Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

290 DER FUEHRERradcly way you have shown me ways so fundamentally new. . . .'Goebbels suggested to Hitler that the party needed a new 'general staff,'of course with himself on it: 'The men are available. Just call them. Orrather, summon them one after another just as in your eyes they seem todeserve it. . . . Then a day may come on which everything smashes,when the mob around you fumes and grumbles and roars: Crucify him!Then we shall stand like iron, and shout and sing: Hosanna!' Acomparison with the Savior was practically de rigueur in a letter to theparty leader.With his well-directed flattery, his affected ardor, Goebbels successfullypenetrated the circle of little men among whom Hitler feltprivately at ease — all of them physically small. He also was a dwarf;the 'scheming dwarf as the betrayed Gregor Strasser called him fromnow on. He had Jewish blood, the Strasser clique said, and a proof of itwas his club foot; for men thus 'marked' by nature were always of mixedrace. One of this circle, Erich Koch, many years later president of EastPrussia, attempted to prove this in a newspaper article. He comparedGoebbels with Talleyrand, the club-footed French statesman who hadbetrayed Napoleon. Like him, he asserted, Goebbels was a man of'racially conditioned mental and physical disharmony.' Among theNational Socialist thugs and murderers, Goebbels was like a boastingcripple in the stands at a football game, loudest of all in cheering theplayers. Goebbels, wrote Koch, knew how 'to dazzle, to inflate himself,to circulate false rumors, ruthlessly to exploit the devotion of others, tosqueeze them like a lemon and throw them away, to appropriate theservices of others for himself.' He was 'an expert in the arts of slander,intrigue, and falsehood.' Assuredly this young dwarf had an uncannyknowledge of the weaknesses of humanity and knew how to exploitthem, because he knew better than other men what weakness is. Menlike him,' Koch concluded, were 'intelligent but boundlessly ambitiousand unfeeling egoists, who up to now have done nothing but harm to thepeople.'Essentially Koch's criticism applied just as well to Hitler himself; forin Hitler's self-pitying nature there is something of the dwarfish-nesscharacteristic of Goebbels. True that Goebbels coldly copied his Fuhrer,learning his tricks of public speaking, poster-writing, theat-