Burning the Reichstag (7 page)

On February 18th, orders had gone out to all police stations in the state of Prussia to compile lists of leaders and officials of the Communist Party and all related Communist organizations—the paramilitary groups known as the Red Frontfighters' League and the Combat League Against Fascism, as well as the Communists' sports and cultural organizations. The lists were also to include the names of union leaders and officials. In all cases, along with the names, the lists were to provide the addresses of homes and likely hiding places. The completed lists were to be submitted to the Interior Ministry no later than February 26th.
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In the early afternoon of Monday, February 27th, Diels sent out an order by radio to all police stations in Prussia. “Communists,” said Diels, were “said to be planning attacks on police patrols and the members of national organizations, with a view to disarming them, for the day of the Reichstag elections or a few days before or after.” These attacks would be carried out with firearms, knives, and blunt instruments, and in such a way that the attackers could not be identified. Never mind that, as Diels himself wrote after the war, a police raid on the Berlin Communist Party headquarters on February 22nd had turned up “nothing alarming.” Diels
ordered that “suitable countermeasures” against the Communist threat were to be taken “immediately.” Above all, “in necessary cases” Communist functionaries were to be taken into “protective custody.”
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“Protective custody” was an official euphemism. It was calculated to suggest saving vulnerable people from grave danger. In fact it meant being thrown into prison without charge or trial, and in all likelihood being sent to one of the newly established “concentration camps” to suffer unspeakable beatings and tortures at the hands of the SA.

By shortly after six that evening, all Prussian police stations had received Diels's order. Hours before fire consumed the Reichstag, the police were ready.

JOSEPH GOEBBELS

ONE DAY AROUND
1900
, after a long Sunday walk with his family, a small boy in the Rhenish town of Rheydt was afflicted by osteomyelitis—an inflammation of the bone marrow—in his right leg. The infection seemed to revive the pain and paralysis young Paul Joseph Goebbels had already experienced in his foot, but which the family thought he had put behind him. “The next day on the sofa the old pain in my foot came back,” he remembered years later. “Cries, incredible pain … Long treatment.” Doctors at the Bonn university clinic examined his foot and shrugged. For two years the family doctor and a masseur tried to get the foot and leg growing normally again. When he was ten, Joseph went for surgery in nearby München-Gladbach. “Rather a failure,” was his later summary. “One of the decisive events of my childhood.” He was burdened for life with a club foot.

“Youth from then on rather joyless,” wrote the twenty-six-year-old Goebbels. “I had to depend on myself. Could no longer join in the games of the others. Became lonely and eccentric [
eigenbrödlerisch
] … My comrades didn't like me. Comrades have never liked me….” In 1919, Goebbels wrote an autobiography couched as a novel in the third person,
Michael
Voormanns Jugendjahre
(The youth of Michael Voormann), in which, he said, “I write my own story with heart and soul … without prettying it up, just as I see it.” Goebbels wrote that rejection by other children had not only made him lonely, it had embittered him. The very Catholic boy began to quarrel with God. “Why had God made him so that people mocked and ridiculed him?” he wondered. And more fatefully: “Why must he hate, when he wanted to love, when he had to love?”
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Compensation for the young Goebbels came in two forms. One was his success in school. His desperate feelings of inferiority drove him to apply his quick mind obsessively to his lessons, even those, like math and physics, in which he felt he had no ability. Little by little he won the respect of his teachers and even his fellow pupils. He earned some additional money for the Goebbels household by tutoring less talented but better-heeled students.
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The other compensation lay in his imagination. Goebbels became a voracious reader. This began, by his account, as he lay in hospital after the failed operation. His aunt brought him fairy tales, which he devoured. In books he found “a world of enjoyment.” He also began to show a flair for acting and even for producing theatrical performances—a flair which could quickly enough shade into a talent for lying. “Theater, puppet theater,” he remembered. “Self-written horror stories [
Schauertragödien
]. Admission 3 pennies …” One of Goebbels's biographers writes that the “gulf between bitter reality and the fictitious existence into which he escaped” was the defining quality of his childhood—and, one might add, not just of his childhood.
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His club foot kept him out of service in the First World War, a fact that only magnified his feelings of inferiority. Instead he studied: literature and philosophy at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, and Heidelberg. Very little of the war appears in the pages of his diary: indeed he wrote of his student days in 1918 “I hardly know that there is a war on.” The diary reveals an intelligent and ambitious young man, literary, romantic, extremely moody, and—like most young men—with his mind firmly fixed on young women. He wrote a doctoral thesis on the eighteenth-century novelist Wilhelm von Schütz. His doctoral supervisor at Heidelberg, Max von Waldberg, and another professor whom he revered, Friedrich Gundolf, were Jewish.

When Goebbels graduated with his doctorate in 1921 he tried unsuccessfully to make it as a writer and a journalist. He even applied for a job
with the
Berliner Tageblatt
(Berlin daily newssheet), the literate, liberal paper owned by the prominent (and Jewish) Mosse family. Resentment over the rejection of this application no doubt colored his later virulent denunciations of the “Jew press” in Berlin. In despair he went to work as a clerk at the Dresdner Bank in Cologne. He read Oswald Spengler's gloomy
The Decline of the West
, which had an “unsettling” and “lasting” impact on him, as did the same writer's
Prussianism and Socialism
. The connection that Goebbels drew between these two qualities became one of the central points of his own ideology. Then he discovered the Nazi Party.
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The first mention of the Nazis in his diary comes in a cryptic passage describing his life between January and August 1923, which hints at a melding of ideas and resentments central to Nazi ideology—anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism, with a new suspicion of Gundolf: “The banks and the stock exchanges. Industry and stock market capital. My view is clarified by poverty. Repugnance for the bank and my work. Despairing poems. Jewry. I think about the problem of money … Opera. Klemperer as conductor. The Jewish question in the arts. Gundolf. Intellectual insight. Bavaria. Hitler …”
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Goebbels came into the Nazi Party under the wing of Gregor Strasser, a pharmacist and First World War veteran who was in charge of organizing the Nazis in northern Germany, away from their Bavarian roots. Like Strasser, Goebbels was a revolutionary who, in Spenglerian fashion, placed more emphasis on the “Socialist” than the “National” in the National Socialist German Workers' Party's contradictory name. That Hitler did not share this emphasis was to become Goebbels's constant frustration. His diaries in the early 1930s are peppered with remarks like “The Party must become more Prussian, more active and more socialist,” accompanied by complaints that the Munich leadership failed to recognize this.
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This was hardly Goebbels's only conflict. In a party dominated by grizzled war veterans, thugs, and adventurers of the stripe of Hermann Göring, Ernst Röhm, and Gregor Strasser, he stood out as the slight young man whose disability had kept him from the trenches. In a party with a great appetite for violence and no use whatsoever for ideas, he was an intellectual who could appreciate—even when he hated—the works of left-wing and Jewish opponents. In 1924, after reading the elegant and savagely sarcastic journalist Maximilian Harden (who had Jewish roots and had changed his name from Isidor Witkowski) Goebbels wrote with grudging
admiration that the radical nationalists would have to be “a little livelier, a little more intellectually flexible, to finish off this kind of writer.”
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It was perhaps Goebbels's sense of physical inferiority, or his memories of childhood rejection, that led him to worship as heroes the young toughs of the SA and eagerly court their affection and approval, a theme that fills the pages of his diary. Had Goebbels not been such a compulsive womanizer one might suspect homoerotic tendencies. In his 1930 eulogy for the Nazi “martyr” Horst Wessel, Goebbels said that Wessel would “remain among us” as he always had been, “with the smile of youth on his red lips.” In September 1931 he wrote of a visit to the hostel put up by SA unit Storm 33 in the Berlin neighborhood of Charlottenburg. “Songs, coffee, comradeship. I feel good there …” And he went the same night to another SA hostel where he “sang and carried on with the boys. Swell guys! They all love me very much …” One day, emerging from a meeting with the establishment conservatives he so disliked, he was met by SA men who saluted him with cries of “Heil!” “Dear boys!” he wrote. “I'd like to hug each one.”
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Goebbels was a true believer in Hitler and the most extreme of anti-Semites. Diels said that Goebbels had “the capability for a kind of autosuggestion which led him to believe fanatically what he said and wrote.” This is a phenomenon one can observe over and over in the pages of his diary. Even in this private forum, he wrote obvious lies with strident conviction. Yet Goebbels was a political extremist who could step outside of his own fanaticism to observe coolly how his doctrines looked to an opponent. This capacity helped to make him the talented propagandist that he was. One day in 1932 he read a critique of Hitler written by Theodor Heuss, a prominent liberal politician who became the first president of West Germany after the war. “Not at all dumb,” he wrote in his diary. “Knows a lot about us. Uses it somewhat meanly. But in any case an impressive critique.” He admired American movies, and in the last desperate days of the war sought to make a kind of Nazi
Gone with the Wind
called
Das Leben geht weiter
(Life goes on), which would show the bombed-out cities and the hard lot of German civilians. Goebbels had despaired by then of the mindless optimism of Nazi propaganda, and was looking for something more real, and hence more persuasive. In an irony Goebbels himself could have appreciated, Allied bombers destroyed the Babelsberg film studios where
Das Leben geht weiter
was in production, and the war ended before he could get his film made.
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His confidence in his intellectual superiority allowed Goebbels his tolerance for intellectual opponents, and made him want to persuade rather than to compel obedience. In a speech given shortly after the founding of his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in March 1933, Goebbels said “If this government is determined never and under no circumstances to give way, then it has no need of the lifeless power of the bayonet, and in the long run will not be content with 52 percent behind it and with terrorizing the remaining 48 percent, but will see its most immediate task as being to win over that remaining 48 percent.” Diels even thought that Goebbels's ambition to exert tyranny imperceptibly through words caused him to despise much of the apparatus of Nazi repression.
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Where the confidence failed, so did the tolerance. Anyone, including SA men, who mocked Goebbels's physical limitations or self-dramatizing rhetoric could face his potentially murderous vengeance. This was all the more true for anyone who threatened his position in the Party or his safety. There is plausible evidence that the murders of a police officer, one Constable Josef Zauritz, and a Berlin SA leader, Hans Maikowski, can be traced to such a reaction.

The Nazi regime blamed these killings, which took place during the famous torchlight parade on the evening Hitler became chancellor of Germany, on Communists. But even just a few months later, in the summer of 1933, Diels's Gestapo had evidence that pointed elsewhere. Three stormtroopers told the Gestapo that they had seen an SA man named Alfred Buske shoot both Zauritz and Maikowski. One of these witnesses, Karl Deh, survived to tell the same story to police long after the war. Deh said that at a meeting in late December 1932, SA men had expressed the fear that the Nazi Party, once in power, would push them aside. Goebbels, therefore, had to “disappear before that.” Hans Maikowski, who commanded the especially infamous Berlin SA unit Storm 33, declared that he himself would shoot Goebbels “if necessary.” Four weeks later, during the torchlight parade, Constable Zauritz was assigned to march with Storm 33. Afterward, as the unit returned to its base “Storm Tavern,” Deh stood a few feet away as Buske shot first Zauritz and then Maikowski. “In my opinion,” said Deh, “Buske acted on higher orders.” He was convinced that Goebbels had learned Maikowski might kill him. Buske had shot Zauritz to eliminate a witness. After these killings, Deh claimed, Buske was promoted, and though unemployed, he always seemed to be in funds.
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Evidence that the police gathered at the very start of the investigation is consistent with Deh's story. The doctor who pronounced Zauritz dead noted that he was shot from close range (there was powder in the wound) and by someone standing at the same level, ruling out Buske's story that the shots came from a first- or second-floor window. One witness heard a cry from the street: “A cop has been shot by the Nazis!” Another heard “Stop shooting! You're shooting your own comrade!” Some police officer or prosecutor underlined this part of the statement in red pencil. A third witness claimed actually to have seen two SA men shoot at Zauritz. Nonetheless, the police charged only Communists with the killing—a sign of what was coming in the German justice system.
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