Goebbels: A Biography Read online

  The conventional approach to the history of organizations and structures cannot quite encompass the position Goebbels built up for himself over time through accumulating and, in part, amalgamating various offices. It was historically unique and completely tailor-made for him, bearing the stamp of his personality through and through. Only a biography, therefore, can make it fully intelligible. He combined the offices of Gauleiter of Berlin, head of propaganda for the Party, and leader of a ministry that was especially invented for him and united the management of the mass media with the National Socialist control of cultural life. In addition, he was tasked with certain special functions, again tailor-made for him, for example in the area of foreign policy. To the extent that Goebbels succeeded during the war in extending his authority beyond propaganda into other spheres, eventually assuming a central role in the conduct of the nonmilitary side of the war effort, it was—as we shall see—a result of his attempt to shape the public sphere into his desired image, particularly under the conditions of the “total war” he himself propagated. The connections, often quite subtle, among his various responsibilities become apparent only through a description of his life.

  A Goebbels biography not only enables us to take a look behind the scenes by bringing together a multiplicity of sources to show how Nazi propaganda was conceived and carried out; it can also question the frequently asserted omnipotence of Goebbels’s propaganda. Here, the deconstruction of Goebbels’s self-constructed image, as bequeathed to posterity, of the brilliant director of propaganda plays a central role. It will become clear that narcissistic self-elevation not only represented an important aspect of Goebbels’s character but was also decisive in creating the image he built up over the years, so powerful that it was by no means demolished even by his death. It will be apparent that Goebbels was not the absolute master of the whole propaganda machine, as he liked to think, but that in some areas, at least, he was obliged to share his responsibilities with other Nazi apparatchiks. Above all, however, we shall see that the enormous impact claimed for propaganda by the National Socialists, and particularly by Goebbels himself, was itself an integral component of Goebbels’s propaganda. The importance of a biographical approach is emphasized by the fact that the man who asserted the all-powerful effect of propaganda was a textbook case of self-overestimation who had difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction.

  Moreover, biography can make an important contribution to the general history of the Third Reich. Goebbels, with his diaries, has left us the most important insider’s chronicle of Nazism and its Führer, from the re-founding of the Party in 1924–25 until the end of the regime. No other source of insight into the inner workings of Nazi power can compare. True, Goebbels often stood outside the decision-making process, but he did have the opportunity to observe at close quarters how decisions were arrived at. With his fixation on Hitler and consequent inability to take a critical view of him, he often gives us a unique and peculiarly authentic perspective on the dictator.

  The diaries, the basis of this biography and one of the chief sources for histories of the Third Reich, were transcribed many years ago for publication without notes or commentary. But to give them their full value as a historical source we need to analyze the propaganda minister’s personality and ambitions. This book is the product of a double process: evaluating the diaries as a historical source for a biography and interpreting them in the light of the author’s personality. Particularly in the early years, the diary was a site of self-reflection and self-criticism for Goebbels. But quite soon it began chiefly to serve the purpose of confirming his successes to himself, consolidating his success story, brushing aside failures and setbacks, constantly reinforcing his own morale, and driving him forward along the path taken. If the self-critical passages are the most interesting parts of the earliest diary, the almost complete absence of self-criticism is perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of the later volumes.

  The diaries had a further function as a place for Goebbels to deposit material he would go on to use elsewhere. Textual comparisons reveal how the diary corresponds with his publicity-oriented and literary writing as well as with his private letters. No clear distinctions can be made: The diary is frequently the first draft of a literary treatment, perhaps consisting of colorful descriptions of individuals, dramatized events, evocations of atmosphere, or aphorisms. The writer of the diary was not just a chronicler but also a journalist and a literary author, collecting impressions and trying out various forms. Once he had gained a foothold in politics at the end of the 1920s, his ideas about the secondary uses of the diary became more concrete. It served him now, above all, as the basis for publications centered on the recording of political chronology. Its utility can be seen, for example, in books such as Kampf um Berlin (Battle for Berlin, 1931) or Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei (From the Kaiserhof [Hotel] to the Reich Chancellery, 1934), where he was chiefly concerned with one thing only: the success story of Joseph Goebbels. Eventually, in 1936, he sold the right to publish the diaries—after revision—to the Party’s publisher, Max Amann and also planned to draw on them for publications connected with a projected official history of the Third Reich.13 The variety of ways in which Goebbels proposed to utilize the diaries should be borne in mind when reading them.

  Not least, though, the purpose of the diary was to provide an aide-mémoire and logbook of events, and this function increased with the growing range of offices that the propaganda minister acquired. An important turning point was the start of hostilities against the Soviet Union. The entries were now no longer handwritten but dictated to a secretary, with the result that the personal content of the texts was further diminished, and the diary became diffused and inflated by the admixture of other texts—military situation reports, the minister’s official correspondence, and whatever else was lying around on his desk.

  Comparison with other sources shows that the information about appointments and encounters with other people is very largely reliable and that Goebbels’s recall of conversations is in essence generally correct—apart from the exaggeration (especially where his own role is concerned), the dramatizing of certain situations, the omissions, and so forth. But time and again the diaries also feature freely invented strategic assertions from the workshop of Goebbels the propagandist, assertions that he clearly intended to reproduce in his later publications. Such distortions and inventions are particularly valuable for a biography. They provide us with the key to understanding Goebbels’s perception and interpretation of certain situations. But to come to terms with them properly, the diaries must, if possible, be weighed against other historical sources. That is the procedure followed by this biography, wherever feasible.

  A basic problem of every biographical approach to Goebbels is that, particularly in the early years, for the most part we have only his own testimony to go on, so that we are confronted with the challenge of penetrating the narcissistic front of the author’s self-interpretation. Almost everything he tells us about his childhood and youth originated in a deeply depressive phase of his life, between 1923 and 1934, when Goebbels was clearly driven by a manic compulsion to write.

  To gain access to these early years, we have to engage closely with these texts and attempt to decipher them. As our entry point into his life story, we have therefore chosen the autumn of 1923, the moment when Goebbels began to keep his regular autobiographical record.

  1897–1933

  TO ADVANCE AT ANY PRICE

  CHAPTER 1

  “Rings a Song Eternally / From Youth’s Happy Hours”*1

  Goebbels on His Childhood and Youth

  Credit 1.1

  Neither his handicap nor his academic ambitions seem to have turned him into an isolated loner: Joseph Goebbels (front row, third from left) with his fellow pupils at the high school in Rheydt, about 1914.

  “I can’t go on suffering like this. I need to write this bitterness out of my soul. Else is giving me a notebook for day-to-day use. So on October 17 I’m g
oing to start my diary.”1

  It was in 1923 that Goebbels came to this decision—a resolve he maintained consistently, right up to the last weeks of his life. The diary became his constant companion.

  There were many reasons for the pain and bitterness from which Goebbels was suffering in the autumn of 1923. The plain facts are that at this juncture the almost twenty-seven-year-old Joseph Goebbels was an unsuccessful writer who had just been fired from a job he loathed in a Cologne bank and was now completely penniless, having retreated to his parents’ home in Rheydt on the Lower Rhine. Else, a young schoolteacher, was his girlfriend. But the relationship was troubled, and after an argument the couple, overshadowed by money worries, had canceled a vacation on the Frisian island of Baltrum. Goebbels saw himself as a “wreck on a sandbank”; he felt “deadly sick.” He had spent days in “wild desperation drinking.”2 The general political and economic situation added in no small measure to his depression.

  His hometown of Rheydt was part of the territory west of the Rhine that had been occupied by British, Belgian, and French troops since the end of the Great War. Passive resistance to the French army, which since the beginning of the year had extended its occupation beyond the Rhine to the Ruhr, had just collapsed. Inflation had reached its absurd high point: Money earned in the morning was worthless by the evening. Extremist groups of the left and right were gearing up for civil war; separatists in the Rhineland were preparing to secede from the Reich. Rocked by a series of grave crises, the German Republic seemed on the verge of falling apart. “Politics are enough to make you laugh and cry,” noted Goebbels.3

  He had longed for the crisis as for a cleansing fever: “The dollar is climbing like an acrobat. I’m secretly delighted. We need chaos before things can get better.”4 It was to help him cope with this state of personal and political tension that he turned to his diary. After a few months he set about writing a short biographical introduction to it, an outline of his life written in the summer of 1924, hastily thrown together and in part reduced to key words; he called it his “memory pages.” This is the most important source of information we possess about Goebbels’s early years.5 It was the same depressed mood in 1923–24 that led him both to take up the diary and to give this short account of his life. In his despair, Goebbels asked himself who he was, what made him the way he was, and what he wanted to achieve in life.

  THE RHEYDT YEARS

  He began his life story thus: “Born on October 29, 1897, in Rheydt, at that time an up-and-coming little industrial town on the Lower Rhine near Düsseldorf and not far from Cologne.” We learn that his father, Fritz Goebbels, born in 1862, was a lowly clerk in a wick factory and that in 1892 he married Katharina Odenhausen, seven years younger than himself and employed at the time as a farmhand. Both came from humble circumstances, artisan families.6

  The Goebbelses were good Catholics, as they say on the Lower Rhine. They had six children in all: Konrad (b. 1893), Hans (1895), Maria (who died at six months in 1896), Joseph (1897), Elisabeth (1901), and Maria (1910).7 In 1900 their father managed to acquire a “modest little house” in Dahlenerstrasse.8

  Joseph’s childhood was overshadowed by ill health. Later, as an adult, he recalled among others a protracted illness (inflammation of the lungs with “terrifying delirium”). “And I also remember a long family walk to Geistenbeck one Sunday. The next day on the sofa my old foot complaint returned. […] Excruciating pain.” There followed, Goebbels tells us, lengthy treatments and further investigations at the Bonn University Clinic, but “foot lame for life” was the inexorable verdict. The consequences were dire: “My youth from then on pretty blighted. One of the pivotal events of my childhood. I was thrown back on my own devices. Could no longer play with the others. Became solitary, a loner. Maybe for that reason the complete favorite at home. I was not popular with my comrades.” Only one friend, Richard Flisges, stood by him.9

  What Goebbels says about his illness suggests that his “foot complaint” was a case of neurogenic clubfoot, a deformity that is often particularly associated with a metabolic disorder in childhood. His right foot was turned inwards; it was shorter and thicker than his healthy left foot.10

  Goebbels’s account of his elementary education, which began in 1904, makes for equally sorry reading. He remembered a teacher called Hennes, “a lying hound.” There was another, Hilgers, who was “a villain and a swine who mistreated us children and made our school life hell. […] My mother once discovered the stripes from his cane across my back when she was bathing me.” However, Goebbels did admit that his difficulties at school may have had something to do with his own attitude: “At the time I was so stubborn and independent-minded, a precocious lad the teachers couldn’t stand.”11

  In his last year at elementary school he underwent a largely unsuccessful operation on his foot: “When my mother was about to leave, I howled dreadfully. I still have terrible memories of the last half hour before the anesthetic and the trains rattling past the hospital during the night.” But there was a positive side to his stay in the hospital: His godmother, Aunt Stina, brought him fairy-tale books, which he “absolutely devoured. My first fairy tales. There wasn’t much storytelling at home. Those books awakened my first interest in reading. From then on I consumed everything in print, including newspapers, even politics, without understanding a word.” Immediately after his time in hospital, he left elementary school for the grammar school in Rheydt: Thanks to his father’s intervention, he recalled, his academic record was considerably enhanced.12 Although, according to his own estimation, Goebbels was “pretty lazy and lethargic” during his early years at grammar school, he gradually developed into an outstanding and extremely ambitious student, excelling particularly in religion, Greek, and history.13

  At first sight, it does not seem hard to explain why he was so ambitious: He was trying to compensate for his physical deformity. Goebbels himself put forward this explanation in 1919 in a piece of autobiographical writing entitled Michael Voormann’s Early Years, a dramatic literary version of his own childhood and youth that was clearly quite consciously modeled on a traditional German form, the novel of development.14 Michael was “a strange boy. You did not need to know him to see it when he opened his big, gray eyes wide and looked so questioningly at whoever was talking to him. There was something unusual in his gaze, a whole world of questions that no one suspected. You seldom saw him playing with other children.” Michael was lazy at school. The teacher “hated him like sin,” and his fellow pupils “were not fond of him.” “He was so harsh and rude to them, and if anyone asked him to do them a favor, he just turned away with a laugh. Only one person loved him—his mother.” Then Goebbels indulged in a description of his parents that made them out to belong to the lumpenproletariat: “She could neither read nor write, because before she married his father—a poor day laborer—she had been a farm girl. She had borne him seven sons, becoming pale and thin as a result. The fourth child was Michael. No one knew anything about his mother’s family origins, not even their father.” The text describes the father as “an upright, honest man with a highly developed sense of duty” who sometimes treated his mother “harshly and roughly” and from whom he had inherited a certain “tyrannical tendency.”

  At the age of ten, we are told, Michael suffered from a serious illness that left him with a lame right leg: “Michael was in despair most of the time; eventually he came to terms with it. However, it made him even more withdrawn, and he spent even less time with his comrades.” He had now become “eager and industrious at school, for his ambition was to become a great man one day.” He had been unpopular with his fellow pupils, and the gulf between them had made him “hard and bitter.” It is clear that in the novel Goebbels was trying out an imaginary variation on his autobiography. Unlike Joseph Goebbels, son of a petit bourgeois, Michael Voormann is from the working class, and by excelling at school he tries to make up for the distance from his contemporaries, an isolation initially rooted in his sense of b
eing different and then increased by his disability. Goebbels was testing out a dramatic version of his own life story: rising above the most humble origins, crippled, disdained, solitary, but at the same time highly talented, determined, and successful, even if embittered, cold, and consumed with ambition. In this telling, his later development into a genius is taken for granted. The differences between this and the memoir he composed in his “memory pages” five years later are obvious: Although he certainly describes his disability as the most important factor in his bleak childhood, he no longer wants to represent it as the real force driving him on to higher things. In subsequent literary treatments of his life story, his disability is as inconspicuous as it is in the diary, where it is rarely mentioned, although in fact he needed an orthopedic appliance to help him walk, and medical complications frequently recurred.15 Can Michael therefore be seen as an authentic account of his life? Is this a rare and valuable autobiographical document in which Goebbels for once shows himself capable of honest soul-searching? Is he attempting in Michael to break out from his denial of a disability that has become a permanent front to the world and honestly face up to his deformity and its consequences?

  His physical disability may well have intensified his adult conviction of a call to higher things, his compulsion as a boy to escape the narrow confines of his childhood milieu by excelling at schoolwork, and his self-imposed isolation. But there are other reasons for his narcissistic streak, his highly developed craving for recognition and affirmation by others.