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Headline: When Hitler Threatened Suicide

Publication Date: Sunday, August 12, 1934
Historical Event: Hitler Purges Storm Troopers, Executes Opponents
This database includes 2,331 articles about this event
Tags: Gannett full page downloadable
Article Type: Editorial or Opinion Piece
Newspaper: The Commercial Appeal
Location: Memphis, Tennessee
Page Section and Number: D12
Author/Byline: Milton Bronner
Article Text: WHEN things began breaking badly for the German Nazis early this summer, Chancellor Adolf Hitler moved fast—and decisively.

Before the discontented elements in the party and nation knew quite what was happening, Hitler and his trusted aides had swept down on them with the force of a tornado.

When the smoke cleared away, such prominent folk as Capt. Ernst Roehm and Gen. Kurt von Schleicher—to say nothing of some 70 lesser lights—had been shot to death. Several others had gone to prison. And Hitler's hold on his place was quite unbroken.

The Nazi leader did not always meet a discouraging situation with so much firmness, however.
On Dec. 8, the Nazis' outlook was dark. Chancellor Bruening had resigned some six months before, and the Nazis' hope that Hitler would be summoned to form a cabinet had been dashed, President Hindenburg having put the Junker representative, Col. Franz von Papen, in authority instead.

This has been followed by symptoms, to be sure. The Reichstag had been dissolved in the new election held on July 21 the Nazis had made a great gain, winning 230 of the 607 seats in the Reichstag. But again Hindenburg had refused to name Hitler chancellor. Again the Reichstag had been dissolved, and again there had been a nationwide election.

This one went badly for the Nazis. They lost 34 seats in the Reichstag, and fully 2,000,000 popular votes. The party treasury was empty, the members were deeply discouraged. Papers opposing Hitler announced that his star had set.

Then, to cap the climax, on Dec. 8 Gregor Strasser, one of Hitler's chief lieutenants and organizers, announced his resignation from all of his posts. It was said that he was flirting with the idea of joining the cabinet and taking as many Nazis as possible away from Hitler. Strasser, incidentally, was "liquidated" in this summer's upheavals.

* * *

AND Hitler, in that moment of crisis, made the following statement:

"If the Nazi party falls to pieces, then in three minutes I will make an end with a pistol!"

This is not hearsay, nor is it a tale from some enemy propagandist. It comes from the pen of one of Hitler's most powerful and trusted lieutenants, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda and one of Hitler's right-hand men in the suppression of the recent revolt.

The statement is contained in Dr. Goebbels' recent book, "Von Reichskanzlei"—which, in English, is "From the Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery." The Kaiserhof is the Berlin hotel where Hitler lived when in Berlin as a private citizen.

The Goebbels book consists of extracts from the author's private diary. Its most sensational entry, naturally, is its account of Hitler's suicide threat. The story is told in Goebbels' entry for Dec. 8, 1932. It reads:

"There reigns in the organization the deepest depression. Care about money makes all effort towards the goal impossible. . . . One is internally so sore that one has no deeper wish than to flee for a few weeks from all this business. . . .

"In the evening the Fuehrer is with us at home. No right feeling can be pumped up.

We are all so depressed, especially in the fact that now the danger lcoms up that the party will fall to pieces and that our work will have been done in vain."

* * *

LATER in the evening the party leaders were in Hitler's room in the hotel. A letter of Strasser's had appeared. They all made up their minds that the first job was to destroy all the organization that Strasser had built up within the party. Then, says Goebbels:

"For hours the Fuehrer walked up and down the hotel room with long strides. One sees from his facial features that he is terribly moved. he is embittered and deeply wounded through this treachery. Then for a moment he stood still and said:

" 'If the party falls to pieces, then in three minutes I will make an end with a pistol.' "
Goebbels adds:

"A terrible saying which lay on the soul like a ton."

This revelation is all the more surprising because the Nazi leaders have been careful to teach the German people to consider Hitler almost as a demi-god. In their own writings they have vied with each other in servile praises of the Fuehrer.

Herman Goering, head of the air forces and premier of Prussia, did so in a recent book, and now Goebbels does so in his diary. The Fuehrer is the master. His judgment is infallible. His speeches are masterpieces. His short writings are crystal-clear and marvels of argument and logic.

Goebbels depicts him as iron of nerves, body and mind. No manifold speeches, no cyclonic tours by airplane and automobile from one end of Germany to the other, no lack of food, drink and sleep bother him, no crises disturb him.

And yet—he tells this suicide story, which gives the lie to all the demi-god talk.

* * *

THE little doctor will never die from modesty. In his introduction to his diary, he says in so many words that the Nazi victory is the greatest spiritual and political revolution of all time. It will stand for all eternity.

During the war in allied newspapers and speeches Kaiser Wilhelm used to be ridiculed because he so often spoke so familiarly of the good old German God. Goebbels almost, but not quite, makes Him a Nazi God. He says when the German people massed themselves behind Hitler, one almost imagined he heard the cry that was heard when the Germans crusaded—"God wills it!"
Goebbels gravely adds:

"And so, just as He gave us His blessing, so He denied it to others.

* * *
SCHOOL children learn that an island is a body of land entirely surrounded by water. Goebbels' diary would seem to indicate that we is a wide mouth entirely surrounded by a small, pale, lemon-colored face.

Goebbels fully appreciates Goebbels. He says of one of his speeches:

'I attached with biting wit."

In the Reichstag, General Groener, then minister of war in the Bruening cabinet, made a speech. Goebbels notes that he and some of his companions interrupted him in such manner that the whole house shook with laughter. In the end people only had pity for Groener. He adds:

"A finished man. He has sung his own graveside dirge."

Hate is one of his favorite words—hatred of the Jews, the Socialists, the Communists and even of those surrounding von Papen, whom he dubs "reactionaries."

The rough stuff appeals to him. He relates with relish that at one sitting of the Reichstag:

"A Communist hit one of our party colleagues in the face. That was the signal for a reckoning. It was short and sweet and it was fought out with ink-wells and chairs. In three minutes we were alone in the hall. . . . That's the only way to make ourselves respected. . . . As victors we stand on the ruins."

* * *

REMAINS one more phase of the self-painting. It has always been one of the deep and bitter regrets of his life that he did not and could not serve as a soldier at the front. No war heroism, no uniform, no iron cross for him. Hitler was a common soldier in the front trenches. Goering was an airman. The executed ex-favorite, Roehm, was a front-line officer. They all cashed in heavily on this in their Nazi-speaking campaigns.

That was denied to Goebbels, whose deformed foot debarred him from military service. All right! The doctor knew a trick worth two of that. If he could not be a hero in the trenches, he could be a hero in the Nazi campaigns.

And so a hero he became—as far as his book is concerned, anyway.

He draws a pathetic picture of himself, down with the flu. He holds bedside conferences with his lieutenants, despite all his aches and pains. Contrary to the orders of his doctor, the call of duty is such that, burning with fever, he, nevertheless, forsakes his bed and goes forth into the night—to make a three-hour speech!

If Goebbels was not allowed to face the shot and shell of the allied enemy during the World War, he assures his reader that he faced plenty of dangers during his propaganda work. Once he tells how one evening they were riding in an automobile in the industrial Rhineland district around Duesseldorf.

The streets in one town were jammed with Communists and Socialists. Things looked menacing. For a time, their car could move neither forward nor backward. Goebbels and all his companions—big, husky nazi Storm Troopers—had their hands on their pistols. They were prepared to sell their lives dearly.

But, finally, they plunged their car forward and the threatening masses made way for them, cursing them as they went. Goebbels' little hero—himself—had found a way and come through unseathed.
History Unfolded Contributor: Joyce R.
Location of Research: Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)