B006OAL1QM EBOK (8 page)

“Will the man who has just called me a capitalist exploiter come up on this platform and empty his purse. I'll do the same, just to show which of us has the most money.”

He poured his few coins out on the table. He won over his audience by this instinctive gesture; it was a political agitator's baptism of fire. He had taken his first, infant's step.

As his interest in politics grew during the winter of 1923-24, he attended more meetings with Prang, and on one occasion went with his friend to a congress at Weimar where the nationalistic speeches he heard so stirred his blood that he could not stop talking politics when the meetings were over and there was a chance to wine and dine at Prang's expense with a beautiful girl—the daughter of a rich landowner visiting the conference. She was far more interested in the social possibilities of the evening than in Goebbels' political enthusiasm. Prang eventually got rid of him and pushed politics aside in order to attend more fully to the opportunities the girl offered.

Among the odd jobs Goebbels was always ready to do there occurred one at this time that brought him directly into politics. He became secretary at one hundred marks a month to Franz von Wiegershaus, Reichstag Deputy of the Völkische Freiheitspartei, one of several small right-wing groups that shared substantially similar nationalistic views to those being so loudly advocated by the Nazis in Munich. Wiegershaus lived in Elberfeld and edited there the paper belonging to his minority, the
Völkische Freiheit (People's Freedom)
. Goebbels' duties included helping to edit this journal, and soon he found that he was also expected to speak at public meetings. It was at these local meetings of the Freiheitspartei that he came into close contact with members of the Nazi movement, to which he seemed at first to have been strongly opposed. Towards the end of the year, however, he approached Karl Kaufmann, who was at that time Gauleiter of the Nazi Party for the Rhine-Ruhr District, and offered him his services. Kaufmann discussed the matter with Gregor Strasser, who was the leading figure in the movement in the north of Germany and who was considering at the turn of the year producing a small weekly journal to be what the Strassers rather bombastically called the Party's
geistiges Führungsorgan
(organ of spiritual leadership). Gregor was to be the publisher and Otto the editor, and they needed an editorial assistant. Hearing of Goebbels through Kaufmann, they wondered if he might be suitable for the position at a salary of two hundred marks a month, double what he was getting from Wiegershaus.

Otto Strasser arranged with Kaufmann to interview Goebbels. Kaufmann characterised the young man as
“sehr gescheit aber sehr wendig”
(“very intelligent but very unreliable”).

Both Kaufmann and Otto Strasser confirm this account of Goebbels' introduction to the Nazi movement. Otto Strasser said how surprised he was by Goebbels' personal appearance at the first meeting. He felt that any political opponent could have pushed him over with one hand. He wore a grey suit, threadbare but tidy, and, in spite of it being late in the autumn, no overcoat. Although the chance of work with so important a man as Strasser must have meant a great deal to Goebbels, he showed no subservience. He seemed, in fact, almost haughty as he looked at Strasser, who remembers to this day the effect of his large and very penetrating brown eyes. He spoke very slowly and very pointedly in a voice of great beauty. He said that he thought the Völkische Freiheitspartei had no future.

“The leaders know nothing about the people,” Strasser remembers him saying. “They are afraid of socialism, but I am convinced that only a kind of socialism and nationalism can save Germany. I don't mind admitting that it was your brother Gregor who helped me to understand these ideas. He is a genuine socialist, and it is his synthesis of socialist ideas and nationalist emotions that must be observed without any equivocation by us National Socialists.”

Strasser noted the way he said ‘us' as if he were already one of the Party's staff. Goebbels continued talking—"We are going to win the German working man for National Socialism. We are going to destroy Marxism!”

His eyes shone as he spoke. Then he raised his beautiful hands in a passionate gesture as he concluded his eloquent attempt to convince Strasser he was the man for the job. “As for the bourgeois refuse,” he said, “we shall sweep that away into the dustbin!”

Strasser was impressed. More particularly he noted the young man's voice, which he handled as a violinist handles his instrument.

They decided to engage him on secretarial work for the Northern Party organisation and as editorial assistant for the future journal. Goebbels in fact stepped into the place vacated by another young man, Heinrich Himmler, whom the Strassers had dismissed for inefficiency. Himmler went back to his original occupation of poultry-keeping. His time was yet to come.

*
The mark in 1917 was worth about one shilling or twenty-five cents according to the values of the period. By 1920, however, it was beginning to decline prior to the catastrophic inflation of the years 1921–23.

*
A gate to a thousand deserts mute and cold—
Whoever lost what Thou hast lost can nowhere rest.
Fly away, bird, and croak your song,
your desert song, Hide, oh fool, thy bleeding heart in ice and mockery.
The crows are croaking as they wildly wing their way to the town.
Soon it will snow. Woe to him who has no home!

CHAPTER TWO

“History's Children”

D
URING
the next two years Goebbels was to establish himself with the National Socialist Party. By the time he entered the employment of the Strassers in 1925, the National Socialists were already reorganised after the unsuccessful putsch of 1923 and had begun the task of spreading their influence over Germany. Their two main centres were Berlin in the north, where Gregor Strasser (a pharmacist who was comfortably off and had great political aspirations) was in the ascendant, and Munich in the south, where Adolf Hitler had taken charge once more. Both men were ambitious for power, but the personal struggle between them was not yet joined.

Germany herself was in a state of unrest following the period of inflation and of passive resistance against the French and the Belgians. Independently of the rest of the Allies, France and Belgium had occupied the Ruhr in January 1923 and systematically begun to confiscate its coal. The Government of Stresemann had stabilised the currency at the expense of the working and middle classes, and in many parts of Germany there was open strife between the combined forces of the Army and Police and the workers, who were in a state of revolt in the main German cities. Blood flowed in the streets, and there were many killed in these savage riots. The State Governments of Saxony and Thuringia, which contained strong Socialist and Communist elements, were suppressed by force at the instigation of the Reich Government.

It was in this atmosphere of social and political tensions that the National Socialist Party began to flourish. The Party had originated as the Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei—the German Workers' Party—when Hitler discovered it in Munich in 1919 and became its seventh member.

Its funds at the time were 7.50 marks. It was violently revolutionary and anti-Semitic. In April 1920 Hitler left the Army to give the whole of his time to politics. He and Feder drew up for the Party a twenty-five point programme which even so early as this demanded, among many reforms, the self-determination of Germany, the abolition of the Treaty of Versailles, the exclusion of Jews from German citizenship, the abolition of unemployment, a widened application of the death penalty to those whom the Party regarded as anti-social, the formation of a National Army and the tight control of the press in the national interest.

Hitler himself, before he had enlisted in 1914, had spent many years destitute in Vienna. He was born in 1889, and was therefore eight years older than Goebbels. His native town was Braunau, on the Austro-German border. His father, who was illegitimate, was the son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, but his name had been legalised to that of his father, Hitler, some twelve years before Adolf, his third child by his third wife, a cousin, had been born. He was a Customs officer, a difficult man given to marrying only when children had already been born or conceived by the women with whom he was associated. But like Goebbels' father, who belonged to the same class as Hitler's, he was ambitious for his son's education. Adolf was sent to a secondary school where he did reasonably well as a scholar. But at the age of eleven he was already determined to be an artist, a career to which his father (a man of sixty) was stubbornly opposed. Hitler met this opposition by refusing to work at school, and his education suffered accordingly. By the time he left school his father had died, and his indulgent mother let him study art in Munich. He failed in his ambition to enter the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. When Goebbels met Hitler it was a case of the man who had failed as a writer meeting the man who had failed as a painter; a great deal of this early frustration stayed alive in them both to exacerbate their political temperaments. But, like Goebbels, Hitler when young learnt to love music, particularly the operas of Wagner, and to identify himself with romantic and nationalistic imagery. When his mother died in 1908 he was left, while still short of twenty, without any means of support. He went to Vienna where he was only too soon to adopt the life of a vagrant, sleeping in the open or lodging in a doss- house, his only friend a tramp called Hanisch with whom he eventually had a legal dispute over the money they earned together. Hitler and Hanisch formed a labouring team to do odd jobs. At times they sold the postcards which Hitler painted. For four years Hitler earned what money he could drawing architectural pictures, posters and advertisements. His passion was politics. He preferred talk to manual work, and he read a great deal on every subject from history to the occult. He was already violently anti-Semitic, anti-radical and anti-democratic, and even in the doss-house he was resentful to the point of hysteria of any opposition to his views. He loathed Vienna, and eventually moved on to Munich, where he led the same kind of lonely, vituperative, self-destructive life that had made him socially impossible in Vienna. On 1st August 1914 he stood in the great crowd that had assembled in the Odeonsplatz to greet the declaration of war. Heinrich Hoffmann, who was later to become Hitler's personal photographer, happened to be present and photographed the scene. Years later they examined the print and eventually found the Führer's ardent and excited face peering upwards in anticipation of the new life before him in the Army.

This was the man to whom Goebbels was to dedicate his life. Meanwhile, during 1925-26, he was to come to Hitler's notice and win his favour. They were to discover each other.

In 1920 Hitler had changed the name of his Party to the National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (N.S.D.A.P.). He designed the swastika banner, incorporating this ancient symbol of the sun which was used by early civilisations in many parts of the world. In 1921 he became Chairman of the Party and in the same year he formed the semi-military Sturm-Abteilungen (the S.A., or Storm Troopers) under the guise of a sports and athletic association. One of those associated with this movement was Rudolf Hess. By 1923 Bavaria had become a hotbed of nationalistic feeling and militarism, and one of the Party men entrusted with the work of organising this nationalist movement was a former officer of the Imperial German Army, Captain Rohm. At the same time Flight-Captain Hermann Göring was put in charge of the Storm Troopers.

Bavaria itself was politically in a state of revolt against the Reich Government in Berlin, and in the famous putsch of November 1923 Hitler and the National Socialists, in association with General Luden-dorff, made their first abortive bid for power. The putsch failed, and in February 1924 Hitler was formally sentenced to imprisonment in Landsberg fortress, where he had been detained since his arrest in November and was living at ease with Rudolf Hess composing his political testament
Mein Kampf
. He was to be released the following December. The National Socialist movement may have seemed crushed, but all the elements which were to come together to revive it in 1925 after Hitler's release continued to ferment. Among those were Gregor and Otto Strasser; Gregor, who had joined the Party in 1921 and had taken part in the putsch, was in 1924 a Deputy in the Bavarian Diet and the founder of the
Berliner Arheiterzeitung
of which Otto was the editor. The paper became the mouthpiece of the Strassers' own version of National Socialism.

One of the main targets of National Socialist propaganda was Stresemann who, as the author of Germany's more conciliatory foreign policy, was concerned to secure the evacuation of the Ruhr and the Rhineland, to settle the problem of reparations and to build up Germany's economy through arranging foreign credits. To the National Socialists Stresemann's methods of achieving his aims simply represented appeasement of the Allies. When the Dawes Plan for reparations came into operation in 1924, foreign credit poured into Germany, and the Ruhr was gradually evacuated during 1924-25. (The Rhineland was not to be finally rid of Allied soldiers until 1930, leaving Germany free to rearm unmolested.) In 1925 the Locarno Treaty was signed guaranteeing Germany's frontiers with France and Belgium and obliging her to keep a specified area of the Rhineland demilitarised. Also in 1925 Hindenburg was appointed President at the advanced age of seventy-seven. He was to live long enough to make Hitler Chancellor.

In 1926 two other events roused the National Socialists. The first was the vexed question of the expropriation of the estates of former German reigning families, and the second the country's admission to the League of Nations. The first problem involved compensation, the princes on the one hand demanding exorbitant sums while the Socialists and Communists were calling for expropriation without any com- pensation at all. This question was to divide Strasser, Goebbels and Hitler. As for the League of Nations, Goebbels was within only seven years to pay a brief visit to Geneva as Hitler's personal representative at the League; on his return Germany withdrew from the League after a matter of days.

Goebbels was soon employed not merely as Gregor Strasser's secretary but also as a Party speaker and representative in Rhineland-Westphalia. He continued to be based at Elberfeld in the Rhineland-Nord
Gau,
or district, of the Party. His salary was 200 marks a month, and he worked in association with Karl Kaufinann, who was Gauleiter or Party Leader for the Rhineland-Westphalia district, and was in charge of the office in Elberfeld. By a stroke of good fortune, one of the rare links in the chain of Goebbels' diaries survives from this period and is preserved in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. This diary, which is in manuscript and covers over two hundred pages in a series of notebooks, belongs to the period 3rd August 1925 to 16th October 1926. It is of the greatest importance in the history of Goebbels' career, because it was during this period that he came into direct contact with Hitler for the first time and finally decided to throw in his lot with him rather than remain with the Strassers. Only ten days after the last surviving page of the diary ends, on 26th October 1926, Hitler appointed him Gauleiter for the Party in Berlin.

The diary is written in the same strained, highfalutin style as the novel
Michael,
even though Goebbels was twenty-eight years old when he wrote the greater part of it. It is the only strictly private document of any length and importance written by Goebbels that is known to survive, a record of his life meant only for his own eyes. It is composed in the form of notes, and it contains a strange and revealing mixture of slang, obscenity and childish vituperation against any people or events he dislikes. Also there is the same literary posing that distinguishes the style of
Michael,
even though in this case he is writing only for himself. Mixed with occasional quotation—which ranges from ‘Laugh, clown, laugh’ to lines from Goethe's
Faust
—are gauche attempts in poetic prose to describe his private reactions, more especially to Hitler and to Else, the girl with whom he was in love.

For his relations with Else haunted him. Duisburg, where her family lived, Rheydt, where she worked, and Elberfeld were only thirty miles apart, but the demands of his new political work constantly took Goebbels round the whole of the Rhineland-Westphalia district to which he was attached. He lived in rooms which Else describes as commonplace, but as often as he could he went back to Rheydt to his parents' home, where Else was accepted as if she were already one of the family.

But Goebbels' temperament demanded difficulties. His vanity, his irregular mode of life, his prolonged adolescence and lack of emotional self-discipline, made him in many respects an impossible lover. As the result of his growing success as an agitator and his theatrical love of experiencing power over an audience, he was frequently out of hand, saying any vainglorious thing that came into his head. Still deeply disappointed at his lack of immediate success as a writer (he was convinced of his outstanding talent, even genius, and ceaselessly pointed this out to Else), he turned the venom of his frustration into public speaking. His anti-Semitism—which Else agrees was due initially to his rejection by the Jewish press, and in particular by the Ullsteins—became savagely over-developed, and his destructive radicalism fitted in with the Strasser line in National Socialism, which diverged from that of Hitler precisely in this matter.

With Else he blew hot and cold throughout the whole of this eighteen-month period, which was to be the last phase of their stormy love. In August he says: “She's got a crush on me like a flapper. She's so happy about it, I wouldn't grudge it her, and I love her with all my heart.” In September she is “dear and full of goodness … grey, grey leavetaking … I have a great need for Else, thou sweet, sweet woman … Else writes in sweet blood”; in October “Else is coming. Joy on joy! Life is so beautiful! Laugh, clown, laugh … She is giving me a beautiful pullover. A sweet night; she is so dear and sweet and good to me. And sometimes I have to hurt her so much.” However, there is also the warning note: “We've spent some hours full of happiness and pain…. Why, oh why must I hurt Else so? … How gruesomely beautiful life is.” In November he writes, “With Else both bliss and trouble,” while in December, following an occasion when she failed to meet him and offered no explanation, she sent him “a desperate farewell letter … How it hurts me to think that she is now so terribly lonesome”, he goes on, and underlines the words. So he wrote and suggested a meeting in Düsseldorf, and adds in the diary, again underlining the words to satisfy his need to talk to himself on paper, “If she doesn't turn up it's all over! Then we'll just have the bust-up which, one day, must come anyway.”

They met in Düsseldorf, determined, according to Goebbels, to break it all off. But, still according to Goebbels, “she sobs and pleads. Hours full of torment. Until once again we found one another. It's the old story. But what
am
I to do about it? I must have a person to love. She is happy at times. And me? I don't want to talk about me. Maybe I can't have it otherwise. Maybe there's a curse on all my dealings with women. It's so tormenting a thought. It could make one despair.”