Free B006OAL1QM EBOK by Heinrich Fraenkel, Roger Manvell

destroy Marxism!”
    His eyes shone as he spoke. Then he raised his beautiful hands in a passionate gesture as he concluded his eloquent attempt to convince Strasser he was the man for the job. “As for the bourgeois refuse,” he said, “we shall sweep that away into the dustbin!”
    Strasser was impressed. More particularly he noted the young man's voice, which he handled as a violinist handles his instrument.
    They decided to engage him on secretarial work for the Northern Party organisation and as editorial assistant for the future journal. Goebbels in fact stepped into the place vacated by another young man, Heinrich Himmler, whom the Strassers had dismissed for inefficiency. Himmler went back to his original occupation of poultry-keeping. His time was yet to come.

    * The mark in 1917 was worth about one shilling or twenty-five cents according to the values of the period. By 1920, however, it was beginning to decline prior to the catastrophic inflation of the years 1921–23.
* A gate to a thousand deserts mute and cold—
Whoever lost what Thou hast lost can nowhere rest.
Fly away, bird, and croak your song,
your desert song, Hide, oh fool, thy bleeding heart in ice and mockery.
The crows are croaking as they wildly wing their way to the town.
Soon it will snow. Woe to him who has no home!

CHAPTER TWO
    “History's Children”
    D URING the next two years Goebbels was to establish himself with the National Socialist Party. By the time he entered the employment of the Strassers in 1925, the National Socialists were already reorganised after the unsuccessful putsch of 1923 and had begun the task of spreading their influence over Germany. Their two main centres were Berlin in the north, where Gregor Strasser (a pharmacist who was comfortably off and had great political aspirations) was in the ascendant, and Munich in the south, where Adolf Hitler had taken charge once more. Both men were ambitious for power, but the personal struggle between them was not yet joined.
    Germany herself was in a state of unrest following the period of inflation and of passive resistance against the French and the Belgians. Independently of the rest of the Allies, France and Belgium had occupied the Ruhr in January 1923 and systematically begun to confiscate its coal. The Government of Stresemann had stabilised the currency at the expense of the working and middle classes, and in many parts of Germany there was open strife between the combined forces of the Army and Police and the workers, who were in a state of revolt in the main German cities. Blood flowed in the streets, and there were many killed in these savage riots. The State Governments of Saxony and Thuringia, which contained strong Socialist and Communist elements, were suppressed by force at the instigation of the Reich Government.
    It was in this atmosphere of social and political tensions that the National Socialist Party began to flourish. The Party had originated as the Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei—the German Workers' Party—when Hitler discovered it in Munich in 1919 and became its seventh member.
    Its funds at the time were 7.50 marks. It was violently revolutionary and anti-Semitic. In April 1920 Hitler left the Army to give the whole of his time to politics. He and Feder drew up for the Party a twenty-five point programme which even so early as this demanded, among many reforms, the self-determination of Germany, the abolition of the Treaty of Versailles, the exclusion of Jews from German citizenship, the abolition of unemployment, a widened application of the death penalty to those whom the Party regarded as anti-social, the formation of a National Army and the tight control of the press in the national interest.
    Hitler himself, before he had enlisted in 1914, had spent many years destitute in Vienna. He was born in 1889, and was therefore eight years older than Goebbels. His native town was Braunau, on the Austro-German border. His father, who was illegitimate, was the