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.