind the mixture of internal and external pressure by which, in the coming year, he would “annex” Austria and carve off the Sudeten German territories from Czechoslovakia. And if he did have such ideas, he was leaving his most important collaborators in the dark about them. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Henlein wrote to him two weeks later asking him to annex the whole Bohemian-Moravian-Silesian area to the Reich and offering him the help of the Sudeten German Party in doing so, he did not consider this initiative at all. At the time, the idea of using the SdP as a fifth column was obviously beyond his intellectual horizon.
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Evidently Goebbels was completely oblivious to all of these deliberations
on how to put a quick end to Czechoslavakia. During these weeks he was concentrating entirely on his contribution to a policy aimed at forcing the Czech government to capitulate on the “émigré press” question.
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By the end of the year, the result of German-Czech negotiations was a “press truce” imposed by the Reich; it was to last into the first few months of 1938.
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However, Goebbels declined to enter into a formal “press agreement” with Prague, although such an agreement would be concluded with Austria in the summer of 1937,
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and deals with Yugoslavia
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and Poland
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followed the same pattern in January and April 1938, respectively. In this case he did not want to tie the German side down to any commitments.
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In parallel with its incipient policy of expansion, in autumn 1937 the regime entered a new, more radical phase of Jewish persecution. After setting the signals at the Party rally, Goebbels continued this course in November during the usual ceremonies around the anniversary of the 1923 Hitler putsch in Munich, where he and Julius Streicher opened the exhibition “Der ewige Jude” (The Eternal/Wandering Jew). The “Jewish question” was a “world problem,” declared Goebbels in his opening address, which he used among other things to revive memories of his campaign against Police Commissioner Weiss.
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In the evening, as was usual on these occasions, he was in the Bürgerbräu beer hall, where veteran Party comrades were treated to an hour-long speech by Hitler; the next day there was the customary march from the beer hall to the Königsplatz.

A few weeks later Hitler tasked him with drawing up a law forbidding Jews to visit theaters and cultural events.
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Goebbels got to work immediately but learned from Hitler that this law was not the real aim: “The Jews have to get out of Germany, out of the whole of Europe, in fact. It will take time, but it must and will happen.”
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Then Hitler decided to ban Jews from cultural events simply by police ordinance, since a law would create too much of a stir, which he must have thought inopportune at that juncture in domestic politics.
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Goebbels had great hopes of the policy of Octavian Goga, elected prime minister of Romania in December, who during his short term in office was to try to introduce an authoritarian, pro-German, anti-Semitic line.
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When this experiment failed—Goga resigned in February 1938—Goebbels naturally inferred “pressure from the Jews.”
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The propaganda minister took comfort from the thought:
“How good it is that we have the people behind us and we’re tough with the Jews. First you have to knock their back teeth out, then negotiate.”
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As head of the Propaganda Ministry, Goebbels developed a leadership style entirely in keeping with his egomaniacal personality structure. The activities of the ministry were supposed to reflect his genius. His sudden brainwaves and changes of course, his direct interventions in departmental work, and his shifting allegiance to different senior colleagues all contributed to an atmosphere of unpredictability and constant turbulence in the building. This suited Goebbels. In a rare moment of self-criticism, he said about his own attitude in the autumn of 1937: “The same old trouble: If I don’t do everything myself, I’m pleased when things go wrong.”
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Goebbels was not only a dedicated and tireless worker, he was also a difficult and unpleasant boss to work for: He loved making coarse jokes at the expense of his underlings and humiliating them in the office;
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hardly any of his senior colleagues escaped his biting and savage criticism, which often hit them completely out of the blue. His dissatisfaction with his colleagues reached its peak in March 1937; they should “spend a few months in the trenches, so as not to lose the smell of the masses in their nostrils.”
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For this purpose he dispatched a large number of senior staff to companies where they had to sign on as laborers, a move he made sure was reported in the press.
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It is no surprise that his ministry—aside from the actual administration, where he depended on bureaucratically trained personnel—was not exactly known for the continuity of its staffing. “Geniuses consume people,” as he wrote in his novel
Michael
.
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As the transition to an accelerated policy of rearmament and expansion in autumn 1937 kicked off an extensive reshuffle within the regime, Goebbels’s sector took on a leading role. When Reich economics minister Schacht declined to go on accepting responsibility for the risky foreign exchange policy resulting from the breakneck speed of German rearmament, the question of his successor became urgent.
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Goebbels recommended his state secretary, Walther Funk, for the job. He imagined that Funk “would still be available to him”
where “economic matters” were concerned; in other words, he expected to be able to exercise a certain amount of influence over the new minister of economics.
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Having been reluctant at first to let Schacht go, Hitler took up Goebbels’s recommendation in November, although the arrangements for the succession would not go into effect until the New Year.
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Nonetheless, Goebbels set about reorganizing the top ranks of his ministry immediately. Funk left the Propaganda Ministry, to be replaced by Goebbels’s personal adviser Karl Hanke. Otto Dietrich, Reich press chief of the NSDAP, became Goebbels’s second state secretary.
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Apart from the changes at the top of the organization, there were a few other new appointments: Werner Naumann, head of the Party’s Reich propaganda office in Breslau, became his new personal adviser; Ernst Leichtenstern took over the film department; and Franz Hofmann, as noted earlier, became responsible for fine art.
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There was a newly created Department for Special Cultural Affairs, whose duties included specifically the “de-jewifying” of German cultural life.
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In the propaganda department, Leopold Gutterer replaced the incumbent head of the department, Wilhelm Haegert, with whom Goebbels had become increasingly dissatisfied.
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Following a suggestion from Otto Dietrich, the press department, now directed by the latter, was divided into separate sections for home and abroad.
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All in all, the ministry now consisted of fourteen departments. In addition to the specializations already noted (propaganda, home and foreign press, film, fine art, literature, special cultural affairs), there were foreign propaganda (under Franz Hasenöhrl, as before), broadcasting (Hans Kriegler), theater (Rainer Schlösser), and music (Heinz Drewes). The relatively large number of departments suited Goebbels’s leadership style: The “flat hierarchy” of the ministry allowed him to intervene at any time in individual areas. He rejected any consolidation into larger departments.
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Apart from the various specializations, under its head of administration (the career bureaucrat Erich Greiner) the Propaganda Ministry possessed departments dealing with the budget and legal matters as well as a personnel department, run from 1937 onward by former Berlin police chief Erich Müller.
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Up until the outbreak of war, there was to be another important new arrangement in the Propaganda Ministry: Hermann Esser, one of the founding members of the NSDAP who had been dismissed as
Bavarian economics minister after his involvement in an intrigue, was appointed third state secretary, responsible for a new tourism department. Goebbels had been resisting Esser’s appointment to his Propaganda Ministry since 1935,
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but after much ado he was given his new position in January 1939.
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Goebbels had not been in a position to prevent this senior appointment in his organization.