Joseph Goebbels

• 1. Introduction

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  On the evening of the 1st of May 1945, Joseph Goebbels walked up from an underground bunker into the garden of the Reich Chancellery and ended his life. Hours earlier he had served a single day as Chancellor of Germany, named to the post in Hitler's will. Before he died, his six young children were poisoned with a cyanide compound. The man who arranged that night had spent two decades shaping what tens of millions of Germans were allowed to hear, read, and believe. He had a deformed right foot, walked with a limp, and once dreamed of becoming an author. How did a rejected writer with a doctorate in philology become the voice of a dictatorship? What did he know about the murder of Europe's Jews, and when? And why did a man who privately mocked some of the Nazis' racial theories become one of the few top officials to defend extermination in public?

• 2. The Failed Author

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  In 1921, Goebbels wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called Michael, of which only Parts I and III survived. He felt he was writing his own story. The book did not find a publisher until 1929, when the Nazi Party's own house, Eher-Verlag, released it. Born on the 29th of October 1897 in Rheydt, an industrial town near Mönchengladbach, Goebbels grew up in a Catholic family of modest means. His father, Fritz, was a factory clerk; his mother, Katharina Maria, came from a Dutch village near the German border. A congenital problem left his right foot turned inward, thicker and shorter than his left. An operation before grammar school failed to fix it, and he wore a metal brace and a special shoe. That condition got him rejected for military service in the First World War. He was the top student of his Gymnasium class and gave the speech at the awards ceremony in 1917. His parents hoped he would become a Catholic priest, an idea he seriously considered. Instead he studied literature and history across several universities, aided by a scholarship from the Albertus Magnus Society. At Heidelberg he wrote his doctoral thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz, a minor 19th-century romantic dramatist. He had wanted Friedrich Gundolf as his supervisor; it did not seem to bother him that Gundolf was Jewish. Goebbels received his PhD on the 21st of April 1922. His plays did not sell. Forced to work as a caller on the stock exchange and a bank clerk in Cologne, a job he detested, he was dismissed in August 1923. He began keeping a diary in 1923 and continued it for the rest of his life.

• 3. Bow To The Genius

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  When Goebbels joined the Nazi Party around 1924, he became member number 8762. He was drawn to Hitler's charisma and conviction, but his first loyalty lay elsewhere. Gregor Strasser, a leading organiser in northern Germany, hired him for newspaper and secretarial work, and Goebbels became business manager of Strasser's short-lived National Socialist Working Association. The northern wing held a more socialist outlook than Hitler's Munich group. In November 1926, Strasser began revising the party platform, and Hitler summoned 60 Gauleiters and leaders to a conference in Bamberg, where he spoke for two hours repudiating the new programme. Hitler dismissed socialism as a Jewish creation and promised no expropriation of private property. Goebbels was horrified. He wrote in his diary: "I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That's the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away." Hitler then arranged meetings in Munich and sent his own car to collect the men at the railway station, which impressed Goebbels. After Hitler offered his hand in reconciliation, Goebbels capitulated completely. He wrote: "I love him... He has thought through everything," and later, "Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius." The National Socialist Working Association was disbanded and Hitler's authority was greatly strengthened. Soon Hitler offered him the Berlin Gauleiter post, a move that quietly dissolved the very northwestern group Goebbels had served under Strasser.

• 4. Inventing The Spectacle

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  The Berlin party numbered about 1,000 members when Goebbels arrived, and he cut it to a core of 600 of the most active. He instituted membership fees and charged admission to meetings to raise money. Aware that publicity could be positive or negative, he deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, including attacks on the Communist Party. He adapted commercial advertising to politics: catchy slogans, large type, red ink, and cryptic headers that pulled readers into the fine print. Like Hitler, he rehearsed his speeches in front of a mirror. He timed his almost-always-late entrances for maximum emotional impact, surrounding speeches with ceremonial marches, singing, banners, loudspeakers, and decorative flames. His provocations got the Nazi Party banned from Berlin on the 5th of May 1927, and Goebbels himself faced a public speaking ban until late October. During that ban he founded the newspaper Der Angriff, or The Attack, an aggressive modern paper that at one point carried 126 pending libel suits. Its circulation was initially only 2,000. A favourite target was the Jewish Deputy Chief of the Berlin Police, Bernhard Weiß, whom Goebbels nicknamed "Isidore" and hounded relentlessly to provoke a crackdown he could exploit. In 1930, when an SA leader named Horst Wessel was shot by two Communists and later died, Goebbels turned him into a martyr and made Wessel's march, the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the party anthem. He won a Reichstag seat as one of the first 12 Nazi members, gaining immunity from a long list of charges, including a three-week jail sentence for insulting Weiß.

• 5. Masters Of Germany

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  On the 25th of March 1933, Goebbels said he hoped to raise the party's support from the 37 per cent of the last free election to 100 per cent. By then he headed the newly created Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, set up in the 18th-century Ordenspalais across from the Reich Chancellery. The ministry was organised into seven departments, covering everything from radio and film to art, music, and counter-propaganda. After all trade union offices were disbanded and replaced by the German Labour Front, he wrote in his diary on the 3rd of May: "We are the masters of Germany." He suggested the Nazi book burning in Berlin and gave a speech at the ceremony on the 10th of May. Control came through chambers. Anyone wishing to work in film, broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, or theatre had to join the corresponding chamber of the Reichskulturkammer. Those whose views opposed the regime could simply be excluded and silenced. Journalists, now considered state employees, had to prove Aryan descent back to the year 1800, and the same applied to a spouse. The Editor's Law of the 4th of October 1933 required journalists to regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life. Radio was his obsession. He placed stations under a national broadcasting corporation in July 1934 and urged manufacturers to build cheap home sets called the Volksempfänger; by 1938 nearly ten million had been sold. Loudspeakers in factories, schools, and public squares carried party broadcasts to almost every German. Albert Speer later said the regime, through radio and loudspeaker, deprived 80 million people of independent thought. After the war began, listening to foreign radio became illegal, and spreading foreign news could bring the death penalty. In 1934 Goebbels published an account of Hitler's rise that sold around 660,000 copies, his best-selling work in his lifetime.

• 6. The Manufactured Image

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  Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, captured the carefully choreographed 1934 Nuremberg Rally and won the gold medal at the 1935 Venice Film Festival. Goebbels glorified Hitler as a heroic and infallible leader at the centre of a cult of personality, some of it spontaneous and some stage-managed. He helped plan the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. His Degenerate Art Exhibition ran in Munich from July to November 1937 and drew over two million visitors, with a degenerate music exhibition the following year. Privately, his judgements were sharper than his speeches suggested. He spoke of the "rubbish of race-materialism" and called biological racism unnecessary for Nazi ideology. He described Himmler's ideology as "in many regards, mad" and thought Alfred Rosenberg's racial theories were ridiculous. The contradiction ran deep. He repeatedly urged Hitler to act against the Jews and instituted discriminatory measures in Berlin, including bans on public transport and marking Jewish shops. After the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was killed in Paris in November 1938 by Herschel Grynszpan, Goebbels released inflammatory material and, in a speech on the night of the 8th of November, obliquely called for violence while making it look spontaneous. The result was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in which at least a hundred Jews were killed, hundreds of synagogues damaged or destroyed, and around 30,000 Jewish men sent to concentration camps. Even Goebbels was not the most efficient at everything; one observer wrote in 1938 that he liked nobody and was liked by nobody, yet ran the most efficient Nazi department.

• 7. A Judgment Barbaric

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  On the 6th of March 1942, Goebbels received a copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, which indicated that Europe's Jews were to be sent to extermination camps in occupied Poland and killed. He had already ordered, as of the 5th of September 1941, that all German Jews wear a yellow badge. Deportations from Berlin began on the 18th of October 1941, with some Jews shot on arrival at destinations like Riga and Kaunas. His diary leaves no doubt about what he understood. On the 27th of March 1942 he wrote: "In general, it can probably be established that 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to work.... A judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric but thoroughly deserved." He discussed the fate of the Jews with Hitler almost every time they met, and he completely supported the decision. He was one of the few top Nazi officials to do so publicly. He helped write Hitler's Reichstag speech of the 30th of January 1939, which threatened that a world war would bring not the victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. His Sportpalast speech of the 18th of February 1943 demanded total war and carried a strong antisemitic element. During the live broadcast he accidentally began to mention the extermination of the Jews, words that were omitted from the published text. While he had pressed for the expulsion of Berlin's Jews since 1935-62,000 still lived in the city in 1940, kept there because they were needed in the armaments industry.

• 8. The Captain And His Ship

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  After midnight on the 29th of April 1945, Goebbels stood as a witness while Hitler married Eva Braun in the Führerbunker and dictated his last will and testament. The war was already lost. After the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 and the defeats that followed, Goebbels had recognised it could not be won. He had even raised the idea of a separate peace with the Soviets or Britain, and Hitler rejected it. Appointed Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on the 23rd of July 1944, he freed up an additional half a million men for service, though many came from the very armaments industry that needed them, putting him in conflict with Speer. The Volkssturm militia he helped lead drew men aged 45 to 60 with rudimentary training and poor weapons, and the programme was deeply unpopular. On the 23rd of April 1945 he proclaimed to Berliners: "I call on you to fight for your city... Your Gauleiter is amongst you. He and his colleagues will remain in your midst. His wife and children are here as well." Hitler's will named no successor as Führer but appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor, with Karl Dönitz as Reich President and Bormann as Party Minister. Goebbels wrote a postscript refusing Hitler's order to leave Berlin, calling it the first time in his life he had not complied. On the 1st of May he carried out his sole act as Chancellor: he dictated a letter to Soviet General Vasily Chuikov informing him of Hitler's death and requesting a ceasefire, which was rejected. To Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss he said: "The captain must not leave his sinking ship... with little children I will not be able to make it, especially with a leg like mine." That evening an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, injected the six children with morphine, and cyanide was administered. The remains of the Goebbels family were repeatedly buried and exhumed. In 1970 a KGB team, on the authority of Yuri Andropov, burned, crushed, and scattered them into the Biederitz river near Magdeburg, a tributary of the Elbe.