Joseph Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels
Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, leader of the NSDAP's propaganda machine, later the minister in charge of all Nazi Propaganda and Hitler's successor as the Chancellor of Germany.
Chancellor of Germany
In office April 30 – May 1, 1945
Preceded by	Adolf Hitler
Succeeded by	Lutz von Krosigk
Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda
In office January 30, 1933 – April 30, 1945
Preceded by	None (Ministry formed in January 1933.)
Succeeded by	Werner Naumann
Born	October 29, 1897 Rheydt, Germany
Died	May 1, 1945 Berlin
Political party	NSDAP
Spouse	Magda Goebbels
Occupation	Politician
Religion	Roman Catholic
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Paul Joseph Goebbels (October 29, 1897 – May 1 1945) was a German politician and Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda during the National Socialist regime from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers. Goebbels was known for his zealous, energetic oratory and virulent anti-Semitism.

Goebbels earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1921, on the basis of a doctoral thesis on eighteenth-century romantic drama. He then went on to work as a journalist and later a bank clerk and caller on the stock exchange. Goebbels came into contact with the Nazi Party in 1923 during the French occupation of the Ruhr and became a member in 1924. He was appointed Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Berlin. In this position, he put his propaganda skills to full use, combating the local socialist and communist parties with the help of Nazi papers and the paramilitary SA. By 1928 he had risen in the party ranks to become one of its most prominent members.

After the Nazis seized power in 1933, he was appointed propaganda minister. One of his first acts was to order the burning of books by Jewish or anti-Nazi authors at Bebelplatz. He proceeded to gain control of every important outlet of information in Germany. His attacks on German Jews became ever fiercer and culminated in the Kristallnacht in 1938, the first open and unrestrained pogrom unleashed by the Nazis.

An early and avid supporter of war, Goebbels did everything in his power to prepare the German people for a large-scale military conflict. During the Second World War, he increased his power and influence through shifting alliances with other Nazi leaders. By late 1943, the war had turned into a disaster for the Axis powers, but this only spurred Goebbels to intensify the propaganda and urge the Germans to accept the idea of total war and mobilization.

Goebbels remained with Hitler in Berlin to the very end, and following the Führer's suicide he served as the Third Reich's final Chancellor—albeit for one day. In his final hours Goebbels allowed his wife, Magda, to kill their six young children. Shortly after, Goebbels and his wife both committed suicide.

Early life

Goebbels was born in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach on the edge of the Ruhr district. His family was Catholic. His father was a factory clerk, and his mother had work as a farmhand before marrying. He had four siblings. Goebbels was educated at a local grammar school, where he completed his graduation exams in 1916. Beginning in childhood, he had a deformed right leg, the result either of club foot or osteomyelitis. He wore a metal brace and special shoe to compensate for his shortened leg, but walked with a limp all his life. The limp, along with his height (five feet, five inches), exposed him to ridicule and humiliation in a society that valued physical prowess. As a result of these conditions, he was rejected for military service in World War I, which he bitterly resented.

Goebbels compensated for his physical frailty with intellectual accomplishments. He intended training to be a priest, but after growing distant from his Catholic faith, he studied literature and philosophy at universities in Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, and Heidelberg, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the eighteenth-century romantic novelist Wilhelm von Schütz. His two most influential teachers, Friedrich Gundolf and his doctoral supervisor at Heidelberg Max Freiherr von Waldberg, were Jews. His intelligence and political astuteness were generally acknowledged by his teachers and peers.

The British anti-semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain was a major influence on Goebbels.

After completing his doctorate in 1921, Goebbels worked as a journalist and tried for several years to become a published author. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, two verse plays, and quantities of romantic poetry. Goebbels literary career, however, was a source of frustration for him. His novel did not find a publisher until 1929, and his plays were never staged. He found an outlet for his desire to write in his diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life. His diaries reveal a long succession of affairs, both before and after his marriage in 1931 to Magda Quandt, with whom he had six children.

In the early 1920s, Goebbels worked as a bank clerk and a caller on the stock exchange. During this period, he read avidly and formed his political views. Major influences included Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and most importantly, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born German writer who was one of the founders of “scientific” anti-Semitism and whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) was one of the standard works of the extreme right in Germany. Goebbels spent the winter of 1919–20 in Munich, where he witnessed and admired the violent nationalist reaction against the attempted communist revolution in Bavaria. His first political hero was Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, the man who assassinated the Munich socialist leader Kurt Eisner.

Nazi activist

Like others who were later prominent in the Third Reich, Goebbels came into contact with the Nazi Party in 1923, during the campaign of resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr. But Hitler’s imprisonment following the failed November 1923 “Beer Hall Putsch” left the party temporarily leaderless, and when the 27-year-old Goebbels joined the party in late 1924 the most important influence on his political development was Gregor Strasser, who became Nazi organizer in northern Germany in March 1924.

Gregor Strasser, leader of the Nazi Party's socialist faction who was later put to death by Hitler

In 1925, Goebbels published an open letter to “my friends of the left,” urging unity between socialists and Nazis against the capitalists. “You and I,” he wrote, “we are fighting one another although we are not really enemies.”

In February 1926, Hitler, having finished working on Mein Kampf, made a sudden return to party affairs. He summoned about 60 activists, including Goebbels, to a meeting at Bamberg, where he gave a two-hour speech repudiating the political program of the “socialist” wing of the party. For Hitler, the real enemy of the German people was always the Jews, not the capitalists. Goebbels was bitterly disillusioned, at least for the time being. “I feel devastated,” he wrote. As an intellectual who knew better, he was horrified by Hitler’s characterisation of socialism as “a Jewish creation.” He also disagreed with Hitler's declaration that the Soviet Union must be destroyed and his assertion that private property would not be expropriated by a Nazi government. Goebbels confessed: “I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That’s the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away.”

Hitler, however, recognized Goebbels’s talents, and he was a shrewd judge of character, sensing that Goebbels craved recognition above all else. In April, he brought Goebbels to Munich, sending his own car to meet him at the station, and gave him a long private audience. Hitler berated Goebbels over his support for the “socialist” line, but offered to “wipe the slate clean” if Goebbels would now accept his leadership. Goebbels capitulated completely, offering Hitler his total loyalty, a pledge which he adhered to until the end of his life.

Gauleiter of Berlin

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Goebbels at work

In the autumn of 1926, Hitler rewarded Goebbels for his new loyalty by making him Gauleiter of Berlin, the capital of Germany, but in the 1920s a stronghold of the socialists and communists. Here Goebbels developed his genius as a propagandist, and was also able to indulge his heretofore latent taste for violence, if only vicariously. History, he said, “is made in the street,” and he was determined to challenge the dominant parties of the left—the Social Democrats and Communists—in the streets of Berlin. Working with the local S.A. stormtrooper leaders, he deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, frequently involving firearms.

As editor of the Berlin Nazi newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) and the author of a steady stream of Nazi posters and handbills. Among his favoirite targets were socialist leaders such as Hermann Müller and Carl Severing, and the Jewish Berlin Police President, Bernhard Weiss, whom he subjected to a relentless campaign of Jew-baiting. The Social Democrat city government reacted in 1927 with an eight-month ban on the Nazi Party, which Goebbels exploited to the hilt.

Goebbels also discovered a talent for oratory, and was soon second in the Nazi movement only to Hitler as a public speaker. Where Hitler’s style was hoarse and passionate, Goebbels’s was cool, sarcastic, and often humorous: he was a master of biting invective and insinuation, although he could whip himself into a rhetorical frenzy if the occasion demanded. Unlike Hitler, however, he retained a cynical detachment from his own rhetoric.

At the 1928 Reichstag elections, the Nazis polled less than two percent of the vote in Berlin compared with 33 percent for the Social Democrats and 25 percent for the Communists. However, Goebbels was one of the 10 Nazis elected to the Reichstag, which brought him a welcome salary of 750 Reichsmarks a month and immunity from prosecution. By 1928, still aged only 31, he was acknowledged to be one of the inner circle of Nazi leaders.

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Nazi election poster

In April 1930, Hitler sacked Gregor Strasser as head of the Nazi Party national propaganda apparatus and appointed Goebbels to replace him, giving him control of the party’s national newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), as well as other Nazi papers across the country.

Despite his revolutionary rhetoric, Goebbels’s most important contribution to the Nazi cause between 1930 and 1933 was as the organizer of successive election campaigns: the Reichstag elections of September 1930, July and November 1932 and March 1933, and Hitler’s presidential campaign of March–April 1932. He proved to be an organiser of genius, choreographing Hitler’s dramatic airplane tours of Germany and pioneering the use of radio and cinema for electoral campaigning. The Nazi Party’s use of torchlight parades, brass bands, massed choirs, and similar techniques caught the imagination of many voters, particularly young people. Although the spectacular rise in the Nazi vote in 1930 and July 1932 was caused mainly by the effects of the Depression, Goebbels as party campaign manager was naturally given much of the credit.

Propaganda Minister

In 1933, when Goebbels was chief of propaganda for the party, the Nazis burned works of Jewish authors and other works considered "un-German" in Berlin

When Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Goebbels was initially given no office: the coalition cabinet which Hitler headed contained only a minority of Nazis as part of the deal he had negotiated with President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative parties. But as the propaganda head of the Nazi party, Goebbels commandeered the state radio to produce a live broadcast of the torchlight parade which celebrated Hitler’s assumption of office. On March 13, Goebbels had his reward for his part in bringing the Nazis to power by being appointed Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), with a seat in the Cabinet.

The role of the new ministry, which took over palatial accommodation in the eighteenth-century Leopold Palace on Wilhelmstrasse, just across from Hitler’s offices in the Reich Chancellery, was to centralize Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life, particularly the press, the radio and the visual and performing arts. On May 1, Goebbels organized the massive demonstrations and parades to mark the “Day of National Labor,” which preceded the Nazi takeover and destruction of the German trade union movement.

Goebbels soon established beaucracies within his minitry dealing with press, radio, film, theater, music, literature, and publishing. In each of these, a Reich Chamber (Reichskammer) was established, co-opting leading figures from the field to head each Chamber, and requiring them to supervise the purge of Jews, socialists and liberals, as well as practitioners of “degenerate” art forms such as abstract art and atonal music. The respected composer Richard Strauss, for example, became head of the Reich Music Chamber. Goebbels’s orders were backed by the threat of force. Many prominent Jews in the arts and the mass media emigrated in large numbers, as did many socialists and liberals.

Soon the content of every newspaper, book, novel, play, film, broadcast, and concert—from the level of nationally known publishers and orchestras to local newspapers and village choirs—was subject to supervision by the Propaganda Ministry. As a result, a process of self-censorship was soon effectively operating in all these fields, leaving the Ministry in Berlin free to concentrate on the most politically sensitive areas such as major newspapers and the state radio. No author could publish, no painter could exhibit, no singer could broadcast, no critic could criticize, unless they were a member of the appropriate Reich Chamber, and membership was conditional on good behavior.

However, Goebbels became to some extent the protector of the arts as well as their regulator. In this, he had the support of Hitler, a passionate devotee of Wagner. However, Hitler loathed modernism of all kinds, and Goebbels, whose own tastes were sympathetic to modernism, was forced to acquiesce in imposing traditionalist forms on the artistic and musical worlds. The music of Paul Hindemith, for example, was banned because Hitler did not like it.

Goebbels also resisted the complete Nazification of the arts, knowing that the masses must be allowed some respite from slogans and propaganda. He ensured that film studios such as UFA at Babelsberg near Berlin continued to produce a stream of comedies and light romances, which drew mass audiences to the cinema where they would also watch propaganda newsreels and Nazi epics. He resisted pressure from Nazi xenophobes to ban all foreign films—helped by the fact that Hitler was a big fan of Mickey Mouse.

Goebbels and the Jews

Despite the enormous power of the Propaganda Ministry over German cultural life, Goebbels’s status began to decline once the Nazi regime was firmly established in power. This was because the real business of the Nazi regime was preparation for war. Goebbels soon developed a new role for himself as the regime’s leading Jew-baiter.

Goebbels had once mocked the “primitive” anti-semitism of Nazis such as Julius Streicher. Now, however, Goebbels took every opportunity to attack the Jews. In his capacity as Gauleiter of Berlin, Goebbels maintained constant pressure on the city’s large Jewish community, forcing them out of business and professional life and placing obstacles in the way of their being able to live normal lives, such as banning them from public transport and city facilities. There was some respite during 1936, while Berlin hosted the Olympic Games, but from 1937 the intensity of his anti-Semitic words and actions began to increase again.

“The Jews must get out of Germany, indeed out of Europe altogether,” he wrote in his diary in November 1937. “That will take some time, but it must and will happen.” By mid 1938 Goebbels was investigating the possibility of requiring all Jews to wear an identifying mark and of confining them to a ghetto, but these were ideas whose time had not yet come.

[[Image:1938 Interior of Berlin synagogue after Kristallnacht.jpg|thumb|left|280px|Interior of Berlin's Fasanenstrasse synagogue

In November 1938, a Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan, shot a German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, in revenge for the deportation of his family to Poland and the persecution of German Jews generally. On November 9, vom Rath died of his wounds. With Hitler's approval Goebbels organized a massive, nationwide pogrom against the Jews.

The result of Goebbels’s incitement was Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” during which the S.A. and Nazi Party went on a rampage of anti-Jewish violence and destruction, killing between least 90 and 200 people, destroying over a thousand synagogues and hundreds of Jewish businesses and homes, and forcing some 30,000 Jews into concentration camps, where at least another thousand died before the remainder were released after several months of brutal treatment. [[Image:1938 Jews arrested during Kristallnacht line up for roll call at Buchenwald.jpg|thumb|left|280px|Jews arrested during Kristallnacht line up at the Appellplatz for roll call at Buchenwald concentration camp ]]

The longer-term effect was to drive 80,000 Jews to emigrate, most leaving behind all their property in their desperation to escape. Foreign opinion reacted with horror, bringing to a sudden end the climate of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the western democracies.

Goebbels’s pogrom thus moved Germany significantly closer to war, at a time when rearmament was still far from complete. Göring and some other Nazi leaders were furious at Goebbels’s actions, about which they had not been consulted. Goebbels, however, was delighted. “As was to be expected, the entire nation is in uproar,” he wrote. “This is one dead man who is costing the Jews dear. Our darling Jews will think twice in future before gunning down German diplomats.”

Man of power

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Goebbels greeting German soldiers from the Eastern Front.

These events were well-timed from the point of view of Goebbels’s relations with Hitler. In 1937, he had begun an intense affair with the Czech actress Lída Baarová, causing the break-up of her marriage. When Magda Goebbels learned of this affair in October 1938, she complained to Hitler. Hitler was a conservative in sexual matters and was fond of Magda and the young Goebbels' children. He ordered Goebbels to break off his affair, whereupon Goebbels offered his resignation, which Hitler refused. On October 15, Goebbels attempted suicide. A furious Hitler then ordered Himmler to remove Baarová from Germany, and she was deported to Czechoslovakia, from where she later left for Italy. These events damaged Goebbels’ standing with Hitler, and his zeal in furthering Hitler’s anti-Semitic agenda was in part an effort to restore his reputation. The Baarová affair, however, did nothing to dampen Goebbels' enthusiasm for womanising. As late as 1943, the Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann was ingratiating himself with Goebbels by procuring young women for him.

Goebbels, like all the Nazi leaders, could not afford to defy Hitler’s will in matters of this kind. By 1938, they had all become wealthy men, but their wealth was dependent on Hitler’s continuing goodwill and willingness to turn a blind eye to their corruption. Until the Nazis came to power, Goebbels had been a relatively poor man, and his main income was the salary of 750 Reichsmarks a month he had gained by election to the Reichstag in 1928. By 1936, although he was not nearly as corrupt as some other senior Nazis, such as Göring and Robert Ley, Goebbels was earning 300,000 Reichsmarks a year in “fees” for writing in his own newspaper, Der Angriff, as well as his ministerial salary and many other sources of income.

These payments were in effect bribes from the papers’ publisher Max Amann. He owned a villa by the lake at Wannsee and another on Lake Constance in the south, which he spent 2.2 million Reichsmarks refurbishing. The tax office, as it did for all the Nazi leaders, gave him generous exemptions. Hitler, who himself had no interest in money and continued to live an abstemious lifestyle, apparently connived at the corruption of his lieutenants because of the power it gave him over them.

Whatever the loss of real power suffered by Goebbels during the middle years of the Nazi regime, he remained one of Hitler’s intimates. Since his offices were close to the Chancellery, he was a frequent guest for lunch, during which he became adept at listening to Hitler’s monologues and agreeing with his opinions. In the months leading up to the war, his influence began to increase again. He ranked along with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Göring, Himmler, and Martin Bormann as the senior Nazi with the most access to Hitler, which in an autocratic regime meant access to power. The fact that Hitler was fond of Magda Goebbels and the children also gave Goebbels entrée to Hitler’s inner circle. The Goebbelses were regular visitors to Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat the Berghof. But he was not kept directly informed of military and diplomatic developments, relying on second-hand accounts to hear what Hitler was doing.

Goebbels at war

While protesting his desire for peace, between 1936 and 1939, Hitler led Germany firmly and deliberately towards a confrontation. Goebbels was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of aggressively pursuing Germany's territorial claims sooner rather than later, along with Himmler and Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. He saw it as his job to make the German people accept this and if possible welcome it. At the time of the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, Goebbels was well aware that the great majority of Germans did not want a war, and used every propaganda resource at his disposal to overcome what he called this “war psychosis,” by whipping up sympathy for the Sudeten Germans and hatred of the Czechs. After the western powers conceded to Hitler's demands concerning Czechoslovakia in 1938, Goebbels soon redirected his propaganda machine against Poland. From May onwards, he orchestrated a “hate campaign” against Poland, fabricating stories about atrocities against ethnic Germans in Danzig and other cities. Even so, he was unable to persuade the majority of Germans to welcome the prospect of war.

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Once war began in September 1939, Goebbels began a steady process of extending his influence over domestic policy. After 1940, Hitler made few public appearances, and even his broadcasts became less frequent, so Goebbels increasingly became the face and the voice of the Nazi regime for the German people. With Hitler preoccupied with the war, Himmler focussing on the “final solution to the Jewish question” in eastern Europe, and with Göring’s position declining with the failure of the Luftwaffe, Goebbels sensed a power vacuum in domestic policy and moved to fill it. Since civilian morale was his responsibility, he increasingly concerned himself with matters such as wages, rationing, and housing, which affected morale and therefore productivity. He came to see the lethargic and demoralized Göring, still Germany’s economic supremo as head of the Four Year Plan Ministry, as his main enemy. To undermine Göring, he forged an alliance with Himmler, although the SS chief remained wary of him. A more useful ally was Albert Speer, a Hitler favourite who was appointed Armaments Minister in February 1942. Goebbels and Speer worked through 1942 to persuade Hitler to dismiss Göring and allow the domestic economy to be run by a revived Cabinet headed by themselves.

The crushing German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943, however, produced a crisis in the regime. Goebbels was forced to ally himself with Göring to thwart a bid for power by Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Secretary to the Führer, who exploited the disaster at Stalingrad and his daily access to Hitler to persuade him to create a three-man junta representing the State, the Army and Party, represented respectively by the head of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who was Chief of the German High Command Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and Bormann, who controlled the Party and access to the Führer. This so-called Committee of Three would exercise dictatorial powers over the home front. Goebbels, Speer, Göring and Himmler all saw this proposal as a power grab by Bormann and a threat to their power, and combined to block it.

However, their alliance was shaky at best. Goebbels instead tried to persuade Hitler to appoint Göring as head of the government. His proposal had a certain logic, as Göring — despite the failures of the Luftwaffe and his own corruption — was still very popular among the German people, whose morale was waning since Hitler barely appeared in public since the defeat at Stalingrad. However, this proposal was absurd given Göring’s increasing incapacity and, more importantly, Hitler’s increasing contempt for him due to the need of having a scapegoat in order to shift the blame for Germany's defeats from the Führer, that it was doomed to failure. The result was that nothing was done—the Committee of Three declined into irrelevance due to the loss of power by Keitel and Lammers and the ascension of Bormann and the situation continued to drift, with administrative chaos increasingly undermining the war effort. The ultimate responsibility for this lay with Hitler, as Goebbels well knew, referring in his diary to a “crisis of leadership,” but Goebbels was too much under Hitler’s spell ever to challenge his power.

In February, Goebbels launched a new offensive to place himself at the center of policy-making. In a passionate speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, Goebbels demanded from his audience a commitment to “total war,” the complete mobilization of the German economy and German society for the war effort. He hoped in this way to persuade Hitler to give him and his ally Speer control of domestic policy for a program of total commitment to arms production and full labor conscription, including of women. But Hitler, supported by Göring, resisted these demands, which he feared would weaken civilian morale and lead to a repeat of the debacle of 1918, when the German army had been undermined by a collapse of the home front. Nor was Hitler willing to allow Goebbels or anyone else to usurp his own power as the ultimate source of all decisions. Goebbels privately lamented “a complete lack of direction in German domestic policy,” but of course he could not directly criticize Hitler or go against his wishes.

Goebbels and the Holocaust

The view of most historians is that the decision to proceed with the extermination of the Jews was taken at some point in late 1941, and Goebbels’s comments make it clear that he knew in general terms, if not in detail, what was planned.

The decision in principle to deport the German and Austrian Jews to unspecified destinations “in the east” was made in September. Goebbels immediately pressed for the Berlin Jews to be deported first. He travelled to Hitler’s headquarters on the eastern front, meeting both Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich to lobby for his demands. He got the assurances he wanted: “The Führer is of the opinion,” he wrote, “that the Jews eventually have to be removed from the whole of Germany. The first cities to be made Jew-free are Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. Berlin is first in the queue, and I have the hope that we’ll succeed in the course of this year.”

Deportations of Berlin Jews to the Łódź ghetto began in October, but transport and other difficulties made the process much slower than Goebbels desired. His November article in Das Reich was part of his campaign to have the pace of deportation accelerated. In December, he was present when Hitler addressed a meeting of Gauleiters and other senior Nazis, discussing among other things the “Jewish question.”

During 1942, Goebbels continued to press for the “final solution to the Jewish question” to be carried forward as quickly as possible now that Germany had occupied a huge swath of Soviet territory into which all the Jews of German-controlled Europe could be deported. There they could be worked into extinction in accordance with the plan agreed on at the Wannsee Conference convened by Heydrich in January. It was a constant annoyance to Goebbels that, at a time when Germany was fighting for its life on the eastern front, there were still 40,000 Jews in Berlin.

Plenipotentiary for Total War

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Goebbels greeting soldiers from the Eastern Front.

For Goebbels, 1943 and 1944 were years of struggle to rally the German people behind a regime which was increasingly obviously facing military defeat. The German people’s faith in Hitler was shaken by the disaster at Stalingrad, and never fully recovered. In 1943, as the Soviet armies advanced towards the borders of the Reich, the western Allies developed the ability to launch devastating air raids on most German cities, including Berlin. At the same time, there were increasingly critical shortages of food, raw materials, fuel, and housing. Goebbels and Speer were among the few Nazi leaders who were under no illusions about Germany’s dire situation. Their solution was to seize control of the home front from the indecisive Hitler and the incompetent Göring. This was the agenda of Goebbels’s “total war” speech of February 1943. But they were thwarted by their inability to challenge Hitler, who could neither make decisions himself, nor trust anyone else to do so.

After Stalingrad, Hitler increasingly withdrew from public view, almost never appearing in public and rarely even broadcasting. By July, Goebbels was lamenting that Hitler had cut himself off from the people. Goebbels, himself, became the public voice of the Nazi regime, both in his regular broadcasts and his weekly editorials in Das Reich. In public, Goebbels remained confident of German victory, but in private, he was discouraged by the failure of his and Speer’s campaign to gain control of the home front. Meanwhile, Goebbels remained preoccupied with the annihilation of the Jews, which was now reaching its climax in the extermination camps of eastern Poland.

Unlike Hitler, Goebbels retained a grip on reality during this period. Following the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of Benito Mussolini in September, he and Ribbentrop raised with Hitler the possibility of secretly approaching Stalin and negotiating a separate peace behind the backs of the western Allies. Hitler, surprisingly, did not reject the idea of a separate peace with either side, but he told Goebbels that he should not negotiate from a position of weakness. A great German victory must occur before any negotiations should be undertaken, he reasoned. The German defeat at Kursk in July had, however, ended any possibility of this. Goebbels as a realist knew by this stage that the war was lost, but was unable to break the spell that Hitler had held over him since 1926.

As Germany’s military and economic situation grew steadily worse during 1944, Goebbels renewed his push, in alliance with Speer, to wrest control of the home front away from Göring. In July, following the Allied landings in France and the huge Soviet advances in Byelorussia, Hitler finally agreed to grant both of them increased powers. Speer took control of all economic and production matters away from Göring, and Goebbels took the title Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War (Reichsbevollmächtigter für den totalen Kriegseinsatz an der Heimatfront). At the same time, Himmler took over the Interior Ministry.

This trio — Goebbels, Himmler, and Speer — became the real center of German government in the last year of the war, although Bormann used his privileged access to Hitler to thwart them when he could. Goebbels saw Himmler as a potential ally against Bormann and in 1944 is supposed to have voiced the opinion that if the Reichsführer SS was granted control over the Wehrmacht and he, Goebbels, granted control over the domestic politics, the war would soon be ended in a victorious manner. However, the inability of Himmler to persuade Hitler to cease his support of Bormann, the defection of SS generals such as Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and his powerful subordinate Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, to Bormann, soon persuaded Goebbels to align himself with the Secretary to the Führer at the end of 1944, thus accepting his subordinate position.

When elements of the Army leadership tried to assassinate Hitler in the July 20 plot shortly thereafter, it was this trio that rallied the resistance to the plotters. It was Goebbels, besieged in his Berlin apartment with Speer and secretary Wilfred von Oven beside him but with his phone lines intact, who brought Otto Ernst Remer, the wavering commander of the Berlin garrison, to the phone to speak to Hitler in East Prussia, thus demonstrating that the Führer was alive and that the garrison should oppose the attempted coup.

Goebbels promised Hitler that he could raise a million new soldiers by means of a reorganization of the Army, transferring personnel from the Navy and Luftwaffe, and purging the bloated Reich Ministries which satraps like Göring had hitherto protected. As it turned out, the inertia of the state bureaucracy was too great even for the energetic Goebbels to overcome. Bormann and his puppet Lammers, keen to retain their control over the Party and State administrations respectively, placed endless obstacles in Goebbels’s way.

Another problem was that although Speer and Goebbels were allies, their agendas in fact conflicted: Speer wanted absolute priority in the allocation of labor to be given to arms production, while Goebbels sought to press every able-bodied male into the army. Speer, allied with Fritz Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary for the Employment of Labour from 1942, generally won these battles.

By July 1944, it was in any case too late for Goebbels and Speer’s internal coup to make any real difference to the outcome of the war. The combined economic and military power of the western Allies and the Soviet Union, now fully mobilized, was simply too great for Germany to overcome, no matter how many soldiers were sacrificed or how many slave laborers were worked to death. By mid 1944, the crucial economic indicator, the ratio of steel output, was running at 4.5 to one against Germany. The final blow was the loss of the Romanian oil fields as the Soviet Army advanced through the Balkans in September. This, combined with the U.S. air campaign against Germany’s synthetic oil production, finally broke the back of the German economy and thus its capacity for further resistance.

By this time, the best Goebbels could do to reassure the German people that victory was still possible was to make vague promises that “miracle weapons,” such as the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet airplane, the Type XXI U-boat, and the V-2 rocket, could somehow retrieve the military situation.

Defeat and death

The partly burned corpse of Joseph Goebbels, photographed by the Soviet secret service in May 1945

By the beginning of 1945, with the Soviets on the Oder and the western Allies crossing the Rhine, Goebbels could no longer disguise the fact that defeat was inevitable. He knew what that would mean for himself: "For us," he had written in 1943, "we have burnt our bridges. We cannot go back, but neither do we want to go back. We are forced to extremes and therefore resolved to proceed to extremes."

When other Nazi leaders urged Hitler to leave Berlin and establish a new center of resistance in the so-called National Redoubt in Bavaria, Goebbels opposed this, arguing for a last stand in the ruins of the Reich capital.

Unlike many other leading Nazis at this juncture, Goebbels at least proved to have the courage of his convictions, moving himself and his family into the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery building in central Berlin. He told Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss that he would not entertain the idea of either surrender or escape: "I was the Reich Minister of Propaganda and led the fiercest activity against the Soviet Union, for which they would never pardon me," Voss quoted him as saying. "He couldn't escape also because he was Berlin's Defence Commissioner and he considered it would be disgraceful for him to abandon his post," Voss added.

On April 30, with the Russians advancing to within a few hundred yards of the bunker, Hitler dictated his last will and testament. Goebbels was one of four witnesses to Hitler's last will and testament. Not long after completing it, Hitler shot himself. Of Hitler's death, Goebbels commented: "The heart of Germany has ceased to beat. The Führer is dead."

In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, Hitler appointed Goebbels Reich Chancellor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, Reich President, and Martin Bormann, Hitler's long-time chief of staff, Party Minister. Goebbels knew that this was an empty title. Even if he was willing and able to escape Berlin and reach the north, it was unlikely that Dönitz, whose only concern was to negotiate a settlement with the western Allies that would save Germany from Soviet occupation, would want such a notorious figure as Goebbels heading his government, although Dönitz was a committed National Socialist.

As it was, Goebbels had no intention of trying to escape. On May 1, within hours of Hitler's suicide on April 30, Goebbels completed his sole official act as Chancellor of Germany (Reichskanzler). He dictated a letter and ordered German General Hans Krebs, under a white flag, to meet with General Vasily Chuikov and to deliver his letter. Chuikov, as commander of the Soviet eighth Guards Army, commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. Goebbels' letter informed Chuikov of Hitler's death and requested a ceasefire, hinting that the establishment of a National Socialist government hostile to Western Plutocracy would be beneficial to the Soviet Union, as the betrayal of Himmler and Göring indicated that otherwise anti-Soviet National Socialist elements might align themselves with the West. When this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts were futile.

Later on 1 May, Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss saw Goebbels for the last time: "Before the breakout [from the bunker] began, about 10 generals and officers, including myself, went down individually to Goebbels's shelter to say goodbye. While saying goodbye I asked Goebbels to join us. But he replied: 'The captain must not leave his sinking ship. I have thought about it all and decided to stay here. I have nowhere to go because with little children I will not be able to make it'."

At 8 p.m. on the evening of May 1, Goebbels arranged for an SS doctor, Helmut Kunz, to kill his six children by injecting them with morphine and then, when they were unconscious, crushing an ampule of cyanide in each of their mouths. Shortly afterwards, Goebbels and his wife went up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves.

The bodies of Goebbels and his wife were then burned in a shell crater, but owing to the lack of petrol the burning was only partly effective, and their bodies were easily identifiable. The remains of the Goebbels family were secretly buried, along with those of Hitler, near Rathenow in Brandenburg. In 1970, they were disinterred and cremated, and the ashes thrown in the Elbe.

Legacy

During his lifetime and postmortem, "Doctor Goebbels" has been subject to parody and imitation in popular culture. Often he is shown in a negative light and during the war years he was shown as a "malicious dwarf" and evil mastermind. Post-war popular impressions of Goebbels are similar, however, understanding of his person was changed radically after the discovery of his diaries in the Moscow Archives. Today, he is generally perceived as having been a brutal, ruthless, amoral, and ambitious character, and one of the earliest promoters of the "Final Solution" against the Jewish population of Europe.

File:What is an aryan.jpg

A popular image created by Boris Efimov mocking Joseph Goebbels.

• In the 1940 short "You Nazty Spy!" and its 1941 sequel "I'll Never Heil Again," the Three Stooges include Larry Fine in a parody of Goebbels.
• In Charlie Chaplin's 1940 movie The Great Dictator, Goebbels is parodied by Henry Daniell, as Minister "Garbitsch."
• In the anti-Nazi song released in 1942, Der Fuhrer's Face Goebbels is referred to as proclaiming that Germans own the Earth and Space.
• In the 1973 film Hitler: The Last Ten Days , Goebbels was portrayed by British actor John Bennett.
• In the 2004 film Downfall, Goebbels was portrayed by German actor Ulrich Matthes.
• The Goebbels Experiment, produced in 2005, explored the life of Goebbels by combining diary entries with original footage of the propaganda minister.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Goebbels, Joseph. The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943, Greenwood Press, 1970. ISBN 978-0837138152
• Roberts, Jeremy. Joseph Goebbels: Nazi Propaganda Minister, Rosen Publishing Group, 2000. ISBN 978-0823933099
• Trevor-Roper, Hugh. Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, G.P. Putnam's Son, 1978. B000O00K1K
• Fest, Joachim C. The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of Nazi Leadership, Da Capo Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0306809156

External links

• A collection of speeches and essays by Joseph Goebbels
• The Man Behind Hitler
• Joseph Goebbels "The Poison Dwarf"
• Nazi Sozi a pre-1933 pamphlet. In English.

The Hitler Cabinet – 30 January 1933 to 30 April 1945

Adolf Hitler | Franz von Papen | Konstantin von Neurath | Joachim von Ribbentrop | Wilhelm Frick | Heinrich Himmler | Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk | Alfred Hugenberg | Kurt Schmitt | Hjalmar Schacht | Hermann Göring | Walther Funk | Franz Seldte | Franz Gürtner | Franz Schlegelberger | Otto Georg Thierack | Werner von Blomberg | General Keitel | Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach | Julius Heinrich Dorpmüller | Wilhelm Ohnesorge | R. Walther Darré | Herbert Backe | Joseph Goebbels | Bernhard Rust | Fritz Todt | Albert Speer | Alfred Rosenberg | Hanns Kerrl | Hermann Muhs | Otto Meißner | Hans Lammers | Martin Bormann | Karl Hermann Frank | Rudolf Hess | Ernst Röhm

 

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