Joseph Goebbels

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Introduction

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SOURCE: "Introduction," The Early Goebbels Diaries: The Journal of Joseph Goebbels from 1925-1926, edited by Helmut Heiber, translated by Oliver Watson, Weid enfeld and Nicolson, 1962, pp. 15-26.

[In the following essay, Heiber focuses on Goebbels's diaries for the years 1925 and 1926.]

Throughout his life—it is said, from the time he was twelve—Joseph Goebbels kept a diary. Later, when in power, he probably even kept two diaries—his private notes and also voluminous daily records, dictated to a stenographer and containing descriptions of events and comments; these, for all their candour, were clearly addressed to posterity that would judge his actions. Shortcomings in general and colleagues in particular he criticized acidly; he found little wrong with matters of principle and nothing wrong with Hitler, let alone with himself. These moderate disclosures were intended as raw material for a history of the Third Reich, the writing of which was to give content to Goebbels' years of retirement; when completed the history was to provide financial security for his family.

Probably only very few people, and these are in the East, know what happened to these private and semi-official diaries, for most of what escaped destruction during the fighting in Berlin was presumably captured by the Soviets. Under-Secretary of State Naumann believes that this is certainly true of the microfilms of the semi-official diary, which were made before the collapse, and Hans Fritzsche has testified to having seen in Moscow, at any rate, part of the private notes written in Goebbels' own hand.

Disregarding such inaccessible fragments those portions of the diary are of course known which were published by Goebbels himself under the title From the Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery. They cover the period from 1st January 1932 to 1st May 1933 and though of course heavily edited they preserve the original diary form. Another portion appears in his Michael, a novel written in the form of a diary, in which Goebbels draws on his diary covering the years 1919 and 1920 when he went to the Universities of Freiburg, Munich and Heidelberg. Written in 1921, Goebbels was able to publish this book only in 1929 when Eher, the party publisher, accepted it; it contains his own adventures mixed with those of his friend Richard Flisges. Finally we have a book, The Struggle for Berlin, published in 1932, for which the diaries probably provided the source; it begins with 9th November 1926, the day on which the new Gauleiter enters the capital, and describes the first year of his work there.

Far more important than these edited publications are the few available original manuscripts. One of these contains fragments of a typescript taken from dictation and covering the period from 21st January 1942 to 9th November 1943. A heavily cut edition was published by Louis P. Lochner several years ago; it is an important source for the history of that period and for some internal developments in the Third Reich.

But these are meditations of a man written not so much for the sake of recording as for the impression they would make on posterity. Far more important to judge Goebbels, the man, are the 192 diary pages written in his own hand, the only part of the private diaries which fell into western hands after the war. They run from 12th August 1925 to the end of October 1926 without a gap. Apart from the last few pages and a portion in the middle the manuscript is in good condition, although Goebbels' hand makes reading somewhat difficult.

These pages had the same fate as the 1942-43 diary published by Lochner. When the Propaganda Ministry was cleared in 1945 the Russians intended to burn this manuscript, but someone picked it up in the courtyard. It passed through several hands as waste paper until it reached an American well versed in German affairs who, in 1946, passed it on to Herbert Hoover, the former U. S. President. Since then the manuscript has been in the custody of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, California.

These notes have accordingly been known for some time, and they have several times been quoted at length—by Lochner, in his preface, down to the recent Goebbels biography by Manvell and Fraenkel. Transcribing difficulties have probably been responsible for the failure so far to publish these notes which, when seen in toto, fully reveal the personality of the author. This book (first published in Germany by the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte) is thus the first full version of the diary.

As we have already mentioned, a small party of the original is in poor condition. Several pages and corners are burnt—particularly entries beginning on 9th September 1926; other pages have been pierced by nails; and a third group—particularly the entries from 12th to 20th July 1926—have been smudged by water. Fire damage has badly affected the part beginning on 16th October 1926, and only tatters remain of the last pages for that month. The transcriber had thus to contend not only with the handwriting, but also with these defects of the material.

The diary has been transcribed from the original word for word; style, spelling and punctuation follow the original. All mistakes due to carelessness have been reproduced to give the flavour of these hastily made notes and to be fair to the author. Doubtful passages have been placed between square brackets, especially names of insignificant persons (many of these were identified by references to reports of meetings in the Völkischer Beobachter). Undecipherable passages have been indicated by dots. But to save space the paragraphing in the original has been disregarded, for Goebbels usually started a new paragraph for every or every second sentence or exclamation.

The documents in the Appendix are, with the exception of the letter from Holtz (No 10) and Heinemann's notes (No 11), original typescripts or typed copies. A few typing errors in the documents have been corrected.

Many biographers publishing or using personal diaries have inevitably laid bare events of the diarist's private life which can normally claim exclusion from public discussion. But the case of a man like Joseph Goebbels is different. He belongs to history, and he has influenced and moulded the fate of millions. The personality of such men is a matter of public interest and therefore a proper object of historical research. To answer the question—what manner of man was such a person behind the façade which he erected when in power?—it is exceedingly important to know something about his relations with other people.

What, then, had been the career of that young man at the time when he wrote these pages in his diary, before his twenty years of malignant political power? Biographies make it possible to sketch his life briefly as follows.

Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on 29th October 1897 at Rheydt which, like its twin city of Muenchen-Gladbach (now Moenchen-G.), was dominated by the textile industry. In common with the majority of the population, his parents were Roman Catholics, and not only as a matter of form. It seems difficult to establish the occupation of Friedrich Goebbels, Joseph's father. Older biographies describe him as foreman or charge hand, but according to the most recent biography—which also relies on statements by members of the family—he was an office worker in an incandescent mantle factory, in which he eventually rose to a managerial position. Perhaps all statements are correct, and Goebbels' father started as a manual worker and, by his own efforts, bettered his position. This, at any rate, is how his son once described the situation when he spoke of the sacrifices and stubborn efforts of his parents to help their sons to get on in life and to lift them out of their narrow lower middle-class surroundings into which the parents had emerged from the working class. Not that the Goebbels family can have lived in any luxury—in 1917, when applying for a scholarship, Goebbels said that his father's salary was between 315 and 355 marks. Paul Joseph was one of several children. He had two older brothers, Hans and Konrad, and a sister, Elisabeth, older than himself, but she died in 1915. In later years Goebbels was more attached to his sister Maria, who was twelve years younger, than to his brothers.

Just as the family is uncertain about the occupation of the father, who died in 1929, it is uncertain about the cause of Paul Joseph's club-foot. In this respect, too, the two biographies which are based on detailed interrogation of members of the family differ slightly. According to one version the child, at the age of seven, contracted osteomyelitis and the left thigh had to be operated on; this weakened the left leg and retarded development so that the left leg was in the end three inches shorter than the right one. The second version attributes the affliction expressly to poliomyelitis at the age of four. What both explanations have in common is that they describe the deformity as not congenital, which it was commonly understood to be in the Third Reich.

Whatever the origin of the deformity its effect on the mind of the crippled boy, with his weak and underdeveloped body and huge head, and on his relations with playmates and school-fellows of his own age can be well imagined. No wonder that Joseph Goebbels concentrated all his energy on intellectual work. At play and in physical contacts he was necessarily always beaten, but with his mind he was determined to surpass all others. His good intellectual equipment made success certain. The parents sent Joseph to the grammar school, although this entailed heavy sacrifices; the other children had a secondary school education.

Joseph Goebbels was among the best in his form, although he did not surpass everyone. One of his last reports shows three firsts—in scripture, Latin and German. He was not a popular boy, being considered a careerist and a tell-tale, who wanted to get into the good books of the masters and did not hesitate to inform against the other boys. He was also thought to be arrogant and conceited, but this was no doubt the bastion built by the young weakling, who was always on the defensive.

From his school-leaving examination Goebbels emerged with practically top marks. His German essay was the best and he was allowed to deliver the farewell oration. When it was over the headmaster was said to have clasped his hand, saying: 'Good, Goebbels, very good. Content excellent, but believe me, you will never be a good speaker.'

Not many of those who left school that Easter in 1917 have survived, for many volunteered for military service. Even the cripple presented himself at the recruiting depot—evidence that even then he inclined to the grand and meaningless gesture, or that he deceived himself. The medical officer would hardly look at him: he was quite useless for service at the front, but was accepted for non-combatant duties and served for a while as a clerk. Then the war was over as far as he was concerned.

At Bonn University Goebbels began reading German, history and Latin. His father wanted one of his sons to graduate and Joseph was best qualified to do so. He was given an allowance of fifty marks a month, but even so had to interrupt his very first semester. Later, he supported himself by coaching, and he received a loan from the Roman Catholic Albertus Magnus Society, to which he had applied for help. Not that he received any extravagant funds from that source, barely a thousand marks all told between 1917 and 1920, but the society had to wait ten years for repayment, and recovered the money in 1930 only by taking Goebbels, then the Gauleiter of Berlin, to court.

Despite his financial straits Joseph Goebbels went freely from one university to another. In the summer of 1918 he went from Bonn to Freiburg, where he spent one semester, and he was at Würzburg when Germany collapsed in the winter of that year. He went back to Freiburg for the summer semester of 1919, and on to Munich in the following winter—a long-standing ambition hitherto unattainable because he had been unable to find digs. In 1920 Goebbels settled down in Heidelberg, where, in November 1921, he took the PhD with a thesis, Wilhelm Schuetz; A Contribution to the History of the Romantic Theatre.

During those years at the university several events occurred which significantly influenced Goebbels' life. He became estranged from the Church; this developed during his second semester at Freiburg and at Munich, and coincided with the termination of his Albertus Magnus grant. This estrangement led to differences with his devout Catholic parents, especially with his father, who was seriously perturbed and full of reproaches. This cooling of relations between father and son becomes apparent in the diary; the rift had probably not quite closed when the father died.

Simultaneously young Goebbels was acquiring literary ambitions. In a will made at the end of October 1920 he appointed his brother literary executor for his—unpublished—poems and stage-play drafts. Interest in the revolutionary political events seems to have hardly exceeded the degree of patriotism and disappointment felt by most young undergraduates in those years. On the other hand, while in Heidelberg, he probably received a mental wound that was to influence his mind. Vain as he was, and used to leading his fellows in the intellectual field, Goebbels failed to break into the exclusive circle of Friedrich Gundolf, the literary 'Pope' of Heidelberg. This representative of the Stefan George circle was repelled by the bearing of the ambitious young man. And Gundolf—whose original name was Gundelfinger—was a Jew.

Two people who made a deep impression on Goebbels, as can be seen from diary entries several years later, he also met in his student days. It was probably at Freiburg that Goebbels came under the influence of a young man who soon became his friend. Richard Flisges had returned from the war seriously wounded and with high decorations. He wanted to go to the university but failed his entrance examination. This, as he believed, unmerited disqualification, probably made the young man, who may have leaned in the direction before, a rebel against the existing social order—a pacifist, a communist, even a nihilist.

Thus Goebbels, hitherto more or less untroubled by a philosophy of life, was drawn into the whirlpool of opinions passionately expressed and joined together higgledy-piggledy. Flisges introduced Goebbels to the philosophy of Dostoevsky, of Marx and Engels and of Rathenau. The altars built to this dominating friend were probably not destroyed altogether when after a few months Goebbels began to free himself from intellectual shackles; his pride presumably drove him to support an antithesis—nationalism and war. Soon the two young men were completely estranged, but the nimbus of friendship remained, especially when Flisges, who had become a miner, was killed in a mine in Upper Bavaria in July 1923. Goebbels also retained the anti-bourgeois concept of class warfare, latent to the very end though concealed for opportunist reasons. Years later his diary recorded regret at the senseless fight with erring communist class-brothers, and in 1944 and 1945 Goebbels was one of the few National Socialist leaders who dreamed of an 'eastern solution' rather than a 'western solution'.

Finally, there was Anka, Joseph Goebbels' first great love, the first of a long line of women in the life of this man for whom love had become a mania. Goebbels the lover was always active, compensating for his inhibitions by passion. No doubt his physical handicaps contributed to this. In this field at least he wanted to demonstrate his manhood.

Diary entries indicate that Anka came from Itzehoe and later lived in Recklinghausen. Biographers have said nothing about her occupation. In Goebbels' Michael she was a student. Her second name has been given as Hellhorn or Stahlhern, but neither tallies with Goebbels' own records. At any rate she was described as beautiful and coming from a good family, and later, during the Third Reich, she was said to have remembered her former lover. The romance, probably begun in Freiburg in the summer of 1918, lasted a fairly long time, until 1922. According to later diary entries, the semester at Würzburg seems to have been closely connected with this girl.

Anka was followed by Else—a 'half-Jew', according to the Nuremberg Laws. The diary that follows prominently records the climax and end of this love affair. Having taken his degree Joseph Goebbels went back to Rheydt. He did not sit for the teaching diploma, for he considered the career of a schoolmaster out of the question, although his subjects would have made this a likely choice. His ambitions were connected with writing, possibly the stage. This was the time when he wrote Michael, dedicated to Richard Flisges, on whose life he drew for the 'fateful German character'. The novel's other main character was Anka, portrayed in Hertha Holk, and there was also a Russian, to whom years later Goebbels addressed an open letter on politics. Goebbels offered the novel to Ullstein and Mosse, but these two 'Jewish' publishers returned the manuscript, just as Theodor Wolff, the 'Jewish' editor of Berliner Tageblatt, returned a series of articles which Goebbels had written.

The young man lived with his parents. He wrote poems, plays, essays and articles, and earned some money by coaching and book-keeping. Fritz Prang, a friend from his schooldays, had a girl-friend, Alma, who was a teacher; subsequently Goebbels did not hesitate to make advances to her. Alma introduced Goebbels to one of her colleagues, Else, who has already been mentioned. Her home was at Duisburg, but she taught at a school in Rheydt. Goebbels' sister, Maria, went to that school, and so Else came to see the Goebbels family, the two young people fell in love, and the two couples became an inseparable group.

Through Else, Goebbels obtained an appointment with the Cologne branch of the Dresdner Bank, where he worked with distaste for nine months. Then Fritz Prang got him another job, that of price-teller at the Cologne stock exchange. It seems to be well established that Goebbels took no great interest in politics during those years; possibly even the struggle for the Ruhr district and the French occupation affected him little. While Prang joined Hitler's party in 1922, Goebbels, though full of nationalist gestures, would not commit himself. The story that a speech by Hitler in 1922 converted him and that he joined the Munich branch of the party in that year is most probably a later invention of Goebbels himself, like the story that he had written to Hitler while the latter was detained at Landsberg. Goebbels' party membership number, No. 22, was of course subsequently 'acquired'.

In fact, Joseph Goebbels went in for politics as late as 1924. At that time he was going through a period of inner conflict, gaiety and sociable conduct alternating with depression leading to freely advertised suicide threats. The main cause of despair was probably his failure to get on in life, which angered his family. Had they made all those heavy financial sacrifices for a boy who now spent his days doing nothing or, at any rate, doing little more than casual work? Goebbels himself looked at his life in a different way. He considered himself excluded from work to which his ability entitled him, excluded by the Jews who dominated cultural life and would only allow 'their own people' to advance.

In January 1924 Goebbels made a final attempt; he applied for a job on the Berliner Tageblatt, but was turned down. He fared similarly with the stage. Meanwhile, Prang had introduced him to nationalist and National Socialist circles, and he had taken part in the discussions at some of their meetings. At last, Franz von Wiegershaus, the Elberfeld nationalist politician and Prussian diet deputy, appointed Goebbels his private secretary at a monthly salary of a hundred marks. His duties included speaking at party meetings and helping with the editing of Völkische Freiheit, a small weekly magazine published by von Wiegershaus. At the end of 1924 this work brought him into contact with prominent National Socialists in West Germany.

Early in 1925, when after Hitler's release from Landsberg the NSDAP was re-formed, there was a chance of new work. Goebbels was appointed manager of the Gau Rheinland-Nord, Karl Kaufmann's Gau, with his office at Elberfeld; as such he drew two hundred marks a month. This post was coupled with a kind of secretaryship to Gregor Strasser, the North and West German party leader, who had transferred to Berlin and left his secretary, one Heinrich Himmler, behind in Landshut. Finally, Goebbels was to help with the editing of a magazine which Strasser wanted to bring out and which was intended as the 'intellectual mouthpiece' of the party.

The surviving part of the diary opens at this stage of Goebbels' career; it pictures the events of the following months. What is the broad impression that these pages convey of Goebbels' political conduct and development? First, they show clearly his transition from a mere party member to an unconditional follower of Hitler. Originally Goebbels had had certain fixed political ideas; at any rate, that was what he pretended. Strongly attached to his West German friends, he had even joined the anti-Munich junta and indulged in the most acid criticism of the party leader. Then he suddenly changed course and became an uncritically admiring follower. It is difficult to be sure whether this change of heart was caused by Hitler's magic or by an opportunist assessment of the forces ranged on either side.

Clearly both factors contributed, but it can be assumed that the second factor prevailed. For though easily roused to enthusiasm, Goebbels was essentially a man who, when his personal interests were at stake, kept a cool head. At the same time, it remains doubtful whether at that juncture Goebbels knew that his choice was prompted by a political philosophy which determined his actions to the end. Throughout his life Goebbels was actuated by an anti-capitalist resentment, typical of the petit bourgeois intellectual, the intensity of which probably dated from his disappointments as a young writer. It was essentially fortuitous that Goebbels plumped for National Socialism rather than for Marxism or Bolshevism. Moreover, he had no scruples, being quite prepared to turn traitor when it paid. And Hitler paid—that much this shrewd cripple grasped in a flash. This period is covered by the diary which reveals how the mind of Goebbels worked.

The last notes of the diary, written at the end of October 1926, mention the decision just arrived at that Goebbels was to go to Berlin as Gauleiter. Of course, that sounds far grander than it was, for no one could say that the NSDAP was then a particularly imposing force in the city. In his Struggle for Berlin Goebbels wrote, not unfairly, that 'what went as the party in Berlin in those days in no way deserved that description. It was a wildly mixed collection of a few hundred people with National Socialist ideas. ' Such hostility had developed between the political organization, led by the Strasser brothers, and the SA under Kurt Daluege, later to become chief of police, that their leaders slapped each other's faces at meetings. In this situation Hitler sent Goebbels to Berlin as a kind of umpire. Berlin thus became the scene of a struggle between the Strassers and their erstwhile young man who suddenly appeared as Hitler's stadholder in the centre of 'left-wing deviationists'; earlier there had been a crisis caused by the extreme anti-capitalism, federalism and anti-Munich conduct of the North and West Germans. From this crisis Hitler emerged as victor, and his opponents, gritting their teeth, surrendered unconditionally.

The Berlin Documents Centre papers from the files of the Supreme Party Tribunal … and fragments from Goebbels' personal file are good illustrations of the hard but successful struggle of the new Gauleiter. Read in conjunction with the diary for the preceding year they round off the picture of Goebbels' early years in politics and provide a very revealing contribution to the history of the deteriorating relations between Goebbels and the Strasser brothers—a development indicative of the shifting balance of forces in, and the political trend and whole character of, the NSDAP.

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