The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

While his mother suggested—and other relatives urged—that he go to work and learn a trade he contented himself with dreaming of his future as an artist and with idling away the pleasant days along the Danube. He never forgot the “downy softness” of those years from sixteen to nineteen when as a “mother’s darling” he enjoyed the “hollowness of a comfortable life.”30 Though the ailing widow found it difficult to make ends meet on her meager income, young Adolf declined to help out by getting a job. The idea of earning even his own living by any kind of regular employment was repulsive to him and was to remain so throughout his life.

It was Strasser’s radicalism, his belief in the “socialism” of National Socialism, which attracted the young Goebbels. Both wanted to build the party on the proletariat. The diary of Goebbels is full of expressions of sympathy for Communism at this time. “In the final analysis,” he wrote on October 23, 1925, “it would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism.” On January 31, 1926, he told himself in his diary: “I think it is terrible that we [the Nazis] and the Communists are bashing in each other’s heads… Where can we get together sometime with the leading Communists?” It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing. “You and I,” he declared, “are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies.”

For their part, Hitler and his lieutenants were determined to bring down not only the Republic but Papen and his barons too. Goebbels expressed the aim in his diary on June 5: “We must disassociate ourselves at the earliest possible moment from this transitional bourgeois cabinet.”