Hitler's Last Hostages Page 11
Grosz kept tabs on the mood in Germany via the German consulate. In late August, a cultural attaché took him on a tour of Wall Street and the Woolworth Building, and he also attended an embassy stag party. At the event, a rabbi, stroking a long beard, whispered to Grosz that apparently the controversial “Professor Grosz” was in attendance. Upon learning that he was speaking with Grosz himself, the rabbi expressed incredulity that the dapper dandy he was talking to, despite the artist’s penchant for alcohol, was so polite. Chatting with the rabbi, Grosz’s mood changed from bemused to alarmed when he observed a man a few steps away who was violently puffing on a cigarette while raucously praising Hitler and cursing France.61
Grosz viewed the cursing Nazi sympathizer as isolated evidence in America of what already was true in Germany: Nazism was now mainstream. In February 1932, Hitler had finally obtained German citizenship and was thus eligible to become Chancellor. In April, German voters reelected Hindenburg with 19.4 million votes, but Hitler received 13.4 million, mainly due to his sustained ability to court the bourgeoisie and maintain his base among workers. In early January 1932, he had made a pivotal speech to the Düsseldorf Industry Club, where he sported a dark pinstriped suit and gave a two-and-a-half-hour presentation laying out general plans to make Germany prosperous again. Rather than ranting and raving, he remained calm and composed, even while delivering ominous ultimatums. “Either we will succeed in once more forging out of this conglomerate of parties, leagues, associations, ideologies, upper-class conceit and lower-class madness an iron-hard national body, or Germany will finally perish,” he told the industrialists.62
Hitler’s ascendency was not a foregone conclusion in the autumn when elections were set for 6 November 1932. Economic forecasts predicted that Germany was stabilizing. Foreign nations, particularly America and Great Britain, showed increasing respect for Germany. The improvement made both Hitler and Goebbels nervous.
The NSDAP publicly argued that, if the party were to fall, the communists might take over, a fear that resonated with numerous Germans. Still, it was not enough to prevent the NSDAP from losing 4 percent of the vote. Many optimists in Germany saw this as a sign that the Nazis had peaked, but Grosz was not fooled. Hindenburg, by now eighty-five, was clearly in significant physical decline. Though he enjoyed his titular role, he was not fit for the demands of daily governance. “So, Wiz, let me know what’s going on over there—when is Hitler coming to power?” Grosz wrote to his publisher and friend Wieland Herzfelde.63
Grosz and Eva made the decision to emigrate to America after years of harassment by the Nazis and Hitler’s supporters. The family had already received death threats before Hitler’s election. Once, Grosz had picked up an iron pipe in front of his door, recognizing it as the kind that the Sturmabteilung used to beat Jewish Germans on the streets. A note fell out of it reading, “This is for you, you old Jew-Pig, if you keep going with what you’re doing.” The artist knew that it would not matter to the perpetrators that he was not Jewish. On another occasion, a group of SA men called his home, threatening to come beat him up. Grosz warned that both he and Eva were armed with pistols and had no problem shooting them. “Come then,” he dared. They never did. Yet clearly one day they would.64
A life in America for himself, Eva, and his children was the answer, Grosz decided. “Everyone’s advising me to stay here and bring my family over,” he wrote back home. He began signing his letters bilingually with “Umamung and Kisses,” combining “kisses” with the German word for “hug.”65 The Museum of Modern Art’s director, Alfred Barr, told him he would help Grosz’s career in New York if the artist wished to emigrate permanently. His popularity both as a teacher and as an artist ensured he would be able to earn a steady income, perhaps even more money than in Berlin. “I think America is a fine and astonishing land and full of virile self-sufficiency. I hope to make my home here,” he told a reporter for Americana Magazine.66 Grosz returned to Germany and quickly packed with Eva, sailing back to America on 12 January 1933. By now, the couple had a five-year-old, Peter, and a one-year-old, Martin. Knowing that taking the boys would arouse suspicion, they left them with family members so that they could be sent after the school year ended. George and Eva took only three crates and three suitcases. The artist rolled up two of his greatest masterworks, Eclipse of the Sun and The Pillars of Society, and hid them in a basement in Berlin.67
Leaving behind the boys was far worse, but Grosz also mourned this loss of his masterpieces. To protect their friends, the couple did not tell any of them that they were leaving, writing to them in euphemistic terms only once they had reached the safety of America. Grosz journaled that it felt like he was “dismembering” his life, limb by limb.68 Escaping Germany was vital, Grosz noted, not only for the safety of his family but also to avoid complicity with the growing Nazi power. Still, he knew this sacrifice would permanently damage his career and livelihood. The East Coast would become Grosz’s home for the next twenty-five years. When he finally did return to Germany, he would do so as an American citizen.
The eighteen days after Grosz left Berlin were a blur of political machinations. Six days after Grosz and his family sailed, Hitler was demanding to replace Franz von Papen as Hindenburg’s Chancellor. A meeting took place in which Hitler took Oskar von Hindenburg, the President’s son, into a different room. Whatever transpired in the confidential talks, the younger Hindenburg came out agreeing that Hitler would become Chancellor and von Papen would be Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor. Hindenburg was confused and disgruntled, but von Papen was confident that Hitler could be manipulated and his ambitions contained. The Nazis considered the appointment a triumph. Goebbels quickly organized the assembly of a crowd on Wilhelmstraße, the street where government buildings were located. Twenty-five thousand Hitler adherents, carrying torches, marched through the Brandenburg Gate as Hitler was watching contentedly out a window.
A few days later, Nazi troops invaded and ransacked Grosz’s studio, looking in vain for the artist and his family.
From the start of his chancellorship on 30 January 1933, Hitler saw the promotion of “Great German Art” as a top priority. For years, the forty-three-year-old had spent large amounts of time drawing images and plans for a new party headquarters and the artistic revamping of Berlin.69 “He has a marvelous nose” for sniffing out and planning new projects, recollected Goebbels, praising his boss’s “genius instincts.”70 Hitler declared that he would first rebuild the chancellery to make it more artistically and architecturally reflective of the might of German culture instead of the “mere cigar box” it was.71
For many German artists who also felt German culture had been marginalized, Hitler’s ascent represented hope. One such artist was one of Grosz’s childhood heroes, Emil Nolde, who was busy working to establish himself as a supporter of Hitler. Nolde sought out help at the highest echelons, from Joseph Goebbels himself.
In this new German order, the stakes were clear: artists were either revered or reviled. Within months, Nolde would learn his fate, and he was determined to be on the powerful side of history.
CHAPTER IV
ADOLF’S SILVER HAMMER
“You know, I don’t particularly like this exaggerated anti-Semitism.… I can’t say the Jews are my best friends, but I believe you cannot rid the world of them through cursing and polemics or even through pogroms. And even if you could, it would be demeaning and beneath human dignity.”
—Joseph Goebbels, 1919
ADOLF HITLER’S PROPAGANDA MINISTER, JOSEPH Goebbels, vehemently disliked discussing the weather in general conversation. For the thirty-five-year-old, it was a pedestrian topic that offered scant room for wit. Yet, on 15 October 1933, he noted with relief that the sunny skies boded well for a major political relations event: that day, only nine months after ascending to power, Hitler was preparing to lay the cornerstone of Munich’s House of German Art.
The building was to replace the Glaspalast, a striking iron-and-glass exhibition space that had bur
ned down on 6 June 1931, victim to an unknown arsonist. The fire destroyed 3,000 works, including a masterpiece by Caspar David Friedrich, whom Hitler and many Germans revered for his nineteenth-century paintings glorifying nature’s mystical power and, within it, man’s dominant position. Friedrich’s lost work, portraying the crumbling ruins of an ancient Catholic cloister, now seemed to be a metaphor for Hitler’s broader plans for the House of German Art: state-controlled culture would usurp Christianity as Germany’s spiritual compass. “We ourselves will become a Church,” summarized Hitler.1
Goebbels, like Hitler, had been confirmed Catholic but began believing in a divine supremacy within himself once he became a Nazi: “If God has made me in his image, then I am God like him,” he concluded.2 Both he and Hitler referred to the new museum as a “temple,” part of the move to accustom Germans to the Nazi plan to become the country’s dominant authority on spiritual matters. Already over the summer, the Nazi administration had revamped student textbooks to include religious language when discussing the Führer and German culture. To undermine respect for the church, Goebbels arranged leaks of previously ignored sex scandals involving pedophile priests and their young victims; he also scheduled particularly entertaining Hitler Youth outings to conflict with more staid youth events organized by the Catholic Church.3
Goebbels planned for the House of German Art to displace the financial and cultural influence within Germany of artists like George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and Käthe Kollwitz. In doing so, the nexus of the art world would shift from independent individuals to government-controlled ministries financed by corporate sponsors and taxpayers. While previous ministers had raised paltry sums to refurbish the Glaspalast by hawking lottery tickets, Goebbels assembled a package of incentives: a fund-raiser on 4 August at which famous entertainers performed, tax rebates for donations above 25,000 reichsmarks, and a well-designed English-German promotional book illustrating the completed museum plans. His efforts raised an astounding three million reichsmarks by September 1933.4 Eager to ingratiate themselves with the new regime, the heads of Bosch, Opel, Siemens, and Krupp—whose steel Hitler routinely praised in speeches as analogous to the Aryan male ideal—contributed copious funds.
At the opening of the museum, Hitler’s remarks were intended primarily for the donors and the press. “May a new German art blossom from the flame that destroyed the old Glaspalast on 6 June 1931, and may the new house offer a sanctuary for centuries!”5 he exclaimed before grasping a commemorative silver hammer to tap three times on the foundation stone to signal the coming of the Third Reich. It was the propagandistic triumph that Goebbels had been anticipating for months. Yet, as the first ping of Hitler’s silver hammer sounded and the cameras rolled, the hammer head wobbled. With the third and final ping, it flew off the handle.
So did Hitler. Descending into a raging tantrum, Hitler ordered filmmakers to cut the scene and demanded that the press self-censor the debacle.6 The German press, independent only a few months before, unanimously cowed to pressure, reporting that “the Führer had completed the act of laying the foundation stone with three sharp, silvery strokes.”7
Though not an ideal outcome, the Foundation Stone Ceremony’s comic end became a triumph of sorts for Goebbels, proving to the Propaganda Minister how once-independent institutions were now complying with policies that he and Hitler had introduced a mere eight months before. Only days before the event, Goebbels had required journalists to join his Reich Press Association, which banned non-Aryans or those married to non-Aryans. In one fell swoop, it transformed journalists into civil servants who could be held legally responsible for tarnishing their government’s reputation. There were few protests.8 Employing his sly sense of humor, Goebbels referred to this as the “Neue Sachlichkeit,” German for the “new reality,” which also was the name of the art movement to which George Grosz and Otto Dix had belonged.9
Ordinary Germans underestimated Goebbels, a misperception that Goebbels was happy to indulge so that the nation could unify behind the single figure of the Führer. Those within Hitler’s inner circle, however, long had observed how Goebbels shaped the Führer’s social and cultural policies. Many resented the Propaganda Minister’s success, albeit quietly. Other than Hitler, observed Goebbels in his diary, “everyone is jealous of me. Nobody likes me,” adding, “Ugh, shit!”10
Since boyhood, Goebbels had cultivated specific qualities that now made him indispensable to Hitler. A talent for manipulating established social and legislative systems, a genuine belief in German cultural superiority, an objective brilliance as a wordsmith and political strategist, and a slowly developing anti-Semitism all coalesced to make Joseph Goebbels the most reliable and dangerous enabler of the Führer.
Born on 29 October 1897 in the center-west German town of Rheydt, Paul Joseph Goebbels was the fourth of six children. His father, Fritz, was a clerk in a wick-making factory, while his mother, Katharina, was a homemaker. As a child, he frequently suffered from lung inflammations and had a malformed right foot, hampering his ability to roughhouse with other boys. Yet Goebbels had a knack for socializing and still made friends fairly easily. Studying German history and literature awakened in Goebbels an awareness that soaring rhetoric and German romanticism could stoke passionate emotions that lay dormant in ordinary Germans.11 In April 1917, he began studying at the University of Bonn, undertaking an eclectic curriculum of art history, German folklore, psychology, and the causes and preventions of venereal diseases. His hobbies were drinking beer and bowling, the latter being an interest he would come to share with Hitler.12
As a child and a young adult before the Great War, Goebbels did not display any signs of anti-Semitism. For his PhD advisor, Goebbels’s first pick was the Heidelberg-based Jewish German historian Friedrich Gundolf. The renowned literary professor was inundated with research, however, and referred the candidate to fellow Jewish German historian Max von Waldberg, who accepted his application. Goebbels made his PhD relevant to Germany’s volatile political climate by arguing that romantic author Wilhelm von Schütz’s work signaled a desire in Germans for a political and cultural leader who drew on German Romanticism. “All these little people, the smallest, are crying out for leaders, but no great man appears who will embrace them all,” Goebbels argued.13 After receiving his doctorate in 1921 at just twenty-four years old, Goebbels resolved to search for just such a leader.
Soon, while working as a journalist for the Westdeutsche Landeszeitung, Goebbels entered into a sexual relationship with Else Janke, a schoolteacher from his hometown, which British, Belgian, and French troops had occupied after the Great War. “I need to write this bitterness out of my soul,” he complained to her. Sensing his angst, Else gave him his first diary, and he embarked on a habit that he maintained assiduously until his suicide twenty-one years later.14 Goebbels dedicated his first entry of 17 October 1923 to Else, writing, “My dear, kind love! You raise me up and give me new courage when despair threatens. I cannot express how indebted I am to you.”15
When Else mentioned that her mother was Jewish, however, Goebbels recoiled, describing his “enchantment” with her as “ruined.”16 Goebbels was confused by his own intolerance; he had never considered himself anti-Semitic, but now, on realizing he was having sex with a Jewish woman, he felt an unease he could not explain. Even as he refused to break things off, he had a nagging feeling that he was “someone sent by God to await His word” to assist a modern-day Messiah figure to lead the Germans back to greatness, just as John the Baptist had done for his cousin, Jesus.17
On 13 March 1924 Goebbels first wrote in his diary about Adolf Hitler by name. His initial reservations about Hitler’s unsophisticated rantings at large rallies evolved as he realized that he could be of unique service to Hitler by helping him appeal to a wider audience.18 Goebbels identified with Hitler’s views on German cultural supremacy, including the Führer’s conviction that “blond, blue-eyed” Aryan immigrants had made ancient Persia, Greece, and Egypt into su
perpowers.19 Two weeks after he first wrote about Hitler, his view of Else definitively soured. Goebbels began referring to her as “a human dumpling” and “mood killer” with the “curse of Jewish blood” and concluded that his loyalty to Hitler, whom he still dreamed of meeting, necessitated his severing ties with Else.20 “I’d love to make her my wife, if only she weren’t a half-breed,” he concluded in his journal shortly before ending the relationship.21
On 12 July 1925, Goebbels finally met Hitler in person at a conference in Weimar. “What a voice, what gestures, what passion; just as I wished him to be,” he wrote, praising Hitler’s “large, blue eyes, like stars” and anointing him “the coming dictator,” adding, “I’m ready to sacrifice everything for him.”22 The two immediately became close. For Christmas 1925, Hitler gave Goebbels a leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf. Goebbels, by then a cultural policy reporter for the NSDAP’s propaganda newspaper, the Völkische Freiheit, privately noted that Hitler’s writing was “ungainly” and “sometimes unbearable.” Still, he tirelessly promoted the book in public.23
Despite its best-seller status, most Germans who bought Mein Kampf did not actually read it and were consequently ignorant of how it explicitly outlined Hitler’s agenda a full nine years before Germans elected him into power. In his book, Hitler argued that historic wars between Europe’s Catholics and Protestants had been instigated by Jews to divide Aryans.24 Jesus was not Jewish and was himself anti-Semitic, Hitler maintained.25 “The Jew,” Hitler argued, throughout history was “always only a parasite in the body of other peoples,” adding, “He always looks for a new feeding soil for his race.”26 “In the course of the centuries,” Hitler wrote, Jews living in Europe had evolved so that “their external appearance had become European and human,” but they actually were “degenerate” strains of humanity that produced moral and cultural abscesses in “civilized” societies.27 “When carefully cutting open such a growth, one could find a Jüdelein, blinded by the sudden light, like a maggot in a rotting corpse,” he wrote, using the German equivalent of the English slur “kike.”28