Goebbels: A Biography (16 page)

At the end of the summer break, Goebbels began to step up the propaganda effort of the Gau. The opening note was struck by
Der Angriff
on September 24, 1928, with a special issue attacking the Dawes Plan. Reportedly, sixty thousand copies were sold.
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At the end of September the NSDAP held its “Third Brandenburg Day” in Teltow, near Berlin. After rapturous events in the capital—Goebbels took to the podium no fewer than five times—participants gathered on the Sunday to parade near the small Brandenburg town. Four thousand SA men from all over the Reich were said to have assembled. In the afternoon they convened to march into the capital, where in the Sportpalast (Palace of Sport) that evening they took part in the largest National Socialist meeting so far in Berlin, with over ten thousand participants. “Blood is the best adhesive,” cried Goebbels to his listeners, referring to the many violent clashes that had occurred during the march and in the area around the Sportpalast.
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Goebbels was delighted when, a few days later, Hitler sent him a letter congratulating him on his success: “Berlin—that is your work.”
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His pleasure was heightened when Hitler appeared unexpectedly in Berlin a few days later, assuring Goebbels of his support in the dispute with Otto Strasser and the SA.
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On November 4 the SA marched unhindered through Neukölln, something
Der Angriff
presented as a great triumph.
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On November 16 Hitler spoke in Berlin, for the first time at a public meeting since the lifting of the speaking ban in Prussia: Once again the Sportpalast was the chosen venue. Goebbels later declared this to be “the greatest success of my work so far.”
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He celebrated the leader’s appearance under the headline “When Hitler Speaks”: “Where hard work and knowledge and education fail to find the solution, God proclaims it through those he has chosen to speak on his behalf.”
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Even if, with such fulsome praise,
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Goebbels may have contributed to the “Führer cult” in the NSDAP so heavily promoted by Munich, it would be wrong to think that Goebbels’s propaganda efforts in the capital were exclusively concentrated on the person of the Party leader. He focused on quite different topics, which is evident in the Gauleiter’s manifold publicity activities: political questions of the day; anti-Semitic agitation, not least against Deputy Police Commissioner Weiss; the constant reassertion of the “socialist” character of the NSDAP; but first and foremost his own “struggle for Berlin.”
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On the morning after Hitler’s appearance, the police found the body of the SA man Hans-Georg Kütemeyer in the Landwehrkanal.
The police assumed that Kütemeyer had committed suicide.
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The National Socialists, however, maintained that he was the victim of communist terror tactics. Goebbels accused the police and the “Jew press” of covering up a murder and tried to turn Kütemeyer into a National Socialist martyr.
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The Party placed a bounty on the head of the “murderer,” but police headquarters banned the display of posters to this effect.
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The affair escalated when Deputy Commissioner Weiss prohibited a funeral procession, and a confrontation ensued outside the cemetery—Goebbels had given the funeral oration—between thousands of National Socialists and a large contingent of police.
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Relations with Stennes and his SA were to an extent straightened out in autumn 1928.
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But Goebbels resisted being nominally responsible for the paramilitaries, while the leadership under Franz Pfeffer jealously warded off any interference by Gauleiters in SA business. Goebbels thought this arrangement was fundamentally wrongheaded: “How can I take responsibility for things run by other authorities?” Worse still, “the boss takes the easy way out by staying aloof and leaving it all to the people in charge. And I’m always left holding the bag.”
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Early in December he came to an understanding with Pfeffer, whom he regarded with a certain amount of skepticism,
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that “the SA leader shall be deployed with the Gauleiter’s agreement.”
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At the leadership conference of the NSDAP, which took place in Weimar in January 1929, this position of Goebbels’s was largely accepted.
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Nonetheless, he found himself in something of a jam, as he confessed in January after a talk with the young SA leader Horst Wessel, who was pressing for more “activism”: “If we become more active in Berlin, our people will go around smashing the place up. And then Isidor will enjoy banning us.”
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His attitude to Stennes remained skeptical. In the final analysis, he considered the former police captain a “bourgeois” who could no doubt organize a putsch but lacked the courage and ruthlessness to start a revolution.
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Although the NSDAP was still no more than a splinter party with modest results at the polls, there was one sense in which it had succeeded: It was now the only radical right-wing organization of any note surviving in Berlin, and its structures were gradually firming up, even if the position of the SA within the Party as a whole was still problematic.
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The “Gau days” instituted by Goebbels played
an important part in strengthening the organization: Roughly once a month, the Gauleiter called all the leading Party officeholders together. He observed in December that a “leadership cadre” was now gradually taking shape in Berlin, not least thanks to the good work done by the National Socialist functionary Reinhold Muchow, who had been appointed head of the administrative department in July 1928.
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Following the model of the German Communist Party (KPD), Muchow introduced a system of street cells led by civilian Party comrades; in this way SA members were released from the organizational work of the Party and freed up for other tasks. By the beginning of 1930 the Berlin NSDAP could count on over nine hundred street cells coordinated by forty sections. The street cells carried out the detailed work of campaigning above all: For example, they distributed “block newspapers” produced independently by the sections themselves. In this system, there were twelve hundred functionaries working for the Party.
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In 1929, to form a second component in the organization of the Gau—again following the KPD model—Muchow set about building up a cell structure within industry. From these—initially slow—beginnings, the system of National Socialist industry-based cells developed into the NSDAP’s employee organization.
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The price to be paid for this steadily increasing political success was—something Goebbels himself desired—his gradual isolation from his Party cronies, tending eventually to solitude. Whereas early in his time in Berlin he had struck up friendships with various Party comrades, now he was far more concerned to keep his distance. By October 1928, the only two people he considered friends were Hans Herbert Schweitzer and his driver, Albert Tonak. Five days later he even wrote that he had “no friends.” “Everybody makes claims on my person,” he complained a few weeks later, “but I have no claim on anyone else. It’s lonely at the top!” More than a year later, he felt “how solitary I have become. But perhaps that’s a good thing.”
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In August 1931 he explained to a colleague “why I have no close friends in the Gau. I’ve been disappointed often enough. Business and friendship don’t mix.”
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The many affairs that Goebbels engaged in from spring 1928 on, as the Berlin Party was being re-founded and the Party organization built up, failed to overcome his loneliness. All these affairs were in any case eclipsed by the resumption of the relationship between him and the still-idolized Anka.

His ex-girlfriend made a surprise visit in March to tell him how unhappy she was. Her husband—his old rival Mumme—had cheated on her. She sat at home with her little four-year-old son, “unloved and joyless.” In Goebbels the old emotions were immediately rekindled: “You have one great love in your lifetime. Everything else is deception or a business deal: Mine was called Anka.”
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A few weeks later they met up in Thuringia,
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and a few days after that she was back in Berlin: “Anka loves me, I love her, neither of us says anything about it, but we know it all the same.”
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In April he met Anka in Weimar. In the evening, as they were sitting together in a wine bar, a former lover of hers, an artist, appeared. Goebbels was forced to listen to the stories told by this “horror”: “He’s a pacifist and a militarist, anti-Semite and Jew vassal, democrat and aristocrat, enthuses about the East and praises classicism. A dreadful conglomeration. And full of jealousy, too.” On top of everything else, Anka took his side against Goebbels: “I give in. I’m too good to be just the tail end of a failed marriage, even if she is called Anka. Farewell, Anka! You will be ruined by sin or bogged down in mundane life. It’s a shame about you. But evidently it can’t be helped.” When Anka turned up in Berlin a few days later, he spurned her. But two weeks later they met again in Weimar and were reconciled.
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The reunion with Anka cast a shadow over his relationship with Tamara,
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who revealed to him a few weeks after his passion for Anka had been reignited that she was now “with the Jew Arnold Zweig.”
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This relationship was now over as far as he was concerned, for “since I’ve seen Anka again, the beauty of all other women fades before my eyes.”
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Goebbels now constantly fell in love, and with a wide variety of women, often sustaining two or three affairs at a time. The old love for Anka flared up again and again, but he could not bring himself to make her leave her husband. It seems as if he was keeping the affair with Anka up in the air for as long as he could in order to wreak revenge
for her earlier unfaithfulness. And yet he did not want to commit himself to other lovers, because all his affairs were overshadowed by Anka. His behavior naturally provoked jealousy and led to many a tearful evening. But he was neither able nor willing to empathize with the injured women. For him there was only one thing that mattered:
his
state of mind. He convinced himself that there was an inherent tragedy hovering over all of his relationships and that it was all Anka’s fault. This tragedy, which he invoked constantly, was part of his self-dramatizing narrative: With a glittering career ahead of him, he had to make this sacrifice—and the women had to share his fate.

In his almost total self-absorption he thought women he had met only briefly were in love with him. He was completely sure of their feelings, although not a word was exchanged, not a gesture reciprocated. So, for example, on an outing of Berlin Party employees he sat “next to a lovely girl, and without saying as much, we love each other. Neither of us shows it, but it is so.”
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Less than a week later, he experienced a very special erotic attraction during a theater visit: “During the last act I sit next to a wonderful woman, and we have a little celebration of love, without a word, just two glances, a couple of indrawn breaths.”
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In August he fell instantly in love with the wife of the right-wing writer Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz but after seeing her a few times came to the conclusion: “Maybe not.”
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On a short visit to Innsbruck, he met Pille Kölsch with his young wife and immediately confessed that “this young woman, this little devil,” had him under her spell.
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In September he met the young Party supporter Hannah Schneider, “a true German girl,” with whom he immediately fell in love.
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But this affair had hardly begun when he received a cry for help from Anka: She had now decided to ask for a divorce.
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He met her again at the beginning of October. But by then, for the sake of her son, she had already dropped the idea of divorce. Trouble seemed to be looming: “Now she wants to leave Weimar for a few months and come to Berlin. Things could get quite lively.”
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In October Goebbels broke up with Hannah: The relationship was becoming too complicated for his liking.
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“A man with a mission can’t afford unhappy love affairs,” he wrote.
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Goebbels clearly felt that beautiful women were positively pursuing him: At one of his events in Wilmersdorf, the audience contained “Fräulein Müller from Borkum”;
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his ex-girlfriend Tamara, with whom he spent a few
moments after the meeting; and a new “lovely girlfriend” who visited him next evening at home.
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This was Johanna Polzin, and it would not be the last evening they spent together.
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And an eighteen-year-old girl, Jutta Lehmann, came into his life one day in December.
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“She wants to be my loyal comrade. Temptation to escape from the burden of loneliness around me. […] Love and duty in conflict. But I love her all the more because I know I must lose her, just as I’ve lost all other women, because I must serve my cause. Farewell! Adio! Jutta!”
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However, in the next few weeks there was no further mention of farewells, and he decided he was “very happy to have her.”
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In February he found that “in the last few days I have not been able to relate properly to Jutta. I don’t know whether this is due to my general agitation, or whether I’ve tired of [the affair] again because of my insatiable need for change.”
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But he did not want to make a real break with her.
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Over the winter of 1928–29 he saw Anka when he was passing through Weimar, and from time to time she came to Berlin.
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He felt as if “she were a good friend to me. With her it feels like being with a mother.”
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She attended a performance of Goebbels’s play
Blood Seed
. But afterward they clashed badly over “the Jewish question”: “Her thinking is still too bourgeois.” Late at night Anka described her difficult private situation, which drew sympathy from him: “What a burden of sorrow and suffering Anka has had to bear!” “Is this fate revenging itself on her for what she did to me?”
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After many more meetings
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he believed that she was once again “allowing herself to be formed by me. She is becoming a part of me.”
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At Easter they took a trip to the Harz Mountains. The party included the Schweitzers, Fräulein Bettge—a Party employee devoted to him—and Anka’s husband:
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“She’s wearing a green leather coat and looking wonderful. The Stalherm lady. How did she end up with this man?” Georg Mumme’s behavior was odd: “She cold-shoulders him completely, and he puts up with it. […] He doesn’t understand Anka at all. And she doesn’t love him anymore, either. The man expresses his admiration and respect for me in Anka’s presence. Let anyone work that out if they can.” They went to see the Kyffhäuser monument, Harzburg, Goslar, and Wernigerode. “This poor, marvelous woman in the hands of that pseudo-educated philistine. Makes you want to wade in.” So it was that “retribution came late, but thereby took even crueler revenge. But it’s right that it should be so. We were
not meant to be together. I had to take the path of action. It was for her to help me as much as she could.”

During the car journey they sat “close to each other like lovers. Under cover of the car rug Anka passed a ring to me that her mother gave her. Thank you: so kind! I’ll keep it like a talisman.” After they had parted company in Aschersleben, his mood was sad: “Why must I forgo happiness?” But he knew the answer of old: “Probably so that all Germans can be happy again one day. A few must sow for many to reap. It’s hard, but that’s how it has to be.”

Between meetings with Anka he sought consolation, and the pattern was always the same. There was, for example, an Anneliese Haegert who loved him “beyond measure”: “But I can’t decide. Anka always intervenes.”
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One evening in April he was visited by the “lovely Xenia”: Her full name was Xenia von Engelhardt, and she told him how she had to suffer at the hands of “her faithless young man.” Goebbels offered consolation in a “night vibrant with happiness.”
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He declared on May 20 that he loved her “beyond measure.” She was “like Anka in many ways.” He was with Anka from late May to early June in Weimar.
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As Mumme spent a good deal of time away, the two were left completely undisturbed: “We were both happy beyond measure. Anka looked after me like a mother.”
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But he was not comfortable with the role of “man friend” and occasional lover, either. At the end of July in Weimar he made a decision: “Farewell, you two. I’ve got to leave you in all your misery and futility. I haven’t got the time to give myself completely to women. Greater tasks await me.”
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He was to visit Anka in Weimar again in December and in January 1930, but after that he thought he had gotten over her.
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As Xenia had found out in July about his visit to Weimar, their relationship entered a serious crisis.
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In the meantime, during a vacation in Mecklenburg, he had met Erika Chelius, “daughter of a head forester from Angermünde”: “not beautiful, but charming and pleasant” and, most important of all,
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“so like Anka Stalherm. When she was young and not weighed down by marriage and bourgeois life.”
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In August Erika accompanied him to the Nuremberg Party rally, where Xenia unexpectedly turned up too.
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During an excursion he kissed Erika goodbye.
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Back in Berlin, he found his mind constantly dwelling on his new conquest, although he was certain that “I won’t
be any more committed to her than to all the others.” Gradually he began to feel “pangs of conscience about all these tortuous relationships. […] It’s enough to make you despair. Women! Women are to blame for nearly everything.”
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In the following weeks he saw Erika several times in Berlin, or visited her at her parents’ place in Grumsin in Mecklenburg, where he spent New Year’s.
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He told Xenia in mid-August that he wanted to end their relationship, and on the same evening he met Julia, with whom he likewise made a final break: “Enough! Enough! […] Otherwise I’ll end up [wrung out] like a washcloth.”
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But Xenia did not completely disappear from the scene: She came to his place often during the autumn and winter of 1929.
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Of one particular evening, for example, when he had come home exhausted, he wrote: “Get Xenia to come over, so I’m not quite so alone. […] I’ve got to have someone to whom I can pour my heart out. Xenia is a good listener.”
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In February he met Charlotte Streve.
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“She loves me to distraction,” he noted. “But more for what I want than for what I am.”
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In the next few weeks he spent plenty of time with Xenia, too, of whom he wrote almost apologetically in his diary that she was “a welcome counterweight […] to all this mass activity.”
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Over lunch one day at the beginning of March he talked to Erika Chelius about his relationships with women: “I need women as a counterweight. Particularly on critical days they have an effect on me like balm on a wound. But I must have different types of women around me.” Erika reacted “very understandingly” to this avowal. That afternoon he was visited by Xenia: “Made coffee and played around.”
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