Joseph Goebbels
(1897-1945)
Master propagandist of the Nazi regime and dictator of its
cultural life for twelve years, Joseph Goebbels was born into a strict Catholic,
working-class family from Rheydt, in the Rhineland, on 29 October 1897. He was
educated at a Roman Catholic school and went on to study history and literature
at the University of Heidelberg under Professor Friedrich Gundolf, a Jewish
literary historian renowned as a Goethe scholar and a close disciple of the poet
Stefan George.
Goebbels had been rejected for military service during World
War I because of a crippled foot - the result of contracting polio as a child -
and a sense of physical inadequacy tormented him for the rest of his life,
reinforced by resentment of the reactions aroused by his diminutive frame, black
hair and intellectual background. Bitterly conscious of his deformity and
fearful of being regarded as a "bourgeois intellectual," Goebbels
overcompensated for his lack of the physical virtues of the strong, healthy,
blond, Nordic type by his ideological rectitude and radicalism once he joined
the NSDAP in 1922.
The hostility to the intellect of the "little doctor," his
contempt for the human race in general and the Jews in particular, and his
complete cynicism were an expression of his own intellectual self-hatred and
inferiority complexes, his overwhelming need to destroy everything sacred and
ignite the same feelings of rage, despair and hatred in his listeners.
At first Goebbels's hyperactive imagination found an outlet in
poetry, drama and a bohemian life-style, but apart from his expressionist novel,
Michael: ein Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern (1926), nothing came
of these first literary efforts. It was in the Nazi Party that Goebbels's
sharp, clear-sighted intelligence, his oratorical gifts and flair for theatrical
effects, his uninhibited opportunism and ideological radicalism blossomed in the
service of an insatiable will-to-power.
In 1925 he was made business manager of the NSDAP in the Ruhr
district and at the end of the year was already the principal collaborator of
Gregor Strasser, leader of the social-revolutionary North German wing of the
Party. Goebbels founded and edited the Nationalsozialistischen Briefe (NS
Letters) and other publications of the Strasser brothers, sharing their
proletarian anti-capitalist outlook and call for a radical revaluation of all
values. His National Bolshevik tendencies found expression in his evaluation of
Soviet Russia (which he regarded as both nationalist and socialist) as
"Germany's natural ally against the devilish temptations and corruption of the
West."
It was at this time that Goebbels, who had co-authored the
draft programme submitted by the Nazi Left at the Hanover Conference of 1926,
called for the expulsion of "petty-bourgeois Adolf Hitler from the National
Socialist Party." Goebbels's shrewd political instinct and his opportunism were
demonstrated by his switch to Hitler's side in 1926, which was rewarded by his
appointment in November of the same year as Nazi district leader for
Berlin-Brandenburg.
Placed at the head of a small, conflict-ridden organization,
Goebbels rapidly succeeded in taking control and undermining the supremacy of
the Strasser brothers in northern Germany and their monopoly of the Party press,
founding in 1927 and editing his own weekly newspaper, Der Angriff (The
Attack). He designed posters, published his own propaganda, staged impressive
parades, organized his bodyguards to participate in street battles, beer-hall
brawls and shooting affrays as a means to further his political agitation.
By 1927 the "Marat of Red Berlin, a nightmare and goblin of
history" had already become the most feared demagogue of the capital city,
exploiting to the full his deep, powerful voice, rhetorical fervour and
unscrupulous appeal to primitive instincts. A tireless, tenacious agitator with
the gift of paralysing opponents by a guileful combination of venom, slander and
insinuation, Goebbels knew how to mobilize the fears of the unemployed masses as
the Great Depression hit Germany, playing on the national psyche with "ice-cold
calculation."
With the skill of a master propagandist he transformed the
Berlin student and pimp, Horst Wessel, into a Nazi martyr, and provided the
slogans, the myths and images, the telling aphorisms which rapidly spread the
message of National Socialism.
Hitler was deeply impressed by Goebbels's success in turning
the small Berlin section of the Party into a powerful organization in North
Germany and in 1929 appointed him Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSDAP. Looking
back many years later (24 June 1942), Hitler observed: "Dr. Goebbels was gifted
with the two things without which the situation in Berlin could not have been
mastered: verbal facility and intellect.. . . For Dr. Goebbels, who had not
found much in the way of a political organization when he started, had won
Berlin in the truest sense of the word."
Hitler had indeed cause to be grateful to his Propaganda
Leader, who was the true creator and organizer of the Fuhrer myth, of the image
of the Messiah-redeemer, feeding the theatrical element in the Nazi leader while
at the same time inducing the self-surrender of the German masses through
skilful stage management and manipulation. A cynic, devoid of genuine inner
convictions, Goebbels found his mission in selling Hitler to the German public,
in projecting himself as his most faithful shield-bearer and orchestrating a
pseudo-religious cult of the Fuhrer as the saviour of Germany from Jews,
profiteers and Marxists.
As a Reichstag deputy from 1928, he no less cynically gave open
voice to his contempt for the Republic, declaring: "We are entering the
Reichstag, in order that we may arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from
its arsenal. We shall become Reichstag deputies in order that the Weimar
ideology should itself help us to destroy it."
Goebbels's deeply rooted contempt for humanity, his urge to sow
confusion, hatred and intoxication, his lust for power and his mastery of the
techniques of mass persuasion were given full vent in the election campaigns of
1932, when he played a crucial role in bringing Hitler to the centre of the
political stage. He was rewarded on 13 March 1933 with the position of Reich
Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which gave him total control
of the communications media - i.e. radio, press, publishing, cinema and the
other arts.
He achieved the Nazi 'co-ordination' of cultural life very
quickly, astutely combining propaganda, bribery and terrorism, "cleansing" the
arts in the name of the volkisch ideal, subjecting editors and journalists to
State control, eliminating all Jews and political opponents from positions of
influence. On May 10, 1933 he staged the great ritual "burning of the books" in Berlin, where the works of Jewish, Marxist
and other "subversive" authors were publicly burned in huge bonfires.
He became a relentless Jew-baiter, demonizing the stereotyped
figure of the "International Jewish Financier" in London and Washington allied
with the "Jew-Bolsheviks" in Moscow, as the chief enemy of the Third Reich. At
the Party Day of Victory in 1933, Goebbels attacked the "Jewish penetration of
the professions" (law, medicine, property, theatre, etc.), claiming that the
foreign Jewish boycott of Germany had provoked Nazi "counter-measures."
Goebbels's hatred of the
Jews, like his hatred of the privileged and clever, stemmed from a
deep-rooted sense of inferiority and internalization of mob values; at the same
time it was also opportunist and tactical, based on the need to create a common
enemy, to feed popular resentment and to mobilize the masses.
For five years Goebbels chafed at the leash as the Nazi regime
sought to consolidate itself and win international recognition. His opportunity
came with the [Kristallnacht] Crystal Night
pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, which he orchestrated after kindling the flame
with a rabble-rousing speech to Party leaders assembled in the Munich Altes
Rathaus (Old Town Hall) for the annual celebration of the Beer-Hall putsch. Later, Goebbels was
one of the chief secret abettors of the "Final Solution," personally supervising
the deportation of Jews from Berlin in
1942 and proposing that Jews along with gypsies should be regarded as
"unconditionally exterminable."
He combined verbal warnings that, as a result of the war, "the
Jews will pay with extermination of their race in Europe and perhaps beyond"
with careful avoidance in his propaganda material of discussing the actual
treatment of the Jews, i.e., any mention of the extermination camps. Goebbels's
anti-Semitism was one factor whichbrought
him closer to Hitler, who respected his political judgement as well as his
administrative and propagandist skills. His wife Magda and their six children
were welcome guests at the Fuhrer's Alpine retreat of Berchtesgaden. In 1938,
when Magda tried to divorce him because of his endless love affairs with
beautiful actresses, it was Hitler who intervened to straighten out the
situation.
During World War II relations between Hitler and Goebbels
became more intimate, especially as the war situation deteriorated and the
Minister of Propaganda encouraged the German people to ever greater efforts.
After the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender, Goebbels turned this to
advantage, convincing his audience that there was no choice except victory or
destruction. In a famous speech on February 18, 1943 in the Berlin Sportpalast,
Goebbels created an atmosphere of wild emotion, winning the agreement of his
listeners to mobilization for total war. Playing adroitly on German fears of the
"Asiatic hordes," using his all-pervasive control of press, film and radio to
maintain morale, inventing mythical "secret weapons" and impregnable fortresses
in the mountains where the last stand would be made, Goebbels never lost his
nerve or his fighting spirit.
It was his quick thinking and decisive action on the afternoon
of July 20, 1944, when he
isolated the conspirators in the War Ministry with the help of detachments of
loyal troops, which saved the Nazi regime. Shortly afterwards he achieved his
ambition to be warlord on the domestic front, following his appointment in July
1944 as General Plenipotentiary for Total War.
Given the widest powers to move and direct the civilian
population and even to redistribute manpower within the armed forces, Goebbels
imposed an austerity programme and pressed for ever greater civilian sacrifice.
But with Germany already close to collapse, it was too late to accomplish
anything beyond further dislocations and confusion. As the war neared its end,
Goebbels, the supreme opportunist, emerged as the Fuhrer's most loyal follower,
spending his last days together with his family, in the Fuhrerbunker under the
Chancellery. Convinced that the Nazis had finally burnt all their bridges and
increasingly fascinated by the prospect of a final apocalypse, Goebbels's last
words on dismissing his associates were: "When we depart, let the earth
tremble!"
Following the Fuhrer's suicide, Goebbels disregarded Hitler's political testament,
which had appointed him as Reich Chancellor, and decided to follow suit. He had
his six children poisoned with a lethal injection by an SS doctor and then himself and his wife
Magda shot by an SS orderly on May 1, 1945. With characteristic pathos and
egomania he declared not long before his death: "We shall go down in history as
the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals."
Source: Wistrich, Robert S. Who's Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge, 1997. USHMM photo.
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