B006OAL1QM EBOK (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

The First Years

A
HOUSE
in the small textile manufacturing town of Rheydt is among those that managed to survive the relentless bombing of the industrial Rhineland during the Second World War. It is Number 156 on the Dahlener Strasse. The front door, which opens directly on to the street, is set squarely beside the two gaunt windows of the ground floor curtained against the passers-by. It is a severe but solid structure, and the first-floor windows look across the street directly down on to a mason's yard stacked with neat piles of stone crosses to commemorate the dead. Cut into the tiles of the steeply sloping roof are two skylight windows which, unless you stand with your nose pressed to the small squares of glass, only give a view of the sun, clouds and rain.

It was in this house that Joseph Goebbels spent his youth. He was born on 29th October 1897, in the Odenkirchener Strasse, but the family moved to the Dahlener Strasse during his infancy. Like most families in the Ruhr, the Goebbels were Catholics. His father, Friedrich Goebbels, was the son of a manual worker who spent his life in a firm of gas-mantle manufacturers, W. H. Lennartz of Rheydt. He had begun as an office boy and rose during the childhood and adolescence of his children through various clerkships in the business until he was eventually rewarded with the minor directorial position of Prokurist. He was, indeed, a petty bourgeois, struggling to keep his cuffs clean in the dirty atmosphere of the factory where he was employed, but earning no more than the working men who had none of his lower-middle class pretensions. His income was around 2,400 marks a year when his sons were children; at that period this sum was worth about £120 a year. The Goebbels, like their neighbours, were always concerned to keep up appearances.

One day, when Joseph was aged four, he was sitting on the sofa in the
gute Stube,
the parlour on the first floor of the house. Suddenly he began to cry so unaccountably that the doctor was eventually brought in to examine him. He ordered an immediate operation. Joseph had got infantile paralysis.

Herr Goebbels was a stern and devout man whose austere manner was to some extent mitigated by a rather deliberate sense of humour. He looked to his sons to raise the fortunes of the family towards the ideal status of the prosperous middle class. He was saddened at the sight of the shrunken frame and stooping shoulders of Joseph, whose growth was retarded by the paralysis that permanently affected his foot after the operation had made him a cripple.

Joseph was not the only child in the house. He had two older brothers, Hans and Konrad, and an elder sister, Elizabeth, who died in childhood. His younger sister Maria, to whom he was later to become attached, was not born until Joseph was twelve.

Frau Katherina Goebbels was a simple woman of little education; she was of Dutch origin and became a naturalised German citizen before her marriage, though Goebbels subsequently always concealed this fact.
¹
She spoke German with a very pronounced Rhenish accent. Before her marriage she had been Katherina Maria Odenhausen, daughter of a blacksmith. She was a woman of great strength of character. When her son had become Reichsminister he liked it to be thought that he still held her in great respect. She represented, he said in his published diaries, “the voice of the people”, with whom he wished always to keep in contact. He was fond of telling a story (which he may have invented) of how she had once assembled her children round their father's bedside when he was very ill with pneumonia and had made them hold hands and sing and pray, and how almost miraculously their father had recovered. Though her husband, who in later years quarrelled bitterly with Joseph, died in 1929, she was herself to survive her son.

Now, however, in his childhood, there seemed nothing she could do for him but pray. Leading him by the hand, she took him to church constantly and, kneeling beside him, she implored the Heavenly Father to give him strength to endure the burden of his physical weakness and his undeveloped body.

So Joseph's earliest recollections were of unhappiness and abnormal ity. It was obvious to him that his condition was a worry to his parents, and from his early childhood a seam of self-doubt was deposited deep in his nature. He shut himself away in his little attic room with its sloping ceiling and its single window looking up into the clouds, or if he stood beside it, down into a cramped and gloomy courtyard at the back of the house. It was a bad start in life, particularly for a man who was to become so powerful.

Like other children who for one reason or another cannot follow the rough, gregarious life of boys of their own age, he took to reading very early on. Here he was independent. No one cared what he read, and out of sight was out of mind as far as the rest of the family were concerned. A new energy was born in him, the energy to read voraciously, precociously. Neither his parents nor his teachers offered him much guidance. As soon as school was over and the journey home completed, he shut himself away in his room and read. Among his books was a cheap and already out-dated family encyclopædia, Meyer's
Konversationslexikon,
an abridged edition of a larger work popular at the time. This book became his main source of information about the world and gave him his first sense of the power that knowledge and intellect can achieve.

For as Joseph became older his self-assurance began to develop with him. His large head became less odd-looking as his shoulders matured, and his feats of knowledge and memory, due to his years of reading, began to impress even his father. Joseph's predilection for books seemed to offer some solution to the problem of what to do with him. Was he worth giving the higher education offered by the Gymnasium? Could the meagre family budget stand the strain of pinching and saving in order to send him to a school where he would be expected to stay until he was eighteen years of age? And then perhaps could he win a scholarship to a university? Herr Goebbels must have thought with pride of the chance that one day he could refer to his son as Herr Doktor. And there was no denying that the social status he most desired for his sons went with such a title.

So the decision was taken, and Joseph entered the Gymnasium in Rheydt.

The Gymnasium, the equivalent in Germany of an English grammar school, offered an education which had been little altered for over a century, preparing boys for the final hurdle of the Abiturium or Matura—the examination which entitled those who passed to proceed to the university. Boys were usually eighteen years of age and members of the Ober-Prima (or Upper Sixth) when they took this examination.

Joseph was not popular at school. Already he had learnt to compensate for his lack of normal animal boyishness by showing off his knowledge. He was a good scholar and often top of the form, but few liked him, not even the men whose job it was to teach him. The earliest recollection of his boyhood friend, Fritz Prang, who was also a scholar at the Gymnasium, is that Joseph was always over-anxious to impress his teachers, and that at times he was prepared to be a telltale. Prang remembers one particular occasion when Joseph revealed to Father Mollen, the scripture master, that one of his friends was playing truant. Had Joseph not been a cripple, Prang confessed, he would have joined with the other boys to beat the stuffing out of him. They nicknamed him Ulex after Ulysses, the sly one. Goebbels evidently liked this nickname, which stayed with him during his adolescence.

Goebbels was to develop another taste beside reading early in his life—the enjoyment of music. His father took due note of this. Over thirty years later Goebbels recalled in conversation with his aide von Oven how, when he was about fourteen years old, his father summoned him one day:

He had decided to buy me a piano. We were so little used to having presents, that I couldn't grasp it at first. But we went to look at it; it was to cost 300 marks. Obviously it was second-hand … It fitted very well among all the knick-knacks of the drawing-room, and I was allowed to go in every day to practise … It was meant to be a stage in the plan of life mapped out for me.
²

Goebbels sat through the winter in the unheated
gute Stube
wearing his overcoat, and sometimes he played for the assembled family. The money for this piano had been saved over many years—pfennig by pfennig.

When Goebbels became Reichsminister his official biographers, such as Bade and Krause, were given material to publish which Goebbels believed would be favourable to him. He claimed to be of peasant stock, because his paternal grandfather, a carpenter, had married the daughter of a farmer who lived near Düsseldorf. These half-truths and legends about himself in his youth and in the earlier phases of his career are in some cases difficult now either to prove or to disprove, and they have come to be accepted through constant repetition even by those who have written quite independently about him. There seems, however, to be little doubt that he was deeply upset at being rejected for Army service on the grounds of his physical inferiority.

When in 1914 war began, Joseph was approaching seventeen years of age and was a member of the sixth form at his school. The excitement was intense, and the boys (already all but young men in their own view) challenged each other to enlist for the Army. Among those who queued as volunteers was Joseph, hoping his spirited response to the emergency would be admired. No doubt the others laughed at the idea. In fact, the Army doctor merely glanced at the diminutive and stooping body in front of him and rejected Joseph outright for military service without even bothering to examine him. The boy returned home and locked himself in his room. For a whole day and night he sobbed like a small child. His mother could do nothing with him. For two days he would speak to no one. Perhaps he was showing off, for it is inconceivable that a boy of his intelligence could have dreamed that the Army would accept him.

Once more, then, Joseph was thrust back on his intellect, and his family had to consider seriously the essential problem of the future. It was plain that he would never be called upon to fight and that he should if at all possible be given the chance of a university education. The war situation, indeed, might give him distinct advantages when the majority of young men were being forced to leave their education incomplete. Both of his brothers eventually served in the Army, while he stayed on at school until he was eighteen. Later, both as political agitator and Nazi official, he was often to show exemplary physical courage as if he wanted to dare the thugs who surrounded him to think him a coward. As Reichsminister he was always ready to criticise the Army and its generals.

There was now no doubt at all in the minds of his father and mother that Joseph should become a priest in the Catholic Church. Prelate Mollen remembers his pupil seemed at this early age to be very keen on religion. His parents had done everything they could for their odd and seemingly clever son by enabling him to stay at school until he was nineteen. There Goebbels managed to establish a better relationship as soon as he reached the dignity of the sixth form. It was less necessary for him to assert himself in order to compensate for his physical inferiority. He could shine intellectually without affronting the other boys; his sharp tongue found plenty to do in the school and his voice began to find its fluency when he became a class orator on speech days. He also distinguished himself as an amateur actor in the school plays. When he finally matriculated in 1917 his examination results were the best, and he was invited by the headmaster to give the end-of-term farewell speech on behalf of the school-leavers. Prang remembers this speech to have been very stilted and pompous, and the headmaster, who did not like Goebbels because of his supercilious manner at school, remarked afterwards that one thing at least was certain: Joseph Goebbels would never make an orator!

Goebbels himself seemed at first to have no particular aversion to the idea of entering the priesthood. Indeed, it probably appeared to him to offer the most immediate opportunity of achieving the thing he really wanted—a position in the world. His young and impressionable mind could hardly have been unaware of the importance of even the humblest priest in the devout Catholic community where he had been raised, and he was no doubt already beginning to respond to visions of the power the priest could wield over his fellow-men.

In spite of his poverty, Goebbels managed in 1917 to enrol for a single term at Bonn University, the first of several universities that he was to attend before he gained his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Heidelberg in 1921 at the age of twenty-four. After his initial term at Bonn, his further education became dependent on receiving a university scholarship from the important Catholic charitable institu tion, the Albertus Magnus Society. It is in connection with this institution that one of the earliest and most interesting of the Goebbels legends is associated.

Knowing that he was to present himself before a priest at the interview, it is said that Joseph did what he could to make himself impressive. The priest saw the boy was poised ready to assert his knowledge and so he turned the interview into a disarming discussion of the ordinary affairs of the world. What he discovered during this conversation impressed him, but not in the way either Joseph or his parents had foreseen.

“Young man,” the priest is alleged to have said, “you don't believe in God. You must on no account take Holy Orders.”

It seems a pity that there is no truth whatsoever in this much-repeated story with its Faust-like touch of drama. The first approach to the Albertus Magnus Society was not in fact made until September 1917 when Goebbels was almost twenty years of age. He himself approached the institution directly, not through his parents acting on his behalf. The correspondence survives in the Society's archives, written in Goebbels' neat and scholarly hand that was only too soon to deteriorate into an angular, spidery scrawl which retained the neatness of appearance but was notoriously illegible. The letters reveal he had already begun his university studies but that he and his parents had found the cost prohibitive. The first letter is dated 5th September: