‘You Are the Nobility of the Third Reich’

Abstract

Joseph Goebbels was 29 years old when he arrived in Berlin on 9 November 1926 to take charge of the Nazi Party there. He was a small man, weighing only 50 kilogrammes, and slightly over 1.5 metres tall. His head, with its large brown eyes, seemed almost too large for his body. His dark hair was already receding at the temples. Although he walked with a limp, he was active and energetic. He was a man with a totally focused sense of purpose, single-mindedly dedicated to his leader and to advancing the Nazi Party. He had no fear of the Party’s enemies, or of dissident elements within. He was contemptuous of other political groups and politicians, filled with a burning sense of hate and resentment, and he had an unqualified faith in the ultimate success of the Nazi cause.

When in the autumn of 1926, I sought out the office of the Nazi Party in Greater Berlin for the first time, I was genuinely dismayed. It was in a cellar, in a back courtyard on the Potsdamer Strasse, and was known by the Party comrades themselves, with biting self mockery, as the ‘opium den’ … I was strengthened in my conviction that only an energetic, intelligent, and diligent man would suffice to raise up the Party in Berlin. This man arrived in the course of the winter.

Julius Lippert, later the editor of Goebbels’ newspaper Der Angriff.¹