Joseph Goebbels, the failed novelist who ran Nazi Germany's propaganda machine
In the early 1920s Joseph Goebbels was an unemployed doctor of literature whose plays would not sell and whose novel found no publisher. A decade later, as Reich Minister of Propaganda, he controlled Germany's news, films, radio and arts, and used them to spread the extreme antisemitism that fed the Holocaust.
Goebbels was born on 29 October 1897 in Rheydt, near Düsseldorf, to a Catholic family of modest means; his father was a factory clerk. A deformed right foot left him with a limp and a leg brace and kept him out of the First World War. Top of his class, he considered the priesthood, then studied literature and history at several universities and earned a doctorate from Heidelberg in 1922 with a thesis on a minor romantic dramatist, supervised by a Jewish professor. His semi-autobiographical novel Michael appeared only in 1929, through the Nazi party's own publishing house.
The mid-1920s found him drifting. He detested a job as a bank clerk in Cologne, was dismissed in 1923, and filled a diary he kept for the rest of his life. Drawn by the publicity around Hitler's 1924 treason trial, he joined the party and went to work for Gregor Strasser in its more socialist northern wing. At the Bamberg conference of February 1926, Hitler rejected that programme, and Goebbels confided to his diary that his faith in Hitler had been shaken. Within weeks, after a carefully staged welcome in Munich, he pledged Hitler total loyalty.
Appointed Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926, he discovered his gift for propaganda. Once the Nazis took power in 1933, his ministry swiftly seized control of the press, culture and the flow of information, and he proved especially skilled with the newer media of radio and film. The messages he pushed included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches and, after 1939, efforts to steer military and civilian morale. He publicly advocated ever harsher persecution, up to the extermination of Jews and other groups.
From 1943 he pressed Hitler for total war, meaning closure of non-essential businesses, conscription of women into industry and the drafting of previously exempt men. Named Plenipotentiary for Total War in July 1944, he achieved little. In April 1945 he and his wife Magda moved into Hitler's Berlin bunker with their six children. After Hitler's suicide he was Chancellor for a single day, and on 1 May the couple killed their children and then themselves.
Source: Joseph Goebbels
