Goebbels (David Irving) - Rvfonline.com

goebbels. mastermind of the third reich 257
open, empty eyes. The delicate features have been trampled to a bloody pulp. Long,
deep gashes have been torn into the thin body, a lethal wound gapes between lungs
and heart.’ 29 The next day he buried the artist Professor Ernst Schwarz, an S.A. officer
gunned down in a communist ambush a week before. 30
ONE evening Dr Goebbels returned home excited, limped up and down chain smoking
for a while, then told Magda he had had a splendid idea. ‘Hitler himself must
stand for president,’ he said. Hitler however proved unexpectedly difficult to persuade:
he wanted the opposition to come out with their candidates before making up
his own mind. The other gauleiters were critical of Hitler’s reticence, and feared he
was prevaricating yet again. Hitler acted with studied calm. ‘He’s a wonderful man
to work with,’ Goebbels wrote in ‘Kaiserhof’. ‘There’s no human being less equipped
to be a tyrant than he.’ 31
Still delaying his decision on February 9 Hitler reviewed fifteen thousand S.A.
stormtroopers in the Sport Palace. Goebbels enthused, though only in the first edition
of ‘Kaiserhof’, ‘Chief of Staff Röhm has pulled off a miracle.’ This embarrassing
laudation peared only in the first edition of ‘Kaiserhof’, and was struck out of all
editions published after June 1934. 32
Police chief Grzesinski gagged at the prospect of Hitler, his arch enemy, becoming
president. This centurion of social democracy made little pretence of impartiality:
‘How shameful it is,’ he declared in Leipzig, ‘that millions of Germans are trotting
along behind a foreigner… How shameful that this foreigner, Hitler, not only conducts
serious talks with the government on foreign affairs, but is able to speak to
foreign press representatives about Germany’s future and about Germany’s foreign
interests without somebody seeing him off with a dog-whip.’ 33 Dr Goebbels made
hay with that remark. 34 In Angriff he pointed out how often Grzesinski had banned
Nazis for precisely the same kind of incitement to violence. 35 ‘Let’s see,’ he crowed in
‘Kaiserhof’, published when he already knew the answer, ‘which of us gets seen off
with a dog-whip out of Germany.’ 36