Goebbels: A Biography (34 page)

Meanwhile, in September Goebbels had undertaken another important step aimed at using an official appearance to give himself prominence in the field of foreign relations.

Goebbels could not help noticing at the beginning of the month that the Reich Party rally had played very badly abroad. The meeting
of the League of Nations in October seemed a good opportunity to break out of the regime’s still-prevalent isolation and especially to confront the international criticism provoked by the persecution of the Jews. It was also a chance to create a favorable climate for the imminent disarmament conference. When Foreign Minister Neurath suggested that Goebbels should accompany him to Geneva, he was all for it.
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So it was that on September 24 Goebbels arrived in Geneva to participate as a member of the German delegation in the annual assembly of the League of Nations. Joseph Goebbels, the Party agitator, the rabid anti-Semite, the choreographer of gigantic mass rallies, now took the floor as a diplomat. It is not surprising that the international press were very interested to see how he would perform in this unaccustomed role.
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Goebbels made a very self-confident entrance in Geneva, proving more than capable of dealing with diplomatic interchanges. He relied entirely on his ability instinctively to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of his interlocutors and convince them of his argument in direct exchanges. What counted was the “personal impression.”

He found the League of Nations meeting, opened on September 25, “depressing. An assembly of the dead. Parliamentarianism of the nations.” He penned little caricature sketches of the delegates of other nations: “Sir John Simon: Engl. Foreign [Minister]. Tall and imposing. But an old hand. Paul Boncour: vain poseur. Frenchman and writer. Not much of a man.
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Dollfuss: a dwarf, a dandy, a rogue. Otherwise nothing out of the ordinary. Formalities this morning. I’m being looked over and appraised. How vastly superior we Germans are, though.”

The next day he had a series of discussions. First of all he met the Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, whom he sized up as “clever and natural”: “Wants to move away from France, more toward Berlin. Has a series of concerns, but they’re not major ones. We can deal with Poland.” The Swiss Federal Council member Giuseppe Motta (“a politicizing petit bourgeois”) was followed by the Italian foreign minister, Fulvio Suvich (whom he consistently called “Suvic”): “Suvic is opposed to us. He tries to cover it up. Talks about worldview and liberalism. But I’m not taken in!”

Significantly, the speech he gave the next day to about three hundred journalists was the high point of his excursion into diplomacy:
“Received quite coolly. I talk and have one of my best days. Striking success. In the discussion I’m the absolute winner. Tricky questions, but I’m never lost for an answer. It all goes well. I’m quite blissful.” In his speech, Goebbels represented the reconstruction efforts of National Socialism in the most glowing colors. The new regime was being carried along by the popular will; in fact, it was actually a “noble kind of democracy,” which wanted nothing but international parity and peace.
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After a few more discussions there was a return to Berlin which, according to Goebbels’s subjective impression, was nothing less than a triumphant journey. For Goebbels there could be no doubt about the conclusion to draw from this trip to Geneva: “Hitler must negotiate with Daladier. In private. Direct and open. That’s the solution. Legality in foreign affairs policy.”
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A few days later he was able to put this view to Hitler: “France, that’s the alpha and omega. We must have breathing-space now. Otherwise another occupation of the Rhineland is on the cards.”
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Hitler’s fundamental re-think about the disarmament question—the Geneva Conference was due to resume in October—came as a relative surprise to him: From the diary it is clear that Hitler certainly did not ask for his opinion when he called Goebbels to the Reich Chancellery on October 11 to inform him of his “completely new ideas about the disarmament question.”
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The fact was that even by this point Hitler was determined to take a drastic step with regard to disarmament, to which he had already agreed in principle on October 4 with Reich Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg and State Secretary Bernard von Bülow.
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A week later, only one day after informing Goebbels about his “completely new idea,” Hitler announced his new policy in the cabinet: Germany would withdraw from all international bodies that did not grant her parity, including, therefore, the League of Nations. He would announce this decision together with a message of peace and secure popular backing for it by seeking reelection to the Reichstag. Hitler had already developed this idea of a kind of “plebiscite” on his policies in a discussion with Goebbels in July.
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Withdrawal from the League of Nations simply offered a suitable move to initiate a plan conceived long before.
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The cabinet’s approval of this plan on October 13 was a mere formality.
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For all his vigorous engagement with the disarmament question,
as shown by his participation in Geneva, it is plain that Goebbels was not brought into the decision-making process in early autumn 1933. In fact, although they met often in this period, Hitler had left him in the dark for more than a week about his intention of making a policy volte-face. In view of Hitler’s decision not only to back out of the Geneva negotiations but also to withdraw completely from the League of Nations, Goebbels’s suggestion of a one-to-one discussion with Daladier, the French prime minister, in order to establish a basis of trust seems in retrospect positively naive.
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It was now apparent that Hitler sent his propaganda minister to Geneva in order to create the impression that the German government was as ready as ever to negotiate seriously on the disarmament question. In this way international criticism of the regime was to be deflected during the League of Nations meeting, thus avoiding a united international front against Germany. Goebbels’s mission to Geneva had been a diversionary tactic. His self-confident appearance there, which he had thought so brilliant, was designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the international diplomatic fraternity. It had all been nothing but a charade. Naturally, Goebbels refused to acknowledge this quite obvious conclusion but instead threw himself immediately into the election campaign, boasting in the diary in the following days about his skill as the “architect” of the campaign.
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In November Hitler assembled an advisory “Foreign Policy Committee” over which he presided; it included Blomberg, Neurath, Schacht, Economics Minister Kurt Schmitt, and Goebbels (but not Göring, as Goebbels was pleased to note). At its opening meeting on November 16, the dictator expounded his foreign policy direction: “10 years of peace, even at the cost of sacrifices.” It seems the committee never met again.
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Since the late summer Goebbels’s relationship with Göring, never good, had deteriorated further. Goebbels agreed with Hitler about the need to break up the federal structure of the Reich and dispense with the individual states once and for all (he had a particular stake in transferring their cultural-political responsibilities to his own Ministry). Göring, on the other hand, wanted to cement in place the
special arrangements for Prussia within the Reich. Goebbels’s sustained attack on his rival took advantage of the many gaps in Göring’s armor: his highly developed status consciousness, his obsession with collecting titles, and his fixation on uniforms.
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When Goebbels spoke out in the next few weeks about excessive “pomp,” it was obvious whom he had in mind.
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What Goebbels found particularly provocative was Göring’s project of forming a new “Prussian State Council” consisting of leading personalities, to replace the identically named body that had previously represented the Prussian provinces but had been made redundant by “coordination” measures. When he learned that Hitler had no intention of attending the ceremonial opening of the State Council on September 15, he decided that he too would ignore the occasion.
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When Göring complained to him some days later about his absence, Goebbels gave him “a very clear answer.”
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In the following weeks there are numerous negative comments about Göring in the diaries, and he noted assiduously the poor opinion of him that Hitler and other leading National Socialists were disseminating.
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In mid-October he worked on Hitler to issue a “popular decree” intended to abolish “detrimental and ostentatious behavior in the Party.”
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When Hitler spoke to leading Nazis in the Prussian Landtag on October 17, Goebbels noticed with great interest the “sharp words attacking ostentation and the obsession with uniforms”: “The hall goes mad. Boss has mentally broken with Göring already. The poor show-off. He’s nothing but a standing joke.”
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However, Goebbels was cultivating his own image, too, but it was one of ostentatious austerity. For example, at a state banquet given in honor of his visit to the state government of Baden in Karlsruhe, he pointedly declined the food: “I protest, and don’t eat anything. A touch of the old days.”
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On an official occasion in December at the Kaiserhof, he appeared without decorations: “Made something of a stir—especially with Göring. I’m sticking to it. I don’t wear medals.”
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He also declined Berlin’s offer to make him an “Honorary Citizen” and to name a street after him on the occasion of his birthday.
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But he was not consistent on this point: He had already accepted an honorary citizenship from his hometown of Rheydt in April, and he soon relented with respect to Berlin as well. He accepted the honor in February 1934, albeit in the name of the many Party comrades who “have suffered and bled.”
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Although Goebbels did not show off in the manner of Göring, his lifestyle could hardly be called modest. At Christmas, for example, he bought himself a new car (“8 cylinder 200 hp. Wonderful piece of work!”),
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and the following spring he acquired another luxurious Mercedes.
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At the end of November the Goebbelses started to build their house in Göringstrasse, but not before Hitler had given his blessing to their plans and personally drawn a sketch for them.
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In November the election campaign ended its final phase. Goebbels was not only intensively involved in organizing it but also gave speeches in Frankfurt, Breslau, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, and of course Rheydt.
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The Reichstag fire trial, beginning in the Leipzig High Court on September 21, gave Goebbels yet another opportunity to indulge his insatiable appetite for public appearances. On trial were van der Lubbe and his alleged communist backers, the former Reichstag member Ernst Torgler and his three Bulgarian comrades, Georgi Dimitroff, Blagoy Popov, and Vassil Tanev. Göring’s testimony at the beginning of November caused a sensation. By clever questioning, Dimitroff managed to rattle Göring so badly that the latter began to react with monumental invective and threats. Dimitroff had thus succeeded in exposing the proceedings to the international public as a show trial. Goebbels, watching these outbursts of Göring’s, registered them as counterproductive.
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On November 8 he had his chance as a witness to correct the bad impression made by Göring. “Dimitroff and Torgler take a terrible beating. […] A complete victory. Fabulous press here and abroad. Best of all, I outclass Göring.”
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But all these efforts turned out to be in vain: Just before Christmas Goebbels was appalled to hear that the court had not been prepared to accept the version that the Reichstag fire had been the communist leadership’s signal for an uprising. Van der Lubbe was sentenced to death, but the other accused were acquitted.
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Immediately after giving his evidence in the trial, Goebbels flew to Munich to give yet another election campaign speech and to attend the ceremonies commemorating the tenth anniversary of the failed
putsch. Participation was not quite unproblematic for him, since there was no overlooking the fact that, unlike for example Göring, Rosenberg, or Röhm, at the time of the putsch he had had no connection with the Party whatsoever. Perhaps this explains his late arrival for the ceremony in the Feldherrnhalle.
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A few days before the election on November 12 he was dismayed to find that the general outlook was not exactly rosy: “A bad mood among many of the population because of too much pageantry, price rises, inheritance tax, etc.” At last, he recorded, the Party had taken on board something for which he had been calling for months: “Hess issues a strong declaration against ostentation. Finally. Thank God!”
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The high point of the election campaign, on which Goebbels was now fully concentrating, was Hitler’s address to workers in the electrical power plant of the Siemens factory in Berlin on November 10, which Goebbels once again introduced with a commentary.
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The Propaganda Ministry was faced with the task of representing this speech as the reconciliation of Hitler with the industrial workers, the great majority of whom, particularly in Berlin, had voted for the left in every free election. The ministry rose to the occasion in exemplary fashion.

The election was not, of course, in any sense “free.” On November 12—the Reichstag election was combined with a plebiscite vote of confidence in the government’s policies in general—a good deal of rigging took place: Ballot papers were numbered; there were no voting booths; well-known opponents of the regime were turned away at the polling stations; ballot papers were altered after the vote; it was hardly possible to abstain from the plebiscite, given the friendly urging by local Party organizations; and the possibility of rejecting the only list of contestants—that of the NSDAP—was not envisaged.
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Even spoiled ballots—which often conveyed protests—were disregarded in the count. The official result of the plebiscite was that 91.5 percent of the electorate had voted “yes.” In reality, 89.9 percent of those eligible to vote had done so in favor of the government. The approval rating of the solitary NSDAP list of candidates in the “election” was 2.1 points behind the triumphant plebiscite result.
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Goebbels was delighted by the results: “Unimaginable. I’m scared of the envy of the gods.” Later that evening he met Hitler, who “put his hands on my shoulders, quite moved.” Goebbels summed it all
up: “We’ve made it. The German people are united. Now we can face the world.”
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Did Goebbels really believe that in a year the German people—who in the last free elections, in November 1932, had only delivered 33.6 percent of the vote for the Nazis—had been won over to the extent of giving them almost 90 percent of the vote, this despite the massive repressive measures against large sections of the population, the international isolation, and an economic situation that was as bad as ever?

This is probably the wrong question to ask. The fact is that Goebbels was incapable of a reality check on the picture of national unity produced by his own propaganda in conjunction with the regime’s repressive terror measures. The glossy appearance of things, largely produced by his propaganda—a personal success—was for him the only reality that mattered.