Joseph Goebbels: the life of the nazi minister for Propaganda.

By

Louise Kavanagh  4B.

 

Joseph Goebbels was born a strict catholic to a working class family in Rheydt, in the Rhineland, on 29 October 1897. He was educated in 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 was under five feet tall with a bad limp caused by a bone operation as a child and in 1914 was rejected by by the German Army. It was later claimed that he spent the next two days crying hysterically in his bedroom. Goebbels spent the next ten years writing novels, plays and poems. When he failed to find a publisher for his work he developd the theory that this was because the publishing companies were owned by Jews. He was also rejected as a reporter by the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt. It was the Nazi Party that Goebbels’s sharp, clear-sighted intelligence, his oratorical gifts and flair for theatrical effects, his unhibited opportunism and ideological radicalism blossomed in the service of an insatiable will-to-power. 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.

 

      By 1925, Goebbels was made business manager of the NSDAP in the Ruhr district and at the end of the year was already the principle collaborator of Groggier Strasser, leader of the social- revolutionary North German wing of the party. Goebbels founded and edited the NS letters and other publications of the Starrier brothers, sharing their proletarian anti-capitalist outlook and call for a radical revaluation of all values.

 

Goebbels joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in 1926. Goebbels described one of their first meetings with Adolf Hitler in his diary:“Shakes my hand. Like an old friend. And those big blue eyes. Like stars. He is glad to see me. I am in heaven. That man has everything to be king.” 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, organised 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.  Goebbels knew how to mobilize the fears of unemployed masses as the Great Depression hit Germany, playing on the nationalist psyche with ‘ice cold calculation’. With the skill of a master propagandist he transformed the Berlin student Horst Wessel, into a Nazi martyr, and provided the slogans, the myths and images, the telling aphorisms that rapidly spread the message of National Socialism. Hitler was deeply impressed by Goebbels success in turning the small Berlin section of the Party into a powerful organisation in North Germany and in 1929 appointed him Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSDAP. 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.

 

          Goebbels 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. On March 13 1933, he was rewarded with the position of Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. This gave Goebbels total control of the communications media. 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 10 May 1933 he staged the great ritual ‘burning of the books’ in Berlin, where the works of Jewish, Marxist and other ‘subverse’ authors were publicly burned in huge bonfires. He became a relentless Jew-baiter, demonizing the stereotyped figure of the ‘international Jewish financer’ in London and Washington allied with the ‘Jew Bolsheviks’ in Moscow, as the chief enemy of the Third Reich.

 

    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 Crystal Night pogrom of 9-10 November 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 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 anti-Semitism was one factor which brought 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 for Propaganda encouraged people to ever-greater efforts. After the allies insisted on unconditional surrender, Goebbels turned this to his advantage, convincing his audience that there was no choice except victory or destruction.

 

      It was his quick thinking and decisive action on the afternoon of 20 July 1944, when he isolated the conspirators in the War Ministry with the help of detachments of loyal troops, which saved the Nazi regime. Soon 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 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 1 May 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!’

                                                                                 

                                                                                   SHORT QUESTIONS 

 

  QUESTION ONE:

 BIBLIOGRAPHY.    

 

1)     Klabunde, Anja, Magda Goebbels, Little, Brown, London, 2001

2)     Command magazine, Hitler’s Army, Combined Publishing, Pennsylvania, 1996.

3)     Banker, David, German anti-Semitism, Berghahn Books, New York- Oxford, 2000

 

 QUESTION TWO:

  LONG REVIEW.

 

 A book I read for my essay was called Magda Goebbels. It was written by Anja Klabunde and published in 2002 by Little, Brown. Although this essay was to be written on Joseph Goebbels, the book is about Magda Goebbels, his wife, and by reading about her, I learned about him too.Despite the amount of books on the Third Reich, there was very little attention paid to the women who lived with and stood by these Nazi leaders. Magda Goebbels is supposedly the most incongruous and captivating of them all. How could a woman who was madly in love with the zealous Zionist leader Victor Chaim Arlosoroff go and marry Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment and also a brutal anti-Semite? Many people contemplated that Magda Goebbels was the ‘First Lady’ of the Reich, due to Hitler’s attachment to her. How did this dedicated mother of six, turn into Medea and poison these same children?  This biography examines her intricate life. The book succeeds specifically in its early chapters, possibly because the reader is less recognisable with the story.  When she becomes Goebbels wife and especially after January 1933 when Hitler comes to power the story travels on well-trod tracks, and it is more difficult to express new information.

 

 

 

 

QUESTION THREE:

WHY THIS TOPIC MERITED STUDY?

      This topic merited study because:

1)           Everybody focuses their attention on Hitler but very few actually remembered the man who made Hitler who he was. Without Goebbels helping him, Hitler may not have been as powerful.

2)              I wanted to have a unique study case. Joseph Goebbels had such a complicated life; he seemed a very interesting person to study. 

 

QUESTION FOUR:

        SKILLS THAT I LEARNED WHILE DOING THIS PROJECT.

        Two skills that I learned are:-

           1) Computer skills, I learned how to use the Internet to find information, and how to print out documents.

           2) how to write a proper Leaving Certificate essay with footnotes and a list of books at the end.(bibliography).

 

 

                                                                                                                 BY LOUISE KAVANAGH 4B.      1ST DECEMBER 2003.