Joseph Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels (born October 29, 1897, Rheydt, Germany—died May 1, 1945, Berlin) was the minister of propaganda for the German Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. A master orator and propagandist, he is generally accounted responsible for presenting a favourable image of the Nazi regime to the German people. Following Hitler’s suicide, Goebbels served as chancellor of Germany for a single day before he and his wife, Magda Goebbels, had their six children poisoned and then took their own lives.

Goebbels was the third of five children of Friedrich Goebbels, a pious Roman Catholic factory clerk, and Katharina Maria Odenhausen. His parents provided him with a high school education and also helped support him during the five years of his undergraduate studies. He was exempted from military service during World War I because of his clubfoot (presumably a result of having contracted polio as a child), which later enabled his enemies to draw a parallel with the cloven hoof and limp of the Devil. This defect played a disastrous role in his life by engendering in Goebbels a strong desire to be compensated for his misfortune.

After graduating from Heidelberg University in 1922 with a doctorate in German philology, Goebbels pursued literary, dramatic, and journalistic efforts, writing an Expressionist novel in diary form in the 1920s. Although not yet involved in politics, Goebbels, in common with most of his contemporaries, was imbued with a nationalistic fervour made more intense by the frustrating outcome of the war. During his university days, a friend also introduced him to socialist and communist ideas. Antibourgeois from his youth, Goebbels remained so despite his later upper-class affectations. On the other hand, initially he was not anti-Semitic. The high school teachers he valued most were Jews, and he was at one time engaged to a half-Jewish girl. As a young man his options remained wide open as he contemplated political involvement. Indeed, it was an accident that determined the party he was to join.

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In the autumn of 1924 Goebbels made friends with a group of National Socialists. A gifted speaker, he became the district administrator of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers’ Party) in Elberfeld and editor of a biweekly National Socialist magazine. In November 1926 Hitler appointed him district leader in Berlin. The NSDAP, or Nazi Party, had been founded and developed in Bavaria, and, up to that time, there had been practically no party organization in Berlin, the German capital. Goebbels owed his new appointment to the prudent choice he made in a conflict between Gregor Strasser, representing the “left-wing” anticapitalist faction of the NSDAP, and the “right-wing” party leader, Hitler. In this conflict, Goebbels displayed opportunism by taking Hitler’s side against his own inner convictions.

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Goebbels proceeded to build Nazi strength in Berlin until Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933. In 1928 Hitler gave Goebbels—who founded Der Angriff (“The Assault”) in 1927 and served as its editor and later, from 1940 to 1945, served as editor of Das Reich—the additional post of propaganda director for the NSDAP for all of Germany. Goebbels began to create the Führer myth around the person of Hitler and to institute the ritual of party celebrations and demonstrations that played a decisive role in converting the masses to Nazism. In addition, he spread propaganda by continuing his rigorous schedule of speech making.

After the Nazis seized power, Goebbels took control of the national propaganda machinery. A National Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was created for him, and he became president of the newly formed “Chamber of Culture.” In this capacity he controlled, besides propaganda as such, the press, radio, theatre, films, literature, music, and the fine arts. In May 1933 he was instrumental in the burning of “unGerman” books at the Opera House in Berlin. “The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is at an end,” Goebbels triumphantly told the crowd. A month earlier, Hitler had commanded him to organize a boycott of Jewish businesses. To be sure, Goebbels’s control of foreign propaganda, the press, theatre, and literature was limited—exercised only in bitter jurisdictional struggles with other officials—and he displayed little interest in regulating music and art. He did not, however, succeed in extending his power into other areas, such as the high schools.

Many of his cultural policies were fairly liberal, but he had to capitulate to the demands of nationalist extremists. Even his propaganda messages were limited by the rationale that ceaseless agitation only dulls the receptive powers of the listener. As far as Goebbels was concerned, efficiency took precedence over dogmatism, expediency over principles.

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Goebbels’s influence decreased in the years 1937 and 1938. During this time he also became involved in a love affair with a Czechoslovakian film star that nearly caused him to give up his career and family. (In 1931 he married Magda Ritschel, a woman from the upper middle class who eventually bore him six children.) His role underwent little change with the outbreak of World War II.

Goebbels’s mastery of propaganda was particularly apparent after Germany’s defeats in Stalingrad and Africa. Goebbels did not falsify the facts of the prevailing situation. On the contrary, the main thrust of his propaganda—which he carried on personally and without respite in the press and over the radio—was to continually raise hopes by citing historical parallels and making other comparisons, by conjuring up allegedly immutable laws of history, or even, as a last resort, by referring to some secret miracle weapons. His public appearances, in sharp contrast to those of many other prominent Nazis who had retreated to bunkers and fortifications, did much to improve an image that had until then been overwhelmingly negative. Goebbels’s work was especially effective in intensifying the efforts of the home front: he became the protagonist of total war. After several false starts, the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944 (see July Plot), brought him within view of his goal. On August 25 he became “Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War”—but it was, as he shortly lamented, too late.

Hitler died by suicide on April 30, 1945, and that day Goebbels became chancellor of the Reich, as per the instructions in Hitler’s will. However, on May 1 Goebbels, the only one of the original Nazi leaders to remain with Hitler in the besieged bunker in Berlin, and his wife had their six children poisoned with cyanide, and the couple then took their own lives.