BACKGROUND

The fourth of six children, Paul Joseph Goebbels (who went by Joseph) was born into a Catholic, working-class family in Rheydt, Germany (near Düsseldorf), in 1897. He suffered from poor health during his childhood, developing deep-seated insecurities exacerbated by a deformed right foot and a shortened leg. Rejected for military service during World War I, he earned a Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Heidelberg and began working as a journalist. But in 1924, after seeing Hitler speak, he was drawn to the Nazi party and became a devoted servant to its leader.

Goebbels was put to work on propaganda activities, including editing the Party’s weekly newspaper, Der Angriff, and building up support for Hitler in Berlin (where he became district Party leader and later enacted anti-Jewish discriminatory measures). After the Nazis ascended to power in 1933, Goebbels was appointed Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda with power over the radio, press, publishing, cinema and the other arts.

Through the balance of the 1930s, he was able to “Nazify” German culture by subjecting artists and journalists to strict state control and eliminating all Jews and political opponents from positions of influence.

In the process, Goebbels ordered the burning of “un-German” books and had their authors “blacklisted.” And he reinforced the ideology of Nazi racial superiority through films such as Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary on the Party’s 1934 Nuremberg rally) and Olympia (another Riefenstahl agit-prop piece glorifying Aryan superiority via a stilted depiction of the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics). Having created an atmosphere of racial fanaticism and antisemitic hatred, Goebbels used a Jewish student’s assassination of a Nazi diplomat in Paris as a pretext to launch a November 9-10 pogrom against German Jews. In what came to be known as “Kristallnacht” (for the smashing of the windows of Jewish homes and businesses), thousands of Jews in the Third Reich were murdered or sent to concentration camps, while synagogues across the country were looted and burned.

In the meantime, Goebbels continued to ramp up his genocidal propaganda against the Jews, delivering his own speeches and producing rabidly antisemitic films, such as Der ewige Jude ( The Eternal Jew – depicting Jews as sub-human), Jud Süß ( Süss the Jew – the account of a Jewish ducal advisor manipulating his employer behind the scenes), and Die Rothschilds (The Rothschilds – a negative depiction of the famous Jewish banking family) (all from 1940). After the September 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, Goebbels used the full panoply of multimedia and oratory to rouse the German people to arms and, by 1942, to carry out the “Final Solution” – the Nazi plan for the genocide of Europe’s Jews. In a June 1942 address, Goebbels explicitly threatened to carry out the “mass extermination of Jews in reprisal for the Allied air bombings.” The following year, on February 18, 1943, not long after the German surrender at Stalingrad and as Allied bombing of the Third Reich was intensifying, Goebbels delivered his infamous Totaler Krieg ( Total War) address at Berlin’s Sportpalast. Speaking in the fanatical style of Hitler (as was his wont), he sought to persuade the German people not to “bow to the to the Jewish threat” but to “eliminate” it and to fight to the death. The next year, Goebbels was appointed Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, giving him complete control over the war economy. And he remained by Hitler’s side in the “Führer Bunker” to the bitter end, replacing the dictator as German Chancellor for one day (April 30, 1945), after Hitler had killed himself that morning. On May 1, 1945, Goebbels and his family committed suicide and the Nazi propaganda master managed to escape Allied justice.