B006OAL1QM EBOK (10 page)

The secret of Goebbels is always that he must be loved and admired, a feminine trait in his nature which was so strongly pronounced that he only loved those who openly and emphatically loved him. Hitler was astute enough to discover and exploit this weakness, whereas both Kaufmann and the Strassers grew weary of his intrigues and tantrums.

At the same time they were impressed by his undoubted talents, and he shared quite genuinely the radical slant to their particular brand of National Socialism. His experiences had made him antagonistic to the society that had not recognised him, and his earlier friendship with Richard Flisges had associated in his mind the excitement of distinction with the vanity of considering himself an idealist. Even when he became wholeheartedly Hitler's man, Goebbels was never to lose his basic radicalism. The Locarno Treaty of October 1925 he notes as a thing of shame for Germany, accepted “because the capitalists want it. They alone have influence nowadays.” Later he writes: “My spirit, that is the Socialist spirit, is on the march”, “We are Socialists and we do not want to have been Socialists in vain” and “We must be strong, so as to fight for Socialism.
Gut so!”
The memory of his dead friend was associated in his mind with this belief—"Richard Flisges,” he says, “taught me its deepest meaning through his own life and death.”

Meanwhile he gained great experience as a speaker and agitator. The diary is full of self-praise describing the thousands who flocked to hear him first of all in the towns of the Ruhr district, but soon in many other parts of Germany. Kaufmann and others state that the thousands should read hundreds, and hundreds, tens; Goebbels liked to add rhetorical noughts to his audience statistics. But granted this amiable weakness, there is no doubt that he learned his trade rapidly and well. His theatrical instinct and his desperate need to overcome his subconscious sense of inferiority combined to make him use every means in his power to sway the emotions of his audience. “Yesterday a group-evening. I told them about my growing fame and I had a most devout
(andächtig)
audience.” “After three hours, Bamberg. Straight on to the meeting. They receive me with considerable acclaim. I am requested to speak and they listen as devoutly as if they were in Church.” “And then I preached
(predigte)
for two hours. A breathlessly spellbound audience. And at the end they waved to me and cheered me to the echo. I am dead tired.” “Such an exciting meeting there is not a dry thread on me.” “That evening I spoke in Landshut. Everybody raving with enthusiasm. A few very young women seem to be quite crazy about me.” Even poor Benno was expected to go to meetings. “Last night I spoke at Dusseldorf and Benno sat quietly with his snout pointed, listening with what seemed considerable interest.”

These are the reactions of a performer, not of a man whose prime concern is with his political beliefs. One remembers Goebbels' desire to work in the theatre. As we shall see, he rehearsed like an actor, and was always more concerned with the effect he had on an audience than with the significance of what he was saying. That was merely the script through which he fulfilled his desire to make an overwhelming public appearance. He was a most effective exhibitionist. He wanted to be loved. Almost every page of the diary records his success; only rarely does he spit out because he found an audience which was callous, indifferent or reactionary in the face of his talent. Equally he is contemptuous of most of the other Nazi agitators. After hearing a particularly dull speech he exclaims: “That is not the way to make revolutions. The dash of champagne is missing.” Or again: “I refrained from speaking, but someone else talked drivel.”

If the dash of champagne meant the capacity to incite an audience, he was himself beginning to enjoy the spectacle of violence. There are constant references to free-for-all fights with the Communists, fights which the Nazis were learning how to promote. On 23rd November 1925 he records that at Chemnitz the Communists were “kicking up a row. At the end of the meeting a ferocious free-for-all. 1,000 beer-mugs broken. 150 wounded, 30 seriously. Two dead.” Exaggerated though these figures no doubt are, the police frequently stepped in and banned meetings, and Goebbels was himself more than once interrogated by the police who, he said, wanted to bring charges against him for causing a breach of the peace. Goebbels only cared if they stopped him from public speaking; the violence the meetings provoked was part of his business. “In so many German towns blood is flowing for our ideas,” he says. When a meeting in Munich was raided, his comment is: “So what! I don't care a tinker's cuss! After all, we are spoiling for a fight, aren't we? They will get to know us yet.”

It is not without significance that he so constantly refers to preaching. “I want,” he says, “to be an apostle and a preacher.” The apostate who had lost his faith still needed the flamboyance of a belief. He was for the most part incapable of true emotion; his nature did not extend beyond mere emotionalism. Goebbels' only true feeling was for himself, and he was rapidly developing egomania.

Without this understanding of Goebbels it is impossible to appreciate what happened when he finally met Hitler. At first he had followed the Strasser line in opposing the Munich school of Nazism and Hitler himself. For example, in September 1925 he writes: “In Munich some stinking trouble in the movement;” and in October: “Telegram from Munich. Am supposed to speak there. Kiss my arse! Letter to Strasser. Hitler not coming. He has been grousing about me. If he reproaches me on 25th October, I'm quitting. I can't bear this any longer. To give one's all, and nothing but reproaches from Hitler himself! … In Munich the bastards and intriguers are agitating. Bloody fools couldn't stand having a man with brains near them. Hence the struggle against Strasser and myself…” and so on, day after day, Goebbels always directly associating himself with the leadership in spite of his junior position in the district office.

He was automatically opposed to Hitler because Hitler was, or appeared to be, against him. However, the famous public attack by Goebbels on Hitler at Hanover never in fact took place. It is merely one of the many legends associated with his name.

During this crucial period in the development of the Nazi movement two conferences important in the history of the Party took place.
¹
The first, convened by Strasser, was held in Hanover on 25th January 1926; Hitler was not present but sent Gottfried Feder as his representative. The main point at issue was Nazi policy in the referendum concerning the expropriation or otherwise of the property belonging to the former German royal houses. Strasser's strongly Socialist principles demanded expropriation; Hitler, representing the opportunist and essentially non-Socialist opinion of the Munich school, opposed this. Hitler was by now associating with Hohenzollem princes and members of certain aristocratic families prepared to bring a certain social distinction as well as money to the movement. At the Hanover conference, however, Strasser won hands down and an open revolt was staged against Hitler's attempt to dominate the Party because this faction liked to stress the ‘socialist’ aspect of National Socialism. It was on this occasion that Goebbels has always been alleged to have said: “In these circumstances I demand that the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be expelled from the National Socialist Party.” Had he done so, he would have boasted about it in his diary. In fact, he never said the words; they were spoken by Bernhardt Rust, who was nevertheless subsequently to become Nazi Minister for Education. Kaufmann, who was among those present, remembers this quite clearly. The con- ference, which was attended by some twenty to thirty Party representatives, took place in Rust's flat, and Goebbels was one of the most vituperative of the speakers for the appropriation of the royal property. But his principal aim, as Kaufmann recollects, was to achieve a personal success in the meeting. He was, after all, only voicing the view of the majority present. The conference was a very excited one lasting for several hours and Kaufmann claims that Gregor Strasser, who was in control of the discussion, rejected Rust's proposal about Hitler as out of order and exaggerated. Feder said nothing except that the outcome of the meeting spelled trouble.

Goebbels recorded certain reactions to the conference, but not at any length. He claims to have orated about Russia and “our potential relations”. “I spoke for about an hour with everyone listening in breathless tension. Then they all agreed with me enthusiastically. We have won … Finish. Feder nowhere. Strasser shakes my hand.”

Goebbels was at this time writing articles and making speeches which implied that although Communism was misguided it was the potential ally of the brand of revolutionary National Socialism that he was promoting. “We will never get anywhere,” he wrote in the
Briefe,
“if we lean on the interests of the cultured and propertied classes. Everything will come to us if we appeal to the hunger and despair of the masses.” In an article for the
Völkischer Beobachter
he wrote: “The Soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevist or Marxist or international but because it is national—because it is Russian.” Von Pfeffer remembers thinking that Goebbels at one time had Marxist leanings.
²
If this kind of sentiment pleased the Strassers, it certainly did not please Hitler, who was feeling his way to power through other channels besides the angry proletariat.

The second conference to discuss these differences was convened by Hitler for 14th February at Bamberg in his own southern territory. Goebbels was told he must attend along with Gregor Strasser. This arrangement does not seem to have been very welcome; Otto Strasser believes he was frightened of going.
“Ich muss danach mit nach Bamberg”
(“I suppose I'll have to go along to Bamberg”) is how Goebbels put it in his diary. But he adds: “In Bamberg we must lure Hitler on to our terrain.” What he disliked really was the prospect of having to speak at a conference where his views would be necessarily unpopular.

By this time, of course, Goebbels had met Hitler on a number of occasions, and heard him speak. It was Kaufmann who had first introduced him in the autumn of 1925 after a speech which Hitler had made in Elberfeld at the Evangelisches Vereinhaus. The local Party representatives were gathered together afterwards in a small committee room to meet Hitler, and it was then that Kaufmann presented him as Gregor Strasser's secretary who was doing so well with his editorial work on the new Party journal, the
Briefe
. Kaufmann remembers the formality of the introduction and the handshake that followed; Goebbels appeared reserved and distant.

In the diary, however, Goebbels' first account of his reactions to Hitler occurs on the occasion of a subsequent meeting at Hanover. He was evidently greatly impressed. He refers to Hitler's “big blue eyes! Like stars!” He shook Goebbels' hand “like an old friend”. “I am
very happy
to see him,” writes Goebbels. This was 2nd November 1925, when he belonged, strictly speaking, to the Party opposition. When he heard Hitler speak he was carried away. “That man's got
everything to be a king
. A popular leader born and bred
(geborener Volkstribun)
. The
coming dictator.”
Goebbels claims they talked at length (“long disputations”) until he had to catch his train to Elberfeld in the early hours of the morning. Three weeks later, on 23rd November they met again, when Hitler spoke at another meeting. “My joy is great,” says Goebbels. “He
greets me like an old friend. He speaks to us
all the evening. I
can't hear enough of it
. He
gives me his picture
with a greeting to the Rhineland inscribed
‘Heil Hitler!

Such was the background to Bamberg—Goebbels identified with the opposition, yet fascinated by Hitler's magnetic personality. According to the diary Goebbels went to this second conference in a proselytising spirit: “No one seems to have any faith left in Munich. Elberfeld is to be the Mecca of German Socialism.” It was then that he added his declaration: “I want to be an apostle and a preacher.”

Legends, once they are well propagated, have an adhesive quality in history. Goebbels was subsequently to encourage the story that Bam- berg was the great occasion of his public abandonment of Strasser and adherence to Hitler, and this is the account that has so far appeared in all the standard histories of the Nazi movement. But once more the legend is nowhere near the truth.

Goebbels simply records in this private and unedited diary his disgust at Hitler's reactionary views on every major point of policy—restitution to the German princes, the sacredness of private property, the destruction of Bolshevism, Italy and Britain as Germany's allies, the old twenty-five-point programme still the best, and so on. “I am flabbergasted,” he writes. “What a Hitler! A reactionary! Astonishingly clumsy and unsure of himself…. Brief answer by Strasser.
Ach Gott,
can we cope with these people down here? A mere half-hour's discussion after Hitler's four-hour speech and summing-up. I cannot get a word out. I am quite flabbergasted. We drove to the station. Strasser is almost demented with rage … I feel like crying…. That was one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I can no longer believe in Hitler! This is the most terrific thing. My faith is shattered and I feel shattered.” But Goebbels' opportunism soon reasserted itself before the spectacle of Hitler's social and political success. He contented himself with shouting a slogan or two just to please Kaufmann and the Strassers.

Kaufmann confirms that Goebbels said nothing at Bamberg and that Strasser was angry because his assistant, who was by now regarded as one of their chief spokesmen, had let him down by remaining silent. In Kaufmann's view Goebbels did not speak because he was shrewdly aware that it would not be in his own best interests to do so. What impressed him about Munich was the money that Hitler seemed able to command compared with the poverty of the movement in Elberfeld. Hitler always had cars at his disposal, and Goebbels loved the attention which Hitler seemed ready to show him. And Hitler cunningly arranged for Goebbels to arrive in advance on 15th February to speak at a separate public meeting where he records that he received “considerable acclaim”. The extent, therefore, to which Goebbels let the Strassers down at Bamberg was that he did not speak up against Hitler's policy. Nevertheless, within two days Gregor Strasser had calmed down and both he and Otto received Goebbels in Berlin. Otto Strasser admits now that he has in the past exaggerated the degree of the rupture between his brother and Goebbels following Bamberg. He was originally responsible for the slogan “the treason of Bamberg” in connection with Goebbels and in his book
Hitler and I
claims that Goebbels spoke to the effect that Hitler's argument had convinced him and that Strasser was in the wrong. Goebbels himself was subsequently very content to let this apparent act of faith in Hitler stand to his credit. But in fact, he remained in constant touch with both the Strassers and Kaufmann during the ensuing days and weeks, and their intention was to have a further, more private discussion with Hitler to iron things out. “Telegram from Strasser. Must not rush things…. The suggestion being that Kaufmann, Strasser and I are to go to Hitler to have it out with him more thoroughly.” He still refers to the Munich group as political children,
politische Kinder
. But, he says: “We have the feel of history. History's children … that's us!”