1938 by Giles MacDonogh

Author:Giles MacDonogh
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

AUGUST

Goebbels had been using the garden pavilions at his houses in Lanke on the Schwanenwerder peninsula near Berlin to entertain “Babkova”—the Czech actress Lida Baarova, who lived around the corner in Schwanenwerder with the actor Gustav Fröhlich. Despite calling the summer “The loveliest holidays of my life!” Goebbels does not allude directly in his journal to the affair, but there are hints at problems within the Goebbels ménage. At the beginning of August he decided it was time to tell Magda. Rather than asking for a divorce or a separation, Goebbels proposed retaining both wife and mistress. At first Magda does not seem to have been too put out: “It is so good to possess a person who is so totally dedicated to you,” he wrote. On the 3rd he had an “important discussion” with Magda. “She is of great importance to me. I am happy that it is now out on the table.” Clearly there were arguments for all that. On the 9th he recorded unity with Magda: “Let us hope it lasts.”

For two weekends Lida Baarova lived in the house at Schwanenwerder. Magda tried to make both him and his lover see reason, but she also asked her husband’s second-in-command at the Ministry of Propaganda, Karl Hanke, to compile a dossier on Goebbels’s infidelities. When she learned how numerous they were, she had him banned from the house. Magda poured her heart out to Emmy Göring. Hermann Göring naturally knew all about the affair from the “Brown Sheets” his manservant Robert brought him with his morning coffee. He called Hitler and told him that Magda desired to see him urgently; she wanted a divorce.

On August 15, Hitler returned to Berlin. The Goebbelses, husband and wife, were summoned in turns. Magda informed the Führer that she wanted no more to do with her husband. Goebbels went to see Hitler next. Hitler told him that he was a public figure and could not give in to private scandal. He had a choice between dropping Lida or forfeiting his career. This was a Führerbefehl—an order from the all-highest. He was not allowed to see the actress again. Goebbels’s conversation with Hitler shook him to the marrow: “The Führer is like a father to me. I am so grateful to him. At this difficult time I need something like this. I am taking very difficult decisions, but they are final.”

Hitler was not only sentimentally attached to Goebbels’s wife; he had a horror of scandals, as he had demonstrated at the time of the Blomberg-Fritsch Crisis. He also had his time cut out with his Czech project. It transpired that Goebbels’s various conquests had been found work through the Ministry of Propaganda. When Hitler discovered this, he was even angrier with Goebbels. In the end ambition got the better of him. Goebbels rang Lida Baarova: “A very long and very sad telephone conversation. And now a new life begins. My youth is at an end.”

The actress, who was genuinely smitten with Goebbels,

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