Question: At which university did Joseph Goebbels become a doctor of philosophy?
Answer: Heidelberg

Paul Joseph Goebbels (;  29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. One of Adolf Hitler's close associates and most devoted followers, he was known for his skills in public speaking and his deep and virulent antisemitism, which led to his supporting the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.

Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in their northern branch. He was appointed as Gauleiter (district leader) for Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazi Seizure of Power in 1933, Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted controlling supervision over the news media, arts, and information in Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. Topics for party propaganda included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, and (after the start of the Second World War) attempting to shape morale.

In 1943, Goebbels began to pressure Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Hitler finally appointed him as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on 23 July 1944, whereby Goebbels undertook largely unsuccessful measures to increase the number of people available for armaments production and the Wehrmacht.

As the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children joined him in Berlin. They moved into the underground Vorbunker, part of Hitler's underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler's will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; he served one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife committed suicide, after poisoning their six children with cyanide.

Early life

Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on 29 October 1897 in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach near Düsseldorf. Both of his parents were Catholics and from humble beginnings. His father Fritz was a factory clerk; his mother Katharina (née Odenhausen) was ethnically Dutch. Goebbels had five siblings: Konrad (1893–1947), Hans (1895–1949), Maria (1896–1896), Elisabeth (1901–1915), and Maria (1910–1949), who married the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich in 1938. In 1932, Goebbels published a pamphlet of his family tree to refute the rumors that his grandmother was of Jewish ancestry.

During childhood, Goebbels suffered from ill health which included a long bout of inflammation of the lungs. He had a deformed right foot which turned inwards, due to a congenital deformity. It was thicker and shorter than his left foot. He underwent a failed operation to correct it just prior to starting grammar school. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg, and walked with a limp. He was rejected for military service in World War I due to his deformity.

Goebbels was educated at a Christian Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur (university entrance examination) in 1917. He was the top student of his class and was given the traditional honor to speak at the awards ceremony. His parents initially hoped that he would become a Catholic priest, and Goebbels seriously considered it. He studied literature and history at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg, and Munich, aided by a scholarship from the Albertus Magnus Society. By this time Goebbels had begun to distance himself from the church.

Historians, including Richard J. Evans and Roger Manvell, speculate that Goebbels' lifelong pursuit of women may have been in compensation for his physical disabilities. At Freiburg, he met and fell in love with Anka Stalherm, who was three years his senior. She went on to Würzburg to continue school, as did Goebbels. In 1921 he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, a three-part work of which only Parts I and III have survived. Goebbels felt he was writing his "own story". Antisemitic content and material about a charismatic leader may have been added by Goebbels shortly before the book was published in 1929 by Eher-Verlag, the publishing house of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party; NSDAP). By 1920, the relationship with Anka was over. The break-up filled Goebbels with thoughts of suicide.

At the University of Heidelberg, Goebbels wrote his doctoral thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz, a minor 19th century romantic dramatist. He had hoped to write his thesis under the supervision of Friedrich Gundolf, who at that time was a well known literary historian. It did not seem to bother Goebbels that Gundolf was Jewish. However, Gundolf was no longer performing teaching duties, so he directed Goebbels to associate professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg. Waldberg was also Jewish. It was Waldberg who recommended Goebbels write his thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz. After submitting the thesis and passing his oral examination, Goebbels earned his PhD in 1921.

Goebbels then returned home and worked as a private tutor. He also found work as a journalist and was published in the local newspaper. His writing during that time reflected his growing antisemitism and dislike for modern culture. In the summer of 1922, he met and began a love affair with Else Janke, a schoolteacher. After she revealed to him that she was half-Jewish, Goebbels stated the "enchantment [was] ruined". Nevertheless, he continued to see her on and off until 1927.

He continued for several years to try to become a published author. His diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life, provided an outlet for his desire to write. The lack of income from his literary works (he wrote two plays in 1923, neither of which sold) forced him to take jobs as a caller on the stock exchange and as a bank clerk in Cologne, a job which he detested. He was dismissed from the bank in August 1923 and returned to Rheydt. During this period, he read avidly and was influenced by the works of Oswald Spengler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born German writer whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) was one of the standard works of the extreme right in Germany. He also began to study the "social question", and read the works of Marx and Engels. According to biographer Peter Longerich, Goebbels' diary entries from late 1923 to early 1924 reflected the writings of a man who was isolated, preoccupied by "religious-philosophical" issues, and lacked a sense of direction. Diary entries of mid-December 1923 forward show Goebbels was moving towards the völkisch nationalist movement.

Nazi activist

Goebbels first took an interest in Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1924. In February 1924, Hitler's trial for treason began in the wake of his failed attempt to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 8–9, 1923. The trial attracted widespread press coverage and gave Hitler a platform for propaganda. Hitler was sentenced to five years prison, but was released on 20 December 1924, after serving just over a year. Goebbels was drawn to the NSDAP mostly because of Hitler's charisma and commitment to his beliefs. He joined the NSDAP around this time, becoming member number 8762. In late 1924, Goebbels offered his services to Karl Kaufmann, who was Gauleiter (NSDAP district leader) for the Rhine-Ruhr District. Kaufmann put him in touch with Gregor Strasser, a leading Nazi organizer in northern Germany, who hired him to work on their weekly newspaper and to do secretarial work for the regional party offices. He was also put to work as party speaker and representative for Rhineland-Westphalia. Members of Strasser's northern branch of the NSDAP, including Goebbels, had a more socialist outlook than the rival Hitler group in Munich. Strasser disagreed with Hitler on many parts of the party platform, and in November 1926 began working on a revision.

Hitler viewed Strasser's actions as a threat to his authority, and summoned 60 Gauleiters and party leaders, including Goebbels, to a special conference in Bamberg, in Streicher's Gau of Franconia, where he gave a two-hour speech repudiating Strasser's new political programme. Hitler was opposed to the socialist leanings of the northern wing, stating it would mean "political bolshevization of Germany". Further, there would be "no princes, only Germans", and a legal system with no "... Jewish system of exploitation ... for plundering of our people". The future would be secured by acquiring land, not through expropriation of the estates of the former nobility, but through colonization of territories to the east. Goebbels was horrified by Hitler's characterisation of socialism as "a Jewish creation", and his assertion that private property would not be expropriated by a Nazi government. "I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That's the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away", he wrote in his diary.

In hopes of winning over the opposition, Hitler arranged meetings in Munich with the three Greater Ruhr Gau leaders, including Goebbels. Goebbels was impressed when Hitler sent his own car to meet them at the railway station. That evening Hitler and Goebbels both gave speeches at a beer hall rally. The following day, Hitler offered his hand in reconciliation to the three men, encouraging them to put their differences behind them. Hitler also gave Goebbels "new insight" into the "social question". Goebbels capitulated completely, offering Hitler his total loyalty – a pledge that was clearly sincere, and that he adhered to until the end of his life. "I love him ... He has thought through everything," Goebbels wrote. "Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius". Later he wrote: "Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius." As a result of the Bamberg and Munich meetings, Strasser's new draft of the party programme was discarded. The original National Socialist Program of 1920 was retained unchanged, and Hitler's position as party leader was greatly strengthened.

Propagandist in Berlin

At Hitler's invitation, Goebbels spoke at party meetings in Munich and at the annual Party Congress, held in Weimar in 1926. For the following year's event, Goebbels was involved in the planning for the first time. He and Hitler arranged for the rally to be filmed. Receiving praise for doing well at these events led Goebbels to shape his political ideas to match Hitler's, and to admire and idolize him even more.

Goebbels was first offered the position of party Gauleiter for the Berlin section in August 1926. He travelled to Berlin in mid-September and by the middle of October accepted the position. Thus Hitler's plan to divide and dissolve the northwestern Gauleiters group that Goebbels had served in under Strasser was successful. Hitler gave Goebbels great authority over the area, allowing him to determine the course for organisation and leadership for the Gau. Goebbels was given control over the local Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) and answered only to Hitler. The party membership numbered about 1,000 when Goebbels arrived, and he reduced it to a core of 600 of the most active and promising members. To raise money, he instituted membership fees and began charging admission to party meetings. Aware of the value of publicity (both positive and negative), he deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, including violent attacks on the Communist Party of Germany. Goebbels adapted recent developments in commercial advertising to the political sphere, including the use of catchy slogans and subliminal cues. His new ideas for poster design included using large type, red ink, and cryptic headers that encouraged the reader to examine the fine print to determine the meaning.

Like Hitler, Goebbels practiced his public speaking skills in front of a mirror. Meetings were preceded by ceremonial marches and singing, and the venues were decorated with party banners. His entrance (almost always late) was timed for maximum emotional impact. He usually meticulously planned his speeches ahead of time, using pre-planned and choreographed inflection and gestures, but he was also able to improvise and adapt his presentation to make a good connection with his audience.

Goebbels' tactic of using provocation to bring attention to the NSDAP, along with violence at the public party meetings and demonstrations, led the Berlin police to ban the NSDAP from the city on 5 May 1927. Violent incidents continued, including young Nazis randomly attacking Jews in the streets. Goebbels was subjected to a public speaking ban until the end of October. During this period, he founded the newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) as a propaganda vehicle for the Berlin area. It was a modern-style newspaper which took an aggressive tone. To Goebbels' disappointment, circulation was initially small, only 2,000. Material in the paper was highly anti-communist and antisemitic. Among the paper's favourite targets was the Jewish Deputy Chief of the Berlin Police Bernhard Weiß. Goebbels gave him the derogatory nickname "Isidore" and subjected him to a relentless campaign of Jew-baiting in the hope of provoking a crackdown he could then exploit. Goebbels continued to try to break into the literary world, with a revised version of his book Michael finally being published, and the unsuccessful production of two of his plays (Der Wanderer and Die Saat (The Seed)). The latter was his final attempt at playwriting. During this period in Berlin he had relationships with many women, including his old flame Anka Stalherm, who was now married and had a small child. He was quick to fall in love, but easily tired of a relationship and moved on to someone new. He worried too about how a committed personal relationship might interfere with his career.

The ban on the NSDAP was lifted in early 1928, in time for the Reichstag elections, held on 20 May. Results were poor, with the NSDAP losing nearly 100,000 voters and earning only 2.6 per cent of the vote nationwide. Results in Berlin were even worse, where they attained only 1.4 per cent of the vote. Goebbels was one of twelve NSDAP members to gain election to the Reichstag. This gave him immunity from prosecution for a long list of outstanding charges, including a three-week jail sentence he received in April for insulting the deputy police chief Weiß. The Reichstag changed the immunity regulations in February 1931, and Goebbels was forced to pay fines for libellous material he had placed in Der Angriff over the course of the previous year.

In his newspaper Berliner Arbeiterzeitung (Berlin Workers Newspaper), Gregor Strasser was highly critical of Goebbels' failure to attract the urban vote. However, the party as a whole did much better in rural areas, attracting as much as 18 per cent of the vote in some regions. This was partly because Hitler had publicly stated just prior to the election that Point 17 of the party programme, which mandated the expropriation of land without compensation, would apply only to Jewish speculators and not private landholders. After the election, the party refocused their efforts to try to attract still more votes in the agricultural sector. In May, shortly after the election, Hitler considered appointing Goebbels as party propaganda chief. But he hesitated, as he worried that the removal of Gregor Strasser from the post would lead to a split in the party. Goebbels considered himself well suited to the position, and began to formulate ideas about how propaganda could be used in schools and the media.

By 1930, the violence between the Nazis and communists led to local SA troop leader Horst Wessel being shot by two members of the Communist Party of Germany. He later died in hospital. Exploiting Wessel's death, Goebbels turned him into a martyr for the Nazi movement. He officially declared  Wessel's march Die Fahne hoch (Raise the flag), renamed as the Horst-Wessel-Lied, to be the NSDAP anthem.

The Great Depression greatly impacted Germany and by 1930 there was a dramatic increase in unemployment. During this time, the Strasser brothers started publishing a new daily newspaper in Berlin, the Nationaler Sozialist. Like their other publications, it conveyed the brothers' own brand of Nazism, including nationalism, anti-capitalism, social reform, and anti-Westernism. Goebbels complained vehemently about the rival Strasser newspapers to Hitler, and admitted that their success was causing his own Berlin newspapers to be "pushed to the wall". In late April 1930, Hitler publicly and firmly announced his opposition to Gregor Strasser and appointed Goebbels to replace him as Reich leader of NSDAP propaganda. One of Goebbels' first acts was to ban the evening edition of the Nationaler Sozialist. Goebbels was also given control of other Nazi papers across the country, including the party's national newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People's Observer). He still had to wait until 3 July for Otto Strasser and his supporters to announce they were leaving the NSDAP. Upon receiving the news, Goebbels was relieved the "crisis" with the Strassers was finally over and glad that Otto Strasser had lost all power.

The rapid deterioration of the economy led to the resignation on 27 March 1930 of the coalition government that had been elected in 1928. A new cabinet was formed, and  Paul von Hindenburg used his power as president to govern via emergency decrees. He appointed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor. Goebbels took charge of the NSDAP's national campaign for Reichstag elections called for 14 September 1930. Campaigning was undertaken on a huge scale, with thousands of meetings and speeches held all over the country. Hitler's speeches focused on blaming the country's economic woes on the Weimar Republic, particularly its adherence to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which called for war reparations that had proven devastating to the German economy. He proposed a new German society based on race and national unity. The resulting success took even Hitler and Goebbels by surprise: the party received 6.5 million votes nationwide and took 107 seats in the Reichstag, making it the second largest party in the country.

In late 1930 Goebbels met Magda Quandt, a divorcée who had joined the party a few months earlier. She worked as a volunteer in the party offices in Berlin, helping Goebbels organize his private papers. Her flat on the Reichkanzlerplatz soon became a favourite meeting place for Hitler and other NSDAP officials. Goebbels and Quandt married on 19 December 1931.

For two further elections held in 1932, Goebbels organized massive campaigns that included rallies, parades, speeches, and Hitler travelling around the country by airplane with the slogan "the Führer over Germany". Goebbels also undertook numerous speaking tours during these election campaigns. Goebbels had some of their speeches published on gramophone records and as pamphlets. He was also involved in the production of a small collection of silent films that could be shown at party meetings, though they did not yet have enough equipment to widely use this medium.  Many of Goebbels' campaign posters used violent imagery such as a giant half-clad male destroying political opponents or other perceived enemies such as "International High Finance". His propaganda characterized the opposition as "November criminals", "Jewish wire-pullers", or a communist threat. Support for the party continued to grow, but neither of these elections led to a majority government. In an effort to stabilize the country and improve economic conditions, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich chancellor on 30 January 1933.

Propaganda Minister

To celebrate Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Goebbels organized a torchlit parade in Berlin on the night of 30 January of an estimated 60,000 men, many in the uniforms of the SA and SS. The spectacle was covered by a live state radio broadcast, with commentary by longtime party member and future Minister of Aviation Hermann Göring. Goebbels was disappointed to not be given a post in Hitler's new cabinet. Bernhard Rust was appointed as Minister of Culture, the post Goebbels was expecting to receive. Like other NSDAP officials, Goebbels had to deal with Hitler's leadership style of giving contradictory orders to his subordinates, while placing them into positions where their duties and responsibilities overlapped. In this way, Hitler fostered distrust, competition, and infighting among his subordinates to consolidate and maximise his own power. The NSDAP took advantage of the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, with Hindenburg passing the Reichstag Fire Decree the following day at Hitler's urging. This was the first of several pieces of legislation that dismantled democracy in Germany and put a totalitarian dictatorship—headed by Hitler—in its place. On 5 March, yet another Reichstag election took place, the last to be held before the defeat of the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. While the NSDAP increased their number of seats and percentage of the vote, it was not the landslide expected by the party leadership. Goebbels finally received Hitler's appointment to the cabinet, officially becoming head of the newly created Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 14 March.

The role of the new ministry, which set up its offices in the 18th-century Ordenspalais across from the Reich Chancellery, was to centralise Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life. Goebbels hoped to increase popular support of the party from the 37 per cent achieved at the last free election held in Germany on 25 March 1933 to 100 per cent support. An unstated goal was to present to other nations the impression that the NSDAP had the full and enthusiastic backing of the entire population. One of Goebbels' first productions was staging the Day of Potsdam, a ceremonial passing of power from Hindenburg to Hitler, held in Potsdam on 21 March. He composed the text of Hitler's decree authorizing the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, held on 1 April. Later that month, Goebbels travelled back to Rheydt, where he was given a triumphal reception. The townsfolk lined the main street, which had been renamed in his honour. On the following day, Goebbels was declared a local hero.

Goebbels converted the 1 May holiday from a celebration of workers' rights (observed as such especially by the communists) into a day celebrating the NSDAP. In place of the usual ad hoc labour celebrations, he organized a huge party rally held at Tempelhof Field in Berlin. The following day, all trade union offices in the country were forcibly disbanded by the SA and SS, and the Nazi-run German Labour Front was created to take their place. "We are the masters of Germany", he commented in his diary entry of 3 May. Less than two weeks later, he gave a speech at the Nazi book burning in Berlin on 10 May.

Meanwhile, the NSDAP began passing laws to marginalize Jews and remove them from German society. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, forced all non-Aryans to retire from the legal profession and civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of their right to practise. The first Nazi concentration camps (initially created to house political dissenters) were founded shortly after Hitler seized power. In a process termed Gleichschaltung (co-ordination), the NSDAP proceeded to rapidly bring all aspects of life under control of the party. All civilian organisations, including agricultural groups, volunteer organisations, and sports clubs, had their leadership replaced with Nazi sympathisers or party members. By June 1933, virtually the only organisations not in the control of the NSDAP were the army and the churches. In a move to manipulate Germany's middle class and shape popular opinion, the regime passed on 4 October 1933 the Schriftleitergesetz (Editor's Law), which became the cornerstone of the Nazi Party's control of the popular press.  Modeled to some extent on the system in Benito Mussolini's Italy, the law defined a Schriftleiter as anyone who wrote, edited, or selected texts and/or illustrated material for serial publication. Individuals selected for this position were chosen based on experiential, educational, and racial criteria. The law required journalists to "regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life and as a conception of government."

At the end of June 1934, top officials of the SA and opponents of the regime, including Gregor Strasser, were arrested and killed in a purge later called the Night of Long Knives. Goebbels was present at the arrest of SA leader Ernst Röhm in Munich. On 2 August 1934, President von Hindenburg died. In a radio broadcast, Goebbels announced that the offices of president and chancellor had been combined, and Hitler had been formally named as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor).

Workings of the Ministry

The propaganda ministry was organized into seven departments: administration and legal; mass rallies, public health, youth, and race; radio; national and foreign press; films and film censorship; art, music, and theatre; and protection against counter-propaganda, both foreign and domestic. Goebbels style of leadership was tempestuous and unpredictable. He would suddenly change direction and shift his support between senior associates; he was a difficult boss and liked to berate his staff in public. Goebbels was successful at his job, however; Life wrote in 1938 that "[p]ersonally he likes nobody, is liked by nobody, and runs the most efficient Nazi department."

The Reich Film Chamber, which all members of the film industry were required to join, was created in June 1933. Goebbels promoted the development of films with a Nazi slant, and ones that contained subliminal or overt propaganda messages. Under the auspices of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), created in September, Goebbels added additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre. As in the film industry, anyone wishing to pursue a career in these fields had to be a member of the corresponding chamber. In this way anyone whose views were contrary to the regime could be excluded from working in their chosen field and thus silenced. In addition, journalists (now considered employees of the state) were required to prove Aryan descent back to the year 1800, and if married, the same requirement applied to the spouse. Members of any chamber were not allowed to leave the country for their work without prior permission of their chamber. A committee was established to censor books, and works could not be re-published unless they were on the list of approved works. Similar regulations applied to other fine arts and entertainment; even cabaret performances were censored. Many German artists and intellectuals left Germany in the pre-war years rather than work under these restrictions.

Goebbels was particularly interested in controlling radio, which was then still a fairly new mass medium. Sometimes under protest from individual states (particularly Prussia, headed by Göring), Goebbels gained control of radio stations nationwide, and placed them under the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (German National Broadcasting Corporation) in July 1934. Manufacturers were urged by Goebbels to produce inexpensive home receivers, called Volksempfänger (people's receiver), and by 1938 nearly ten million sets had been sold. Loudspeakers were placed in public areas, factories, and schools, so that important party broadcasts would be heard live by nearly all Germans. On 2 September 1939 (the day after the start of the war), Goebbels and the Council of Ministers proclaimed it illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Disseminating news from foreign broadcasts could result in the death penalty. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later Minister for Armaments and War Production, later said the regime "made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought."

A major focus of Nazi propaganda was Hitler himself, who was glorified as a heroic and infallible leader and became the focus of a cult of personality. Much of this was spontaneous, but some was stage-managed as part of Goebbels' propaganda work. Adulation of Hitler was the focus of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his moves were carefully choreographed. The rally was the subject of the film Triumph of the Will, one of several Nazi propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl. It won the Gold Medal at the 1935 Venice Film Festival. At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels declared that "Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself."

Goebbels was involved in planning the staging of the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin. It was around this time that he met and started having an affair with the actress Lída Baarová, whom he continued to see until 1938. A major project in 1937 was the Degenerate Art Exhibition, organised by Goebbels, which ran in Munich from July to November. The exhibition proved wildly popular, attracting over two million visitors. A degenerate music exhibition took place the following year. Meanwhile, Goebbels was disappointed by the lack of quality in the National Socialist artwork, films, and literature.

Church struggle

In 1933, Hitler signed the Reichskonkordat (Reich Concordat), a treaty with the Vatican that required the regime to honour the independence of Catholic institutions and prohibited clergy from involvement in politics. However, the regime continued to target the Christian churches and to try to weaken their influence. Throughout 1935 and 1936, hundreds of clergy, nuns, and lay leaders were arrested, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or sexual offences. Goebbels widely publicised the trials in his propaganda campaigns, showing the cases in the worst possible light. Restrictions were placed on public meetings, and Catholic publications faced censorship. Catholic schools were required to reduce religious instruction and crucifixes were removed from state buildings. Hitler often vacillated on whether or not the Kirchenkampf (church struggle) should be a priority, but his frequent inflammatory comments on the issue were enough to convince Goebbels to intensify his work on the issue in the first half of 1937.

In response to the persecution, Pope Pius XI had the "Mit brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Concern") Encyclical smuggled into Germany for Passion Sunday 1937 and read from every pulpit. It denounced the systematic hostility of the regime toward the church. In response, Goebbels renewed the regime's crackdown and propaganda against Catholics. His speech of 28 May in Berlin in front of 20,000 party members, which was also broadcast on the radio, attacked the Catholic church as morally corrupt. As a result of the propaganda campaign, enrolment in denominational schools dropped sharply, and by 1939 all such schools were disbanded or converted to public facilities. Harassment and threats of imprisonment led the clergy to be much more cautious in their criticism of the regime. Partly out of foreign policy concerns, Hitler ordered a scaling back the church struggle by the end of July 1937.

Goebbels at war

As early as February 1933, Hitler announced that rearmament must be undertaken, albeit clandestinely at first, as to do so was in violation of the Versailles Treaty. A year later he told his military leaders that 1942 was the target date for going to war in the east. Goebbels was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler aggressively pursuing Germany's expansionist policies sooner rather than later. At the time of the Reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Goebbels summed up his general attitude in his diary: "[N]ow is the time for action. Fortune favors the brave! He who dares nothing wins nothing." In the lead-up to the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, Goebbels took the initiative time and again to use propaganda to whip up sympathy for the Sudeten Germans while campaigning against the Czech government. Still, Goebbels was well aware there was a growing "war panic" in Germany and so by July had the press conduct propaganda efforts at a lower level of intensity. After the western powers acceded to Hitler's demands concerning Czechoslovakia in 1938, Goebbels soon redirected his propaganda machine against Poland. From May onwards, he orchestrated a campaign against Poland, fabricating stories about atrocities against ethnic Germans in Danzig and other cities. Even so, he was unable to persuade the majority of Germans to welcome the prospect of war. He privately held doubts about the wisdom of risking a protracted war against Britain and France by attacking Poland.

After the Invasion of Poland in 1939, Goebbels used his propaganda ministry and the Reich chambers to control access to information domestically. To his chagrin, his rival Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, continually challenged Goebbels' jurisdiction over the dissemination of international propaganda. Hitler declined to make a firm ruling on the subject, so the two men remained rivals for the remainder of the Nazi era. Goebbels did not participate in the military decision making process, nor was he made privy to diplomatic negotiations until after the fact.

The Propaganda Ministry took over the broadcasting facilities of conquered countries immediately after surrender, and began broadcasting prepared material using the existing announcers as a way to gain the trust of the citizens. Most aspects of the media, both domestically and in the conquered countries, were controlled by Goebbels and his department. The German Home Service, the Armed Forces Programme, and the German European Service were all rigorously controlled in everything from the information they were permitted to disseminate to the music they were allowed to play. Party rallies, speeches, and demonstrations continued; speeches were broadcast on the radio and short propaganda films were exhibited using 1,500 mobile film vans. Hitler made fewer public appearances and broadcasts as the war progressed, so Goebbels increasingly became the voice of the Nazi regime for the German people. From May 1940 he wrote frequent editorials that were published in Das Reich which were later read aloud over the radio. He found films to be his most effective propaganda medium, after radio. At his insistence, initially half the films made in wartime Germany were propaganda films (particularly on antisemitism) and war propaganda films (recounting both historical wars and current exploits of the Wehrmacht).

Goebbels became preoccupied with morale and the efforts of the people on the home front. He believed that the more the people at home were involved in the war effort, the better their morale would be. For example, he initiated a programme for the collection of winter clothing and ski equipment for troops on the eastern front. At the same time, Goebbels implemented changes to have more "entertaining material" in radio and film produced for the public, decreeing in late 1942 that 20 per cent of the films should be propaganda and 80 per cent light entertainment. As Gauleiter of Berlin, Goebbels dealt with increasingly serious shortages of necessities such as food and clothing, as well as the need to ration beer and tobacco, which were important for morale. Hitler suggested watering the beer and degrading the quality of the cigarettes so that more could be produced, but Goebbels refused, saying the cigarettes were already of such low quality that it was impossible to make them any worse. Through his propaganda campaigns, he worked hard to maintain an appropriate level of morale among the public about the military situation, neither too optimistic nor too grim. The series of military setbacks the Germans suffered in this period – the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne (May 1942), the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein (November 1942), and especially the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad (February 1943) – were difficult matters to present to the German public, who were increasingly weary of the war and sceptical that it could be won. On 15 January 1943, Hitler appointed Goebbels as head of the newly created Air Raid Damage committee, which meant Goebbels was nominally in charge of nationwide civil air defenses and shelters as well as the assessment and repair of damaged buildings. In actuality, the defence of areas other than Berlin remained in the hands of the local Gauleiters, and his main tasks were limited to providing immediate aid to the affected civilians and using propaganda to improve their morale.

By early 1943, the war produced a labour crisis for the regime. Hitler created a three-man committee with representatives of the State, the army, and the Party in an attempt to centralise control of the war economy. The committee members were Hans Lammers (head of the Reich Chancellery), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command; OKW), and Martin Bormann, who controlled the Party. The committee was intended to independently propose measures regardless of the wishes of various ministries, with Hitler reserving most final decisions to himself. The committee, soon known as the Dreierausschuß (Committee of Three), met eleven times between January and August 1943. However, they ran up against resistance from Hitler's cabinet ministers, who headed deeply entrenched spheres of influence and were excluded from the committee. Seeing it as a threat to their power, Goebbels, Göring, and Speer worked together to bring it down. The result was that nothing changed, and the Committee of Three declined into irrelevance by September 1943.

Partly in response to being excluded from the Committee of Three, Goebbels pressured Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Some of these measures were implemented in an edict of 13 January, but to Goebbels' dismay, Göring demanded that his favourite restaurants in Berlin should remain open, and Lammers successfully lobbied Hitler to have women with children exempted from conscription, even if they had child care available. After receiving an enthusiastic response to his speech of 30 January 1943 on the topic, Goebbels believed he had the support of the German people in his call for total war. His next speech, the Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943, was a passionate demand for his audience to commit to total war, which he presented as the only way to stop the Bolshevik onslaught and save the German people from destruction. The speech also had a strong antisemitic element and hinted at the extermination of the Jewish people that was already underway. The speech was presented live on radio and was filmed as well. Goebbels' efforts had little impact for the time being, as while Hitler was in principle in favour of total war, he was not prepared to implement changes over the objections of his ministers. The discovery around this time of a mass grave of Polish officers that had been killed by the Red Army in the 1940 Katyn massacre was made use of by Goebbels in his propaganda in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Soviets and the other western allies.

Plenipotentiary for total war

After the Allied invasion of Sicily (July 1943) and the strategic Soviet victory in the Battle of Kursk (July–August 1943), Goebbels began to recognize that the war could no longer be won. Following the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of Mussolini in September, he raised with Hitler the possibility of a separate peace, either with the Soviets or with Britain. Hitler rejected both of these proposals.

As Germany's military and economic situation grew steadily worse, on 25 August 1943 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler took over the post of interior minister, replacing Wilhelm Frick. (H. R. Knickerbocker had written in 1941 that Goebbels and Himmler were "rivals in unpopularity", and that Goebbels "would be lucky to remain alive twenty-four hours after Hitler's protective hand was removed". ) Intensive air raids on Berlin and other cities took the lives of thousands of people. Göring's Luftwaffe attempted to retaliate with air raids on London in early 1944, but they no longer had sufficient aircraft to make much of an impact. While Goebbels' propaganda in this period indicated that a huge retaliation was in the offing, the V-1 flying bombs, launched on British targets beginning in mid-June 1944, had little effect, with only around 20 per cent reaching their intended targets. To boost morale, Goebbels continued to publish propaganda to the effect that further improvements to these weapons would have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war. Meanwhile, in the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, the Allies successfully gained a foothold in France.

Throughout July, Goebbels and Speer continued to press Hitler to bring the economy to a total war footing. The 20 July plot, where Hitler was almost killed by a bomb at his field headquarters in East Prussia, played into the hands of those who had been pushing for change: Bormann, Goebbels, Himmler, and Speer. Over the objections of Göring, Goebbels was appointed on 23 July as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, charged with maximising the manpower for the Wehrmacht and the armaments industry at the expense of sectors of the economy not critical to the war effort. Through these efforts, he was able to free up an additional half a million men for military service. However, as many of these new recruits came from the armaments industry, the move put him in conflict with armaments minister Speer. Untrained workers from elsewhere were not readily absorbed into the armaments industry, and likewise the new Wehrmacht recruits waited in barracks for their turn to be trained.

At Hitler's behest, the Volkssturm (People's Storm) – a nationwide militia of men previously considered unsuitable for military service – was formed on 18 October 1944. Goebbels recorded in his diary that 100,000 recruits were sworn in from his Gau alone. However, the men, mostly age 45 to 60, received only rudimentary training and many were not properly armed. Goebbels' notion that these men could effectively serve on the front lines against Soviet tanks and artillery was unrealistic at best. The programme was deeply unpopular.

Defeat and death

In the last months of the war, Goebbels' speeches and articles took on an increasingly apocalyptic tone. By the beginning of 1945, with the Soviets on the Oder River and the Western Allies preparing to cross the Rhine, he could no longer disguise the fact that defeat was inevitable. Berlin had little in the way of fortifications or artillery (or even Volkssturm units), as almost everything had been sent to the front. Goebbels noted in his diary on 21 January that millions of Germans were fleeing westward. He tentatively discussed with Hitler the issue of making peace overtures to the western allies, but Hitler again refused. Privately, Goebbels was conflicted at pushing the case with Hitler since he did not want to lose the confidence of his Führer.

When other Nazi leaders urged Hitler to leave Berlin and establish a new centre of resistance in the National Redoubt in Bavaria, Goebbels opposed this, arguing for a last heroic stand in Berlin. His family (except for Magda's son Harald, who had served in the Luftwaffe and been captured by the Allies) moved into their house in Berlin to await the end. He and Magda may have discussed suicide and the fate of their young children in a long meeting on the night of 27 January. He knew how the outside world would view the criminal acts committed by the regime, and had no desire to subject himself to the "debacle" of a trial. He burned his private papers on the night of 18 April.

Goebbels knew how to play on Hitler's fantasies, encouraging him to see the hand of providence in the death of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April. Whether Hitler really saw this event as a turning point as Goebbels proclaimed is not known. By this time, Goebbels had gained the position he had wanted so long – at the side of Hitler. Göring was utterly discredited, although he was not stripped of his offices until 23 April. Himmler, whose appointment as commander of Army Group Vistula had led to disaster on the Oder, was also in disgrace with Hitler. Most of Hitler's inner circle, including Göring, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Speer, prepared to leave Berlin immediately after Hitler's birthday celebration on 20 April. Even Bormann was "not anxious" to meet his end at Hitler's side. On 22 April, Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the end and then shoot himself. Goebbels moved with his family into the Vorbunker, connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden in central Berlin, that same day. He told Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss that he would not entertain the idea of either surrender or escape. On 23 April, Goebbels made the following proclamation to the people of Berlin:

After midnight on 29 April, with the Soviets advancing ever closer to the bunker complex, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony within the Führerbunker. Afterwards Hitler hosted a modest wedding breakfast with his new wife. Hitler then took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. Goebbels and Bormann were two of the witnesses.

In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, he appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, Reich President; and Bormann as Party Minister. Goebbels wrote a postscript to the will stating that he would disobey Hitler's order to leave Berlin: "For reasons of humanity and personal loyalty" he had to stay. Further, his wife and children would be staying, as well. They would end their lives "side by side with the Führer".

In the mid-afternoon of 30 April, Hitler shot himself. After Hitler's suicide, Goebbels was depressed. Voss later recounted Goebbels said: "It is a great pity that such a man is not with us any longer. But there is nothing to be done. For us, everything is lost now and the only way out left for us is the one which Hitler chose. I shall follow his example."

On 1 May, Goebbels completed his sole official act as Chancellor. He dictated a letter to General Vasily Chuikov and ordered German General Hans Krebs to deliver it under a white flag. Chuikov, as commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. Goebbels' letter informed Chuikov of Hitler's death and requested a ceasefire. After this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts were futile.

Later on 1 May, Vice-Admiral Voss saw Goebbels for the last time: "... While saying goodbye I asked Goebbels to join us. But he replied: 'The captain must not leave his sinking ship. I have thought about it all and decided to stay here. I have nowhere to go because with little children I will not be able to make it, especially with a leg like mine...' "

On the evening of 1 May 1945, Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to inject his six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of cyanide could be then crushed in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's later testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but it was Magda Goebbels and SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, who administered the cyanide.

At around 20:30, Goebbels and Magda left the bunker and walked up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they committed suicide. There are several different accounts of this event. According to one account, Goebbels shot Magda and then himself. Another account was that they each bit on a cyanide ampule and were given a coup de grâce immediately afterwards. Goebbels' SS adjutant Günther Schwägermann testified in 1948 that they walked ahead of him up the stairs and out into the Chancellery garden. He waited in the stairwell and heard the shots sound. Schwägermann then walked up the remaining stairs and once outside he saw their lifeless bodies. Following Goebbels' prior order, Schwägermann had an SS soldier fire several shots into his body, which did not move.

The bodies were then doused with petrol, but they were only partially burned and not buried. A few days later, Voss was brought back to the bunker by the Soviets to identify the partly burned bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their children. The remains of the Goebbels' family, Hitler, Braun, General Krebs, and Hitler's dogs were repeatedly buried and exhumed. The last burial was at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. In 1970, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains. On 4 April 1970, a Soviet KGB team used detailed burial charts to exhume five wooden boxes at the Magdeburg SMERSH facility. Those were burned, crushed, and scattered into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.

Antisemitism and the Holocaust

Like many Germans of that time, Goebbels was antisemitic from a young age. After joining the NSDAP and meeting Hitler, his antisemitism grew and became more radical. He began to see the Jews as a destructive force with a negative impact on German society. After the Nazis seized power, he repeatedly urged Hitler to take action against the Jews. The party's goal was to remove them from German cultural and economic life, and eventually to remove them from the country altogether. In addition to his propaganda efforts, Goebbels actively promoted the persecution of the Jews through pogroms, legislation, and other actions. Discriminatory measures he instituted in Berlin in the early years of the regime included bans against their using public transport and requiring that Jewish shops be marked as such.

In November 1938, the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was killed in Paris by a young Jewish man. In response, Goebbels arranged for inflammatory antisemitic material to be released by the press, and the result was the start of a pogrom. Jews were attacked and synagogues destroyed all over Germany. The situation was further inflamed by a speech Goebbels gave at a party meeting on the night of 8 November, where he obliquely called for party members to incite further violence against Jews while making it appear to be a spontaneous series of acts by the German people. At least a hundred Jews were killed, several hundred synagogues were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of Jewish shops were vandalized in an event called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Around 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The destruction stopped after a conference held on 12 November, where Göring pointed out that the destruction of Jewish property was in effect the destruction of German property, since the intention was that it would all eventually be confiscated. Goebbels continued his intensive antisemitic propaganda campaign that culminated in Hitler's 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech, which Goebbels helped to write:

While Goebbels had been pressing for expulsion of the Berlin Jews since 1935, there were still 62,000 living in the city in 1940. Part of the delay in their deportation was that they were needed as workers in the armaments industry. Deportations of German Jews began in October 1941, with the first transport from Berlin leaving on 18 October. Some Jews were shot immediately on arrival in destinations such as Riga and Kaunas. In preparation for the deportations, Goebbels ordered that all German Jews were required by law to wear an identifying yellow badge as of 5 September 1941. On 6 March 1942, Goebbels received a copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. The document made the Nazi policy clear: the Jewish population of Europe was to be sent to extermination camps in occupied areas of Poland and killed. His diary entries of the period show that he was well aware of the fate of the Jews. "In general, it can probably be established that 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 percent can be put to work. ... A judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric but thoroughly deserved," he wrote on 27 March 1942.

Goebbels had frequent discussions with Hitler about the fate of the Jews, a subject which they discussed almost every time they met. He was aware throughout that the Jews were being exterminated, and completely supported this decision. He was one of the few top NSDAP officials to do so publicly.

Family life

Hitler was very fond of Magda Goebbels and the children. He enjoyed staying at the Goebbels' Berlin apartment, where he could relax. Magda had a close relationship with Hitler, and became a member of his small coterie of female friends. She also became an unofficial representative of the regime, receiving letters from all over Germany from women with questions about domestic matters or child custody issues.

In 1936, Goebbels met the Czech actress Lída Baarová and by the winter of 1937 began an intense affair with her. Magda had a long conversation with Hitler about it on 15 August 1938. Unwilling to put up with a scandal involving one of his top ministers, Hitler demanded that Goebbels break off the relationship. Thereafter, Joseph and Magda seemed to reach a truce until the end of September. The couple had another falling out at that point, and once again Hitler became involved, insisting the couple stay together. Hitler arranged for publicity photos to be taken of himself with the reconciled couple in October. Magda too had affairs, including a relationship with Kurt Ludecke in 1933 and Karl Hanke in 1938.

The Goebbels family included Harald Quandt (Magda's son from her first marriage; born 1921), plus Helga (1932), Hilde (1934), Helmuth (1935), Holde (1937), Hedda (1938), and Heide (1940). Harald was the only member of the family to survive the war.

Goebbels - MISS DUERDIN
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Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels was born in 1897 and died in 1945. Goebbels was  Hitler’s  Minister of  Propaganda  and one of the most important and influential people in  Nazi Germany .
Goebbels was born in the Rhineland and he attended Heidelberg University where he was became a Doctor of Philosophy in 1920. He had not served in the German Army during the  First World War  as he was disabled by a clubbed foot which meant he found it difficult to walk (Hitler ordered him to disguise this). This feeling of inferiority (Goebbels was self-conscious about his lack of height as well), his rejection by the German Army and the terms of the  Treaty of Versailles  lead to Goebbels becoming a very bitter man in the early 1920’s. He joined the Nazi Party towards the end of 1924 to keep his parents happy.
Goebbels was given the task of building up Nazi support in Berlin. He did this between 1926 and 1930. In 1928, he was elected to the Reichstag (the German Parliament, so he was a bit like an MP) – something that he repeated in 1930. 
To start with Goebbels didn't like Hitler. It was only after 1926 that he changed his mind. After this he was dedicated and their relationship was a close one - this allowed Goebbels to influence others more. In 1929, he had been given overall charge of the party’s propaganda machine. It was here that Goebbels excelled. In 1933, after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, Goebbels was appointed Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda. He held this post until 1945.
His sharp tongue made him enemies within the Nazi Party where some called him the “Poison Dwarf”. However, except for issues involving his marriage, he had Hitler’s support. Goebbels was a womaniser and his wife wanted to divorce him after one affair too many. Hitler refused to give his permission for a divorce as he had spent much time telling the German people about he importance of family values. Instead Goebbels was told by Hitler to change his ways.
Goebbels knew the power of controlling what people thought. He used lots of brand new (at the time) techniques for his propaganda, such as colour film – rarely used by politicians elsewhere as it was considered too unreliable. Films such as “The Eternal Jew” (a black and white film) hammered home the  anti-Semitic  (anti-Jewish) message of the party. Another film; “Triumph of the Will” portrayed the might of Hitler and Germany. He was vital in Hitler becoming Chancellor in 1933 as his propaganda convinced the German people that the Hitler and the Nazis could save them from the Depression. He also blamed the Jews again at this point, so it was quite early on that we can see the origins of the Holocaust. His policies and propaganda were so appealing at this stage that the Nazis didn't have to use much terror. Their policies were just too appealing to desperate people (however opposition did still exist.)
It also wasn't just films that Goebbels used for propaganda, he also used; newspapers, radio, public holidays, rallies, books, theatre, music and The Olympics. He would use these all the way through to the end of the Second World War, along with censorship.
During the  War , it was easy for Goebbels to persuade the public that things were going well when the war was going Germany’s way. However, this became a lot more difficult after the Battle of Stalingrad. This was portrayed on film as a failing of generals on the eastern front not showing enough commitment to the Nazi cause. Goebbels demanded “total war” from the Germans and in 1944, he was appointed Reich Commissioner for Total Mobilisation. His use of propaganda continued to increase throughout the war, both to keep support and turn people against the opposition to the Nazis.
As the Russians advanced on Berlin in April/May 1945, Goebbels stayed with Hitler in Hitler’s bunker. In his diary, he blamed the defeat of Germany on the German people and not Hitler. On May 1st, he gave poison to his six children and then shot his wife and then himself. He gave orders that his body should be burned. Before, his death, it is said that Hitler gave to Goebbels his own wrist watch as a mark that he had been the only senior Nazi leader to have stayed with Hitler to the end.
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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."

Joseph Goebbels http://www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels was born in Rheydt, Germany, on 29th October, 1897. He attended the established Heidelberg University where he was awarded a doctorate of philosophy in 1920. He had not served in the German Army during the First World War as he was disabled by a clubbed foot which hindered his ability to walk.
 
This feeling of physical inferiority (Goebbels was self-conscious about his lack of height as well), his rejection by the German Army and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles lead to Goebbels becoming a very embittered man in the early 1920’s. He joined the Nazi Party towards the end of 1924.
He was soon after, appointed Gauleiter of Berlin and in this role, he put his propaganda skills to full use. A leading Nazi zealot he focused his energy combating the local socialist and communist parties with the help of Nazi media outlets backed up by the paramilitary thugs of the SA. By 1928 he had risen in the party ranks to become one of its most prominent members.
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, he was appointed propaganda minister. One of his first acts was to order the burning of books by Jewish or anti-Nazi authors at the Bebelplatz and he proceeded to gain full control of every outlet of information in Germany.
 
Der Angriff
In Berlin, Goebbels was able to give full expression to his genius for propaganda, as editor of the Berlin Nazi newspaper Der Angriff  he authored a steady stream of Nazi posters and handbills. He soon rose  to become the city’s most feared agitator.
 
His propaganda techniques were totally cynical: “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result,” he wrote. “It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”
Following his appointment, his attacks on German Jews became ever fiercer and culminated in the Kristallnacht of 1938, the first open and unrestrained pogrom unleashed by the Nazis.
 
Goebbels with Hess & Hitler
Whatever his motives, Goebbels took every opportunity to attack the Jews. Beginning in 1933 and continuing through his career, he was known as one of  the regime’s most virulent anti-Semites. “Some people think,” he told a Berlin rally in June 1935,  “that we haven’t noticed how the Jews are trying once again to spread themselves over all our streets. The Jews ought please to observe the laws of hospitality and not behave as if they were the same as us.”
 
The sarcastic “humour” of Goebbels’s speeches did not conceal the reality of his threat to the Jews. In his capacity as Gauleiter of Berlin, and thus as de facto ruler of the capital, Goebbels maintained constant pressure on the city’s large Jewish community, forcing them out of business and professional life and placing obstacles in the way of their being able to live normal lives, such as banning them from public transport and city facilities.
By mid 1938 Goebbels was investigating the possibility of requiring all Jews to wear an identifying mark and of confining them to a ghetto, but these were ideas whose time had not yet come. “Aim—drive the Jews out of Berlin,” he wrote in his diary in June 1938, “and without any sentimentality.”
 
Goebbels delivering a speech
History has never had a revolution less bloody, more disciplined and more orderly than ours. In attempting to deal with the Jewish question and to approach the matter legally for the first time in Europe's history, we are only following the spirit of the age. Defending against the Jewish danger is only part of our plan. When it becomes the only issue when National Socialism is discussed, that is Jewry's fault, not ours. It has attempted to mobilize the world against us, in the secret hope of winning back the territory it has lost.
This hope is not only in vain, it also carries with it a series of dangers and difficulties for Jewry itself. It cannot prevent arguments throughout the world not only against our policies, but also for them. The discussing has taken on an extent that both in the immediate and distant future could have extraordinarily unpleasant consequences for the Jewish race.
Richard Wagner once called the Jews the "plastic demon of decomposition" and Theodor Mommsen meant the same when he saw them as the "ferment of decomposition." In contrast, the Aryan sees himself as a creative creature. There may be a certain tragedy inherent in the nature of the Jews, but is it our fault that this race works destructively among the peoples and is a constant danger to their domestic and international security?
The fundamental differences between the two races were responsible for the repeated explosions during the November years [1918-1933]. As long as the Jews remain anonymous, they are secure. The moment they lose their anonymity, the racial problem became acute and required a suitable solution. We certainly do not hold the Jews solely to blame for the German spiritual and economic catastrophe. We all know the other causes that led to the decline of our people. However, we have the courage to recognize their role in the process, and to name them by name. It was difficult for a time to persuade the people of this, for public opinion was entirely in Jewish hands.
 
Goebbels 1938 Reichstag Identity card
On a Berlin stage run by the Jews, a steel helmet bearing the words "Away with the filth!" was swept into the dust heap. The Jew Gumbel said the dead of the war had "fallen on the field of dishonor." The Jew Lessing compared Hindenburg with the mass murderer Haarmann. The Jew Toller said heroism was "the most stupid ideal." The Jew Arnold Zweig spoke of the German people as a "horde that needed to be unmasked," as the "animalistic power of the eternal Boche," and as a "nation of newspaper readers, a herd of voters, businessmen, murderers, marchers, operetta lovers, and bureaucratic cadavers."
 
Is it surprising that the German Revolution also broke this unbearable yoke? When one further considers the alienation of German intellectual life by International Jewry, its corruption of German justice that finally led to the fact that only one out of every five judges was German, the takeover of the medical profession, their predominance among university professors, in short, the fact that nearly all intellectual professions were dominated by the Jews, one has to grant that no people with any self esteem could tolerate that for long.
 
It was only an act of national renewal when the National Socialist revolution took action in this area.
 
Giving a speech at a Nazi Rally
People abroad often do not know the real causes of German Jewish legislation. The statistics are most persuasive. Nonetheless, we held back at the beginning of our work. We had more important things to do than to take on a question of such great scope. It is entirely the fault of Jewry that things turned out differently.
 
The boycott and atrocity propaganda they made in other countries was an attempt by International Jewry to accomplish by means of public opinion in other countries what had been made impossible by our takeover in Germany. They attempted to cause difficulties for Germany's rebirth through a worldwide boycott campaign, and to render it ineffective.
 
We finally resorted to a counter-boycott during that critical period. The fact that their racial comrades still in Germany suffered loss is thanks to their racial comrades beyond our borders, who were trying to cause difficulties for us. They only caused economic difficulties for their own race. We can predict the future consequences for Jewry. We have not done anything to encourage them, they are simply the product of the times.
 
Goebbels Speech 1935
Many clever Jews have already realized what they have done, above all to those remaining in Germany, who were the most directly affected. They shouted their warnings. But they could not overcome the radical wing, and in the end had to let things take their course for better or worse. This radical wing has delivered an extraordinarily hard blow to World Jewry and its allies. They put the Jewish Problem up for debate, and where it is debated the results can only be unpleasant. Jewry's strength is in its anonymity; if it loses that, the results can only be harmful.
The recent Zionist Conference in Paris shows the hopeless situation World Jewry has been driven into by its radical wing. When one of the various Jewish groups is no longer united, when there are only fruitless debates, it is a sign that Jewish power is on shaky ground. That is already beginning to have consequences for Jewry.
These events reveal the racial problem in all its difficulty. It will not fade away until Europe's peoples solve it. It will be solved when the people for their own good do what is necessary for their security.
- Joseph Goebbels
Goebbels, Riefenstahl & Hitler
Goebbels knew the power of controlling what people thought. Those that did not had to face the secret police. Those who were taken in by him were enthralled by propaganda films such as "The Eternal Jew" and "Triumph of the Will"  which visually portrayed the might of Hitler and undying power of  Germany skillfully directed by Leni Reifenstahl.
Goebbels delivered 12 such speeches on Adolf Hitler and National Socialism during the years 1933 - 1945. Including a series of articles covering topics on the role of women in Nazi Germany, US involvement in the war, and the ever popular "International Jewish conspiracy."
Once war began in September 1939, Goebbels began a steady process of extending his influence over domestic policy. After 1940, Hitler made few public appearances, and even his broadcasts became less frequent, so Goebbels increasingly became the face and the voice of the Nazi regime for the German people.[55] With Hitler preoccupied with the war, Himmler focusing on the “final solution to the Jewish question” in eastern Europe, and with Göring’s position declining with the failure of the Luftwaffe, Goebbels sensed a power vacuum in domestic policy and quickly moved to fill it.
 
Jews in Vienna forced to scrub streets
Since civilian morale was his responsibility, he increasingly concerned himself with matters such as wages, rationing and housing, which affected morale and therefore productivity. He came to see the lethargic and demoralized Göring, as his main enemy. To undermine Göring, he forged an alliance with Himmler, although the SS chief remained wary of him.
 
The view of most historians is that the decision to proceed with the extermination of the Jews was taken at some point in late 1941, and Goebbels’s comments make it clear that he knew in general terms, if not in detail, what was planned.
The decision in principle to deport the German and Austrian Jews to unspecified destinations “in the east” was made in September. Goebbels immediately pressed for the Berlin Jews to be deported first. He traveled to Hitler’s headquarters on the eastern front, meeting both Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich to lobby for his demands. He got the assurances he wanted: “The Führer is of the opinion,” he wrote, “that the Jews eventually have to be removed from the whole of Germany. The first cities to be made Jew-free are Berlin, Vienna and Prague. Berlin is first in the queue, and I have the hope that we’ll succeed in the course of this year.”
 
Anti-Jewish propaganda  scenes of Jews in Berlin
Deportations of Berlin Jews to the Łódź ghetto began in October, but transport and other difficulties made the process much slower than Goebbels desired. His November article in Das Reich was part of his campaign to have the pace of deportation accelerated.
 
Goebbels wrote in his diary on March 27, 1942:
 
Beginning with Lublin the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is pretty barbaric and is not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. About sixty percent of them will have to be liquidated. Only about 40 percent can be used for forced labour.
 
The former Gauleiter of Vienna (Globocnik) who is to carry out this measure, is doing it with considerable circumspection and in a way that does not attract much attention…… the ghettos that will be emptied in the cities of the General Government will now be re-filled with Jews thrown out of the Reich. The process is to be repeated from time to time.
 
In December, he was present when Hitler addressed a meeting of Gauleiters and other senior Nazis, discussing among other things the “Jewish question.” He wrote in his diary afterwards:
With regard to the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep of it. He prophesied that, if they brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation. The annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. The question is to be viewed without any sentimentality. We’re not there to have sympathy with the Jews, but only sympathy with our own German people. If the German people has again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.
 
After the great defeat at Stalingrad in early February 1943, Goebbels was the first official forthrightly to acknowledge the seriousness of the peril that faced the nation and Europe, and frankly to concede that Germany could lose the war.
 
Probably the best known of his wartime speeches was his brilliantly crafted "Total War" address of February 18, 1943. Masterfully delivered to a large audience in Berlin's Sportpalast hall, it was broadcast on national radio and excerpts were shown in the weekly "Deutsche Wochenschau" newsreel.
Speaking in the aftermath of the Stalingrad catastrophe, Goebbels stressed the grim truth that catastrophic defeat was a real possibility, and concluded with a rousing call for national mobilization.
 
As the war dragged on, Goebbels' front-page editorial essays in the weekly paper Das Reich played an increasingly important role in sustaining public morale. They were widely reprinted and routinely read over the radio.
 
“We live at the most critical period in the history of the Occident,” he wrote in Das Reich in February 1943. “Any weakening of the spiritual and military defensive strength of our continent in its struggle with eastern Bolshevism brings with it the danger of a rapidly nearing decline in its will to resist… Our soldiers in the East will do their part. They will stop the storm from the steppes, and ultimately break it. They fight under unimaginable conditions. But they are fighting a good fight. They are fighting not only for our own security, but also for Europe's future.”
 
In July 1944 he was appointed General Plenipotentiary for Total War. With full authority to direct the civilian population and redistribute manpower even within the armed forces, Goebbels imposed an austerity program 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.
 
The Goebbels family
In April of 1945, Hitler moved into the Führerbunker, located 50 feet below the Chancellery buildings in Berlin. There on April 22, Hitler exclaimed, the Reich was a failure and now there was nothing left for him to do but stay in Berlin and fight to the very end.
Goebbels then brought his entire family, including six young children, to live with Hitler in the bunker. On 30 April, with the Russians advancing to within a few hundred meters of the bunker, Hitler dictated his last will and testament shortly before shooting himself.  Of Hitler's death, Goebbels commented: "The heart of Germany has ceased to beat. The Führer is dead."
Joseph & Magda Goebbels
At 8 p.m. on the evening of 1 May, Goebbels arranged for an SS doctor, Helmut Kunz, to kill his six children by injecting them with morphine and then, when they were unconscious, crushing an ampule of cyanide in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but it was Magda Goebbels and Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, who then administered the cyanide. Shortly afterwards, Goebbels and his wife went up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves.
Before, his death, it is said that Hitler gave to Goebbels his own wrist watch as a mark that he had been the only senior Nazi leader to have stayed with Hitler to the end.
 
Sources:
Who’s Who in Nazi Germany by Robert S Wistrich published by Routledge, London and New York 1995
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power   Allen Lane 2005
The Holocaust Chronicle Publications International LTD
Hitler  Kershaw, Ian W. W. Norton & Company; 1st American edition.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death  Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel Greenhill Books 2006
The Final Solution by G. Reitlinger – Vallentine Mitchell &Co Ltd 1953.
USHMM
Copyright Carmelo  Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2007

Joseph Goebbels - Biography - IMDb
Joseph Goebbels
Biography
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Overview (5)
1 May 1945 ,  Berlin, Germany  (assisted suicide by gunshot)
Birth Name
5' 5" (1.65 m)
Mini Bio (1)
Josef Goebbels, the man who almost single-handedly developed the field of propaganda into an art form, would, for a day, be the leader of World War II Germany. Goebbels was born in the German Rhineland to strict Catholic parents. He was short, standing at just under 5' 6", of small stature and skinny, and had a sharp, prominent nose and an oily, sallow complexion. He was rejected by the German army in World War I on the basis of being a cripple, specifically, he had a club foot for which he wore a brace, contracted after a bout of osteomyelitis. After Germany was defeated, Goebbels joined the National Socialist Workers Party, more infamously known as the Nazi party, which opposed the democratic Weimar Republic that had been set up to govern Germany. Because of his impressive oratorical skills and uncanny ability to slant arguments to his view, Goebbels was considered an ideal leader in the Nazi party. It was there that he met Hitler in 1925. Though they both shared a hatred of Jews, Goebbels, a dedicated socialist, initially tried to expel the relatively capitalistic Hitler, whom he saw as simply an opportunist. He would change his tune, however, when Hitler rose in rank to become Nazi leader. Hitler rewarded Goebbels with a post as Nazi district leader of Berlin, where he would wage year-round political campaigns that eventually drained the organization of virtually all of its funds. He met and married divorcée Magda Quandt around this time. Though their membership grew, the Nazis didn't manage to attract a sizable enough number of voters - especially in Berlin - to attain any kind of legitimate political power, due to both the rebounding German economy and a distrust of the gang of street thugs within the Nazi party called the Sturm Abteilung (SA). However, after the US stock market crashed in 1929, the European economies took a tremendous hit, and the resulting worldwide economic depression hit Germany especially hard. The dire economic straits of many Germans were tailor-made for a demagogue like Hitler, and, slowly, he began to take power; first as Chancellor in 1933, then as Führer in 1934. Goebbels was named minister of entertainment and propaganda, a position that gave him have sole discretion as to what books, magazines, films, radios, newspapers, etc., could print, say or show. Knowing the media power where the influencing of people was concerned, he searched for a director to place as the head of UFA, Germany's leading film studio. In a famous meeting, he offered the position to respected German director Fritz Lang , who tried to excuse himself by saying that he had Jewish grandparents, to which Goebbels curtly replied, "We will decide who is Jewish!" Lang promptly fled the country and Goebbels settled on a rising female director, Leni Riefenstahl , as the "official" Nazi filmmaker. She directed two documentaries on the party's Nuremburg rallies of 1932 and 1933. The first was disowned by Riefenstahl because of the little time she had to prepare and the fact that it was never shown publicly because the film featured Ernst Röhm , leader of the SA, who along with many SA leaders, was murdered by the Nazi high command when they moved against the SA, just after the film was completed. Their second attempt, on which Goebbels assisted Riefenstahl extensively, is perhaps the most famous propaganda film ever made: Triumph of the Will (1935). It took almost a year to prepare from the miles upon miles of footage shot. It was a success worldwide, but was not particularly popular in Germany at the time. Goebbels then commissioned Riefenstahl to shoot the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which the Nazi leadership assumed would be dominated by German athletes. The Germans did win the total medal counts, but African-American sprinter Jesse Owens shattered the myth of Aryan dominance by winning gold medals in four different events - more than any other competitor - and was idolized by the German crowds.
After World War II broke out, Goebbels was responsible for creating a massive propaganda body of work by the German government, much of which still remains recorded. He was known to use almost anything for propaganda purposes, such as posters from French and German movies with Jewish stars as examples of the "typical Jew." Even when Germany was crumbling in 1945 and the Allies demanded unconditional surrender, Goebbels used that as a motivational tool to demonstrate that every German needed to fight or face destruction.
As Allied forces began to advance toward Germany, a paranoid and rapidly deteriorating Hitler had many of his assistants executed or imprisoned, but Goebbels was given the title of "Defender of Berlin." Hitler committed suicide by gunshot on April 30, leaving Goebbels as the next in command to take over the faltering government, which, by then, controlled only a small part of Berlin. As both Soviet forces on one side and American and British forces on the other closed in on the capital, Goebbels was well aware of the fate he would meet if he were captured alive. On May 1, 1945, he reluctantly endorsed the plan his wife had conjured, which she had communicated to Albert Speer, and permitted her to drug their six children with morphine and proceed to poison them to death through the administration of a cyanide capsule. Later that day, after requesting a moment of privacy with his wife from the onlooking SS soldiers, he shot her in head, as they had also planned, and then took his own life within seconds. Soviet troops, whom Goebbels had always boasted would never get to Berlin, found him and his wife partially burnt and unburied outside the Fuhrerbunker. He was survived only by a stepson from Magda's first marriage.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous Researcher
Spouse (1)
( 12 December  1931            - 1 May  1945) (their deaths) (6 children)
Trade Mark (4)
Impassioned Speeches
The Goebbels Technique: 'Argumentum Ad Nauseam"
His ability to slant arguments in order to derive the outcome that would best suit him, or his cause.
Trivia (16)
Reich Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in Nazi Germany.
Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their children moved into the Vorbunker, connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden, in the waning days of the War with the intent of dying; Goebbels refused Adolf Hitler 's order for them to leave. Magda told Traudl Junge that she and Goebbels had made the decision to kill their children as well so that they would not have to live with the shame of their father's role in the Nazi regime. She had told her former sister-in-law: "We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this the victors will exact their full revenge", and wrote to her son by her first marriage that death was "the only possible honorable end". As a dentist gave each child a morphine injection, Magda and Hitler's personal doctor poisoned them with cyanide. Two hours later, she and Goebbels were shot on his orders. Their bodies were discovered by the Soviet Army on May 2, 1945.
Brilliant speaker; regarded as second only to Adolf Hitler himself
Doctor of philosophy; received his PhD in 1921 at the age of 24
Admired the Russian people
Because of some pro-communist statements, he was considered a member of the Nazi party's "left" wing
Held the position of Reich Chancellor for less than 24 hours, before his assisted suicide
Stepson: Harald Quandt; (b. November 1921 to Gunther & Magda Quandt (later Magda Goebbels )) perished in a plane crash in 1967 in southern France. Quandt's girlfriend was aboard the plane and also perished. The Quandt family today owns 50% of the BMW automobile company.
Children with Magda Goebbels : Helga (b. 1 September 1932), Hilde (b. 15 April 1934), Helmut (b. 2 October 1935), Holde (19 February 1937), Hedda (b. 5 May 1938), & Heidi (b. 29 October 1940). All died on 1 May 1945, having been poisoned by their parents.
Before joining the Nazi party, he worked as a writer on a newspaper.
He held so much influence in the Propaganda Ministry, that a special microphone with an on-air switch was installed in his office, allowing him to interrupt all German broadcasts whenever he considered it important.
Was the only member of the Nazi hierarchy to hold a degree (a PhD in Literature and History from the University of Heidelberg).
Although he later commanded the Nazi press, his initial applications to seven different newspapers for a reporter's position were all rejected.
Although his family was well-to-do, Goebbels ran away from home and lived in a slum.

Joseph Goebbels | World War II Database
World War II Database
Contributor: C. Peter Chen
ww2dbasePaul Joseph Goebbels was the son of factory clerk Friedrich Goebbels in Rheydt, Germany.  His family was Catholic in faith.  With a metal brace around his deformed right leg, he was exempt from front line service during WW1, serving a desk job instead with a "Patriotic Help Unit" in his home town.  He bitterly resented the fact that he could not serve in the military, thus after the war he made up a story that he had actually served in the war, and his disability with his right leg was due to a war wound.  Around this time, while working as a bank clerk and a caller on the stock exchange, he became influenced by author Houston Stewart Chamberlain's anti-Semitic works.  He earned a Ph.D. in literature and philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in 1921 and became a journalist.  He attempted to become a published author, but that ambition never led to success; his novel did not get published until 1929, and none of the plays he wrote ever became staged.  In 1924 he joined the Nazi Party in admiration of Hitler's leadership.  In 1925, he was the editor to the Nazi newspaper "National-sozialistische Briefe".  His ability to twist the truth into propaganda supporting the Nazi Party presented him with a unique position, and he quickly became one of the well-known figures in the party.  In 1926, Hitler returned to politics after serving his prison sentence and began to put forth his anti-Semitic beliefs into his political agenda, which disappointed Goebbels extremely, as it showed that Hitler was no different than a common reactionary.  "I no longer fully believe in Hitler", he noted in his diary.  "That's the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away."  Hitler, however, recognized Goebbels' talents; in Apr 1926, Hitler and Goebbels met in Munich in southern Germany, where Hitler reaffirmed his position in Goebbels' mind.  "I love him - He has thought through everything", Goebbels noted in his diary after the meeting.  From this point on, his complete and total loyalty to Hitler was sealed.
ww2dbaseIn Oct 1926, Hitler made Goebbels the Gauleiter for Berlin, where he put his talents in propaganda to heavy use.  Using Jewish police chief Bernhard Weiss as a target, he launched a full fledged propaganda campaign; when he was confronted by a friend that Weiss was a loyal German with an exemplary military record, Goebbels admitted that he had nothing against Weiss: the attacks were entirely for propaganda values, putting the Nazi Party constantly under the national spotlight.  While he served as the Gauleiter of Berlin, he also became a great orator, playing public sentiments to further party support.
ww2dbaseIn 1931, with a Protestant ceremony, Goebbels married Magda Quandt, with whom he would later have six children.  He was a known womanizer; his diaries revealed that he had many affairs both before and after the marriage.
ww2dbaseIn 1928, Goebbels was among the ten Nazi Party members to become elected to the Reichstag.  In Apr 1930, he was appointed the head of Nazi Party's national propaganda organization by Hitler.  Between 1930 and 1933, he successfully conducted a series of successful election campaigns for Hitler, choreographing Hitler's dramatic airplane tours of Germany and pioneering the use of radio and cinema for campaigning.  On 30 Jan 1933, Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor of Germany, and Goebbels was given no office as Hitler's coalition government initially had only very few Nazi Party members; this changed on 13 Mar when Goebbels was appointed the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.  On 1 May, he organized a massive parade on the "Day of National Labor"; this event was noted as the end of the German trade union movement.  On 10 May, he supervised the burning of 20,000 books by Jewish or anti-Nazi authors.  In this position, he also began to control all cultural aspects of German life, including art, music, literature, and mass media, causing Jewish artists and authors to emigrate out of Germany en mass.  It was not long before all content of Germany's newspapers, books, novels, plays, and other mediums became subject to the supervision and review of his ministry.  With a large budget, he was able to bride artists that cooperated with Nazi Party policies and threaten those who did not with violence.  He argued that by controlling art, literature, and other forms of German culture, he brought about a spiritual mobilization of the German people.  Some of his policies were an extension of Hitler's preferences; for example, the music of Paul Hindemith was banned by his ministry simply because Hitler did not like it.
ww2dbaseIn the late 1930s, Goebbels began to receive less attention from Hitler as war preparations began, and propaganda seemed to have lost its past importance.  Perhaps to maintain his position in Hitler's inner circle, Goebbels, who at once thought systematic anti-Semitism was primitive, now embraced it.  Still holding the position of the Gauleiter of Berlin, he began to implement policies that forced out Jewish businesses and banning Jewish citizens from using public transportation.  "The Jews must get out of Germany, indeed out of Europe altogether", one entry in his diary dated Nov 1937 read.  In Nov 1938, a Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan, shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris, France, and Rath died from his wounds on 9 Nov.  Goebbels, lying to Hitler noting that a nation-wide demonstration against Jews had already begun due to Rath's death, got Hitler's approval to launch a massive propaganda campaign against Jews which he knew would turn violent.  The resulting Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") saw the death of somewhere between 90 and 200 deaths, while thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses damaged or destroyed.  30,000 Jews were also sent to concentration camps as the result of that night.  "As was to be expected, the entire nation is in uproar", he wrote.
ww2dbaseIn 1937, Goebbels' began an affair with Czech actress Lï¿½da Baarovï¿½, and it was discovered by his wife Magda Goebbels in Oct 1938, who took the matter to Hitler.  Hitler ordered Goebbels to end the affair, but Goebbels responded by handing a letter of resignation.  Hitler rejected the request to resign.  On 15 Oct, he attempted suicide but failed, angering Hitler, who ordered Heinrich Himmler to deport Baarovï¿½ to Czechoslovakia.  Although this event damaged the relationship between Hitler and Goebbels (though he remained one of the key figures in Hitler's inner circle until the end of the war), it did not deter Goebbels from womanizing.
ww2dbaseIn the years that led up to the European War, Goebbels was instrumental in using propaganda to turn the still peaceful German sentiment into one that would be ready for war.  Prior to the annexation of Sudetenland, he used his channels to stir up sympathy for Sudeten Germans and hatred toward Czechoslovakians.  A similar campaign was launched against the Polish people, where from May 1938 and on he continuously published fabricated stories about Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans in Poland and the Free City of Danzig.  Once the war began in Sep 1939, Hitler became engrossed with military matters, giving much less speeches and public appearances, thus in a way Goebbels filled in the void.  He viewed Hermann Gï¿½ring, in charge of the economy, as his main political enemy as he aimed to become the chief of all domestic matters, but by Feb 1943 changing political atmosphere following the major defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad forced the two to form an alliance to thwart a bid for power by Martin Bormann.  On 18 Feb, he delivered a passionate "Total War" speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin, urging the people to devote themselves entirely to the German war effort, warning that a German defeat would mean the destruction of western civilization at the hands of Jews and communists.  He was a supporter of sending Jews to concentration camps and ghettos to the east, and pushed for Jews in his jurisdiction, Berlin, to be sent first.  "The world war is here", he wrote in a diary entry dated Dec 1941, "[T]he annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.  The question is to be viewed without any sentimentality.  We're not there to have sympathy with the Jews, but only sympathy with our own German people.  If the German people has again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives."  In other entries, he wrote that the Jews remaining in Berlin should be "carted off", "[i]t would be best to kill them altogether", and that Jews must be "liquidated" signifying that he had a good idea what happened to Jews after deportation to concentration camps.
ww2dbaseIn 1944, as situations grew worse on the home front in Germany, Goebbels and Speer once again attempted to overthrow Gï¿½ring in terms of domestic matters.  Hitler finally agreed with them in Jul 1944, granting Goebbels the title of Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, thus in the final years of the war the home front in Germany was under the control of Goebbels, Speer, and Himmler; although Bormann remains a political enemy, he gave up the fight against Bormann some time in late 1944.  During the failed July Plot attempt to overthrow Hitler's government, he was able to maintain an open line of communications with the Hitler, thus was able to convince the Berlin garrison commander Otto Ernst Remer to act against the conspirators.  Near the end of the war, as German lines falling back toward its own borders, he continued to produce propaganda, trying to persuade the German people to keep fighting and keep producing as a victory was still possible.  He said, in a speech,
Rarely in history has a brave people struggling for its life faced such terrible tests as the German people have in this war....  The misery that results for us all, the never ending chain of sorrows, fears, and spiritual torture does not need to be described in detail.  We are bearing a heavy fate because we are fighting for a good cause, and are called to bravely endure the battle to achieve greatness.
ww2dbaseAs enemy troops neared Berlin, Goebbels was opposed to the notion that Hitler should abandon Berlin in order to establish another headquarters in Bavaria to continue the fight, arguing that the final battle should be fought in Berlin, and it likely have had influence on Hitler's decision to remain in Berlin.  He made a proclamation to the people of Berlin on 23 Apr:
I call on you to fight for your city. Fight with everything you have got, for the sake of your wives and your children, your mothers and your parents.  Your arms are defending everything we have ever held dear, and all the generations that will come after us.  Be proud and courageous!  Be inventive and cunning!  Your Gauleiter is amongst you.  He and his colleagues will remain in your midst.  His wife and children are here as well.  He, who once captured the city with 200 men, will now use every means to galvanize the defense of the capital.  The battle for Berlin must become the signal for the whole nation to rise up in battle.
ww2dbaseTrue to his word, Goebbels moved his family into Hitler's bunker under the Chancellery.  On 30 Apr 1945, Hitler committed suicide after leaving a will, which was witness by four people, one of them being Goebbels.  In it, Hitler named Goebbels the Chancellor of Germany.  The only action he performed in this new capacity was to order General Hans Krebs to deliver a letter to Russian General Vasily Chuikov in an attempt to negotiate a conditional surrender, hinting that Germany and Russia could possibly work together against the future threat from the Western Allies, but it was rejected.  With all hopes lost, he decided to end his own life, which was against Hitler's orders.  "It is a great pity that such a man is not with us any longer", he said.  "For us, everything is lost now and the only way left for us is the one which Hitler chose. I shall follow his example."   On 1 May, as German Vice Admiral Hans-Erich Voï¿½ was leaving Berlin, he attempted to convince Goebbel to leave as well, which was rejected.  "The captain must not leave his sinking ship", Goebbels responded, "I have thought about it all and decided to stay here.  I have nowhere to go because with little children I will not be able to make it."  At 2000 hours, he arranged for SS doctor Helmut Kunz to drug his children, orally, with morphine; after the children became unconscious, they were administered cyanide by Magda Goebbels and Hitler's doctor Stumpfegger.  Some bruises were found on the body of his oldest child, Helga, indicating that she might not have died peacefully as intended.  SS Oberscharfuehrer Rochus Misch, who was Adolf Hitler's bodyguard, courier, and telephone operator, was in Hitler's bunker during his final days, as he noted during a 2009 interview with BBC journalist Steven Rosenberg.  The telephone and teletype machine operator recalled:
Straight after Hitler's death, Mrs. Goebbels came down to the bunker with her children....  She started preparing to kill them.  She couldn't have done that above ground - there were other people there who would have stopped her.  That's why she came downstairs - because no-one else was allowed in the bunker.  She came down on purpose to kill them....  The kids were right next to me and behind me.  We all knew what was going to happen.  It was clear.  I saw Hitler's doctor, Dr. Stumpfegger give the children something to drink.  Some kind of sugary drink.  Then Stumpfegger went and helped to kill them.  All of us knew what was going on.  An hour or two later, Mrs. Goebbels came out crying.  She sat down at a table and began playing patience.
ww2dbaseShortly after, Goebbels and his wife walked up to the garden above the bunker where they killed themselves.  Exact details were unknown, though it's likely that Magda Goebbels took a cyanide pill while Joseph Goebbels killed himself, possibly with aid from a SS trooper, with a gun.  Their bodies were burned in a shell crater; due to the lack of gasoline, Goebbels' remains, with his metal leg brace and NSDAP badge only partially destroyed, were easily identifiable.  The remains of the Goebbels family were cremated in 1970, and the ashes were thown into the Elbe.
ww2dbaseSources: BBC, the Fall of Berlin, Wikipedia.
Famous Quote(s)
"Once more a red fire blows steeply upwards...the factory will do no more work for Herr Churchill... tomorrow morning Coventry will lie in smoke and ruins."
    » 1 Sep 1940
7 Jun 2011 02:11:18 PM
BIG BROTHER, BIG BROTHER!
Goebbels was the master of deception and was well-versed in the big lie, as minister of propaganda he was instrumental in feeding the Nazi machine, controlled all that was seen, heard and read.
Kept the German poeple on a diet of lies and falsehoods. He was responsible for setting up the "Burning Of The Books" in 1933 did you know, he held a Ph.D in Philosophy, how could an educated man, condemn the writings of others?
My answer is: The State will decide about books, and creativity, books create ideas and teaching not related to the State.
The State decides what the people will see and hear.
The State will educate the masses therefore, there is no reason for books...
3.
 Bill says:
7 Jun 2011 07:22:32 PM
History is not an exact science, access to the facts and knowledge of what has happened
and controversy will always exist.
Nazi Germany, under the dictatorship of
Adolf Hitler was one of the most significent
events in human history.
More has been written about the Nazis, than most historical subjects there is a lot we don't know, and may never really know.
Suggested Reading:
TECHNOLOGY FOR GOOD AND EVIL:
The Nazis were developing an early form of
cable television the system would broadcast
propaganda and approved programs to the masses.
Engineers were almost ready for program broadcast with large TV screens. One of the
earlist televised program was the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Just think about Friday night..from Berlin its the Adolf and Hermann show! or the Saturday morning viewing of the
Fuhrer enjoying the day at the Richard Wagner
music festival.
Back to you Otto, its a real traffic jam, along the Unter den Linden traffic is slowing down to watch the construction of those large TV screens, so no citizen or party member will miss the Fuhrer speak and
those little camera's will see everything day and night and all for our safty those little Volkswagens are common today, for both loyal party members and trusted citizens. Everyone is off to the Party rally, and remember be one of the first in your district to have that new silver party button! and remember report any suspicious activity to Gestapo and Polizei at emergency
number 2600.
This was almost like a scene from the HBO movie "Fatherland" 1994 starring Rutger Hauer as a Gestapo agent. Based on the book by Robert Harris.
I thank the editor/ww2db for allowing me to present this comment.
4.
8 Jun 2011 03:16:56 PM
BOOK BURNING A TOOL FOR TYRANTS:
The 19th Century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine said:
"Where they burn books, they will also burn people".
Over 25,000 known volumes of Un-German books were destroyed, among the books burned were authors Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann and Helen Keller.
I'm sure that was an estimate when the book burning frenzy starts everything will be burned. This set the stage for an era of state censorship and control of culture and people, it was the purge of literary freedom.
Any Totalitarian State will prove there is no God, the state is the God, it will always provide and educate the masses, weed out the weak and helpless, has no concept for the dignity of man, only for the people to serve the state.
There is a memorial at the spot where the burning of the books took place in 1933.
Romerberg Square Hesse, Germany.
In 1946 Allied occuption forces listed over
30,000 titles from school books, to poetry
including the works of von Clausewitz were
confiscated and destroyed.
Added collections of German militarism, and Nazi ideology were taken into custody.
There were dozens and dozens of book burnings
over the centuries. The destruction of the
Library of Alexandra, the Library of Baghdad
destruction of the Mayan Codices by the Spanish and recent times, the Nazi book burning of 1933.
Mayan Codices: Folding type picture book
there are three known to have survived.
5. Anonymous says:
2 May 2015 02:58:36 AM
good
12 Nov 2015 08:56:19 AM
It was very helpful and useful for answers
7. Anonymous says:
30 Nov 2015 03:28:09 PM
this peice is a bunch of bs. Half of it is not true. They coppied of of other websites.
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Joseph Goebbels - World War II - HISTORY.com
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Joseph Goebbels: Early Years
Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on October 29, 1897, in Rheydt, Germany, an industrial city located in the Rhineland. Because of a club foot that he acquired during a childhood bout with osteomyelitis, a swelling of the bone marrow, the young Goebbels was exempted from service in the German army during World War I (1914-18). Instead, he attended a series of German universities, where he studied literature and philosophy, among other subjects, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in German philology from Heidelberg University.
Did You Know?
Despite the anti-Semitism Joseph Goebbels promoted as Germany's minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, some of his favorite schoolteachers were Jewish, and Goebbels was even once engaged to a young woman who was part-Jewish.
In the first half of the 1920s, after unsuccessfully attempting to establish a career as a journalist, novelist and playwright, Goebbels became a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, which promoted German pride and anti-Semitism. Goebbels eventually became acquainted with the organization’s leader, Adolf Hitler . At this time, inflation had wrecked the German economy, and the morale of the German citizenry, who had been defeated in World War I, was low. Hitler and Goebbels were both of the opinion that words and images were potent devices that could be used to exploit this discontent. Hitler was impressed with Goebbels’ ability to communicate his thoughts in writing, while Goebbels was enamored of Hitler’s talent for speaking in front of large crowds and employing words and gestures to play on German nationalistic pride.
Goebbels: Rising in the Nazi Party Ranks
Goebbels quickly ascended the ranks of the Nazi Party . First he broke away from Gregor Strasser (1892-1934), the leader of the more anti-capitalistic party bloc, who he initially supported, and joined ranks with the more conservative Hitler. Then, in 1926, he became a party district leader in Berlin. The following year, he established and wrote commentary in Der Angriff (The Attack), a weekly newspaper that espoused the Nazi Party line.
In 1928, Goebbels was elected to the Reichstag, the German Parliament. More significantly, Hitler named him the Nazi Party propaganda director. It was in this capacity that Goebbels began formulating the strategy that fashioned the myth of Hitler as a brilliant and decisive leader. He arranged massive political gatherings at which Hitler was presented as the savior of a new Germany. In a masterstroke, Goebbels oversaw the placing of movie cameras and microphones at pivotal locations to accentuate Hitler’s image and voice. Such events and maneuverings played a pivotal role in convincing the German people that their country would regain its honor only by giving unwavering support to Hitler.
Joseph Goebbels: Hitler’s Propaganda Minister
In January 1933, Hitler became the German chancellor, and in March of that year he appointed Goebbels the country’s minister for public enlightenment and propaganda. In this capacity, Goebbels had complete jurisdiction over the content of German newspapers, magazines, books, music, films, stage plays, radio programs and fine arts. His mission was to censor all opposition to Hitler and present the chancellor and the Nazi Party in the most positive light while stirring up hatred for Jewish people.
In April 1933, at Hitler’s directive, Goebbels orchestrated a boycott on Jewish businesses. The following month, he was a guiding force in the burning of “un-German” books in a public ceremony at Berlin’s Opera House. The works of dozens of writers were destroyed, including German-born authors Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), Arnold Zweig (1887-1968), Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), and such non-Germans as Émile Zola (1840-1902), Helen Keller (1880-1968), Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), H. G. Wells (1866-1946), Jack London (1876-1916) and André Gide (1869-1951).
In September 1933, Goebbels became director of the newly formed Reich Chamber of Culture, whose mission was to control all aspects of the creative arts. An offshoot of the formation of the chamber was the forced unemployment of all Jewish creative artists, including writers, musicians and theater and film actors and directors. Because the Nazis viewed modern art as immoral, Goebbels instructed that all such “decadent” art be confiscated and replaced by works that were more representational and sentimental in content. Then in October came the passage of the Reich Press Law, which ordered the removal of all Jewish and non-Nazi editors from German newspapers and magazines.
Joseph Goebbels: The Power of the Moving Image
At the start of World War II in 1939, Goebbels was entrusted with the task of uplifting the spirit of the German people and employing the media, and specifically the cinema, to convince the population to support the war effort. A typical project he instigated was “Der ewige Jude,” also known as “The Eternal Jew” (1940), a propaganda film that ostensibly charted the history of the Jews. In the film, however, Jews are depicted as parasites who disrupt an otherwise tidy world.Goebbels also orchestrated the production of “Jud Süss” (1940), a feature film depicting the life of Josef Süss Oppenheimer (1698-1738), a Jewish financial consultant who collected taxes for Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg (1684-1737), ruler of the Duchy of Württemberg, in the early 18th century. After the duke’s sudden death, Oppenheimer was put on trial and executed. Under Goebbels’s stewardship of the project, the story of Jud Süss was transformed from a human tragedy to an allegory about Jewish self-importance and greed.
Joseph Goebbels: The Beginning of the End
In 1942, Goebbels organized “The Soviet Paradise,” a large Nazi propaganda show that was exhibited in Berlin. Its purpose was to bolster the resolve of the German people by exposing the chicanery of Jewish Bolsheviks. On May 18, Herbert Baum (1912-42), a Berlin-based German-Jewish Resistance leader, and his accomplices partly demolished the exhibition by setting it on fire.
Goebbels refused to allow this act to be reported in the German media. Nonetheless, Baum and his small but determined group succeeded in striking a sizeable psychological blow to Goebbels and his propaganda machine.
Joseph Goebbels: Final Years
As the war plodded on and German casualties mounted, Goebbels became a proponent of an all-out battle to the death against the Allied forces. In this regard, he employed his own abilities as a public speaker to further incite the German populace. On one occasion, in August 1944, speaking from the Sports Palace in Berlin, he commanded the German people to support a total war effort. If Germany was destined to lose the war, he reasoned, it was fitting that the German nation and people be obliterated.
As 1944 segued into 1945, the German defeat seemed inevitable to the Nazi regime. While other Nazi higher-ups made contact with the Allies in the hope of negotiating lenient treatment after the German surrender, Goebbels remained steadfastly devoted to Hitler.
During the last days of April 1945, as Soviet troops were on the threshold of Berlin, Hitler was holed up in his bunker. Goebbels was the lone senior Nazi official at his side. On April 30, Hitler committed suicide at age 56 and Goebbels replaced him as Germany’s chancellor. However, Goebbels’ reign was short-lived. The following day, he and his wife, Magda (1901-45), fatally poisoned their six children. The couple then took their own lives, although accounts of exactly how they died vary.
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Joseph Goebbels
Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels ( October 29 , 1897 – May 1 , 1945 ) was Adolf Hitler 's Propaganda Minister (see Propagandaministerium ) in Nazi Germany . Goebbels was known for his zealous and energetic oratory and virulent anti-Semitism . Following Hitler's death, he served as Chancellor for one day. He then committed suicide .
Contents
[ edit ] Early life
Goebbels was born to factory clerk Friedrich Goebbels [1] (1867–1929) and his wife Katharina Odenhausen in Rheydt (now a part of Mönchengladbach ), a Protestant area in the Rhineland , although his family was Roman Catholic . He had four siblings: Konrad (1895–1949), Hans (1893–1947), Elisabeth (1901–1915) and the youngest child Maria Katharina (b. 1910). His legal surname according to his birth certificate was Göbbels, but he seems always to have used the spelling Goebbels, as is not uncommon in Germany. At the age of seven he contracted osteomyelitis - an infection of the bone marrow - and an operation, in the days before antibiotics, was only partially successful. He was left with a left leg which was shorter and weaker than the right, which caused him to be rejected when he volunteered for military service at the beginning of World War I (he wore a metal brace on his leg for most of his life). Although he has been frequently described as having a club foot, this was not the case. As a student he often represented himself as a wounded veteran, but in fact the nearest that he came to wartime service was from June 1917 to October 1917; he was an "Office Soldier" with the "Patriotic Help Unit" in Rheydt . [2]
After earning a Ph.D. in Literature and Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in 1921 he worked as a journalist and tried for several years to become a published author. His work included an autobiographical novel called Michael which no publisher would take at the time, and two plays written in verse - The Wanderer, about Jesus Christ, and The Lonesome Guest - which no producer would stage. Joining the Nazi Party in 1924 (although he later claimed to have joined in 1922), Goebbels was initially closely aligned with the left faction around the Strasser brothers . From 1926, when he became gauleiter of Berlin, he moved away from his early associations, and his diary shows many instances of great admiration for Hitler.
In December 1931, after a stormy courtship, he married divorcee Magda Quandt , whose son, Harald (from her previous marriage to wealthy industrialist Günther Quandt) accompanied them beneath the raised arms of an SS honour guard (Harald, who served as a officer in the Luftwaffe , was the only one of Magda's seven children to survive World War II ).
The diaries of Joseph Goebbels, which have survived almost in their entirety, contain large numbers of entries detailing his philanderings, which he clearly regarded as great love affairs, and of which it would appear he had several at a time. In the 1925 and 1926 books the names Else, Alma and Anke are the most common to appear. "Anke" was Anke Helhorn. She left Goebbels, got married and divorced, and in 1934 he got her a job on one of the magazines he controlled. (Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis p.58).
A love affair with the actress Lída Baarová nearly took his life when he attempted suicide on October 15 , 1938 . Goebbels survived, and the affair was terminated at the behest of Adolf Hitler.
Together with Adolf Hitler at the Berghof
For more details on this topic, see Nazi propaganda .
Goebbels played a large role in helping the Nazis achieve and retain power by creating propaganda to present the Nazi ideology to the German people. Some suggest he was a committed anti-Semite, involved with Kristallnacht in 1938 and later connected with the Nazi Endlösung ( Final Solution ) as well as the Judenfrage ("Jewish Question"), especially the deportation of Jews from Berlin . Others historians, such as Ian Kershaw , present the idea that Goebbels was not anti-semetic, but simply sold the message of the Nazis to the German people. Originally from the socialist side of the NSDAP, Goebbels saw potential with Hitler's side and rooted his commitments there with the nationalist members.
Goebbels began to regulate all forms of artistic expression , banishing Jewish writers , journalists and artists from Germany's cultural life. He took control of the news media, making sure that it presented Germany's domestic and foreign policy aims in terms of Nazi ideology. He played probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to "clean" the Reich of Jews, homosexuals and other minorities. The Goebbels technique, also known as argumentum ad nauseam , is the name given to a policy of repeating a falsehood until it is taken to be the truth (see Big Lie ). Goebbels also pioneered the use of broadcasting in mass propaganda, promoting the distribution of inexpensive single frequency radio receivers (the so-called Volksempfänger (People's radio)) to the German public which ensured that millions of people heard the output of the Reich's propaganda ministry while being unable to receive news and other broadcasts from outside Germany. Meanwhile his ministry busily broadcast Nazi propaganda around the world by shortwave radio . Newsreels, movies and books were impossible to publish without prior approval and censorship by Goebbels' ministry. He is credited by historians with developing the techniques of modern communications and propaganda. He had a strong influence on German propaganda motion pictures throughout the Nazi era. He was the unaccredited Executive Producer and an uncredited writer of the film Kolberg (1945). [3]
Although Goebbels was disappointed when Germany went to war with Britain in 1939, he remained steadfastly loyal to Hitler throughout the war and derived immense power and prestige from his position. Goebbels' ministry of propaganda controlled essentially every aspect of culture in Germany. In October 1941 he organized the "Weimarer Dichtertreffen" (Weimar Convention of Poets) inviting collaborating writers from all of Europe. Under Goebbels auspices the participating members (e.g. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Robert Brasillach ) founded the "Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung" (European Writer's League). Goebbels is often remembered for his Sportpalast speech , given on February 18 , 1943 (sometimes called the Total War speech) in which he tried to motivate the German people to continue their struggle after the tides of World War II had turned against Germany. By this time many Germans privately believed Germany was irrevocably on its way to defeat.
There was strong animosity between Goebbels and the popular Hermann Göring , whose political influence waned following his disastrous management of the Luftwaffe early during the war and Goebbels became the third most powerful leader in Germany (after Martin Bormann , Hitler's private secretary, of whom most Germans were not aware). As Germany's military situation collapsed, the increasing shrillness of the government's propaganda brought discreet ridicule from the German people who nicknamed Goebbels The Malicious Dwarf and The Wotan Mickey Mouse.
[ edit ] Ruin and suicide
Joseph Goebbels and his family, pictured around October 1942, with Magda's son Harald Quandt in the back row
During the final stages of the war in the spring of 1945 Hitler split the offices of Reichskanzler (Chancellor of the Reich) and Reichspräsident (President of the Reich), both of which he had held as Führer since the death of Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934. He appointed Goebbels Chancellor of Germany in his will, with Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz , the commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, as President without the Führer title (the post-Hitler Flensburg government had hopes of being recognized by the Allied powers but was ultimately arrested towards the end of May 1945 when the Allies decided to formally replace it with their own military administration).
Shortly after Hitler committed suicide at about 3:30 in the afternoon (Berlin time) on April 30 , 1945 , an emotional and agitated Goebbels sought out Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge and dictated these lines as an addition to Hitler's political testament:
"The Führer has given orders for me, in case of a breakdown of defense of the Capital of the Reich, to leave Berlin and to participate as a leading member in a government appointed by him. For the first time in my life, I must categorically refuse to obey a command of the Führer. My wife and my children agree with this refusal. In any other case, I would feel myself (...) a dishonorable renegade and vile scoundrel for my entire further life, who would lose the esteem of himself along with the esteem of his people, both of which would have to form the requirement for further duty of my person in designing the future of the German Nation and the German Reich."
After several hours of anxiously waiting for news that German troops might be able to rescue the bunker's occupants, Goebbels and his wife resolved to carry out a previously arranged plan to kill their children and then themselves. Magda had all six of their children put to sleep with morphine , then poisoned them with cyanide . Joseph Goebbels did not take a direct part in this but acquiesced throughout, even refusing the offers of others to take the children out of Berlin before it was too late. Contrary to what he hastily added to Hitler's last political will, by all accounts the children were in good spirits and entirely unaware of their parents' plans to kill them, except perhaps in the case of Helga, whose body showed signs of physical abuse (i.e. bruising). They were:
Helga Susanne (born, September 1 , 1932 , aged 12) was the eldest of the six and her father's favorite. She had her father's chestnut brown hair and eyes.
Hildegard (Hilde) Traudel (born April 13 , 1934 aged 11) was also a brunette and the most diligent of the six.
Helmut Christian (born October 2 , 1935 , aged 9) was the only boy and a dreamer who fell behind in school. He aspired to join the Hitler Youth when he became of age.
Today there are surviving descendants in Ravenna, Michigan .
The Goebbels suicide as depicted in the film Der Untergang
While early reports suggested Joseph and Magda Goebbels were shot by SS bodyguards in the ruins of the Chancellory garden at their own request on May 1 , 1945 , they likely took cyanide first. Another account claims Goebbels shot Magda then himself afterwards (as shown in the 2004 film, Der Untergang (Downfall), where Goebbels was portrayed by actor Ulrich Matthes ). Their bodies were partially burned, left unburied and quickly found by Soviet troops. The children's pyjama-clad bodies were found still in the three sets of two-tiered bunk beds in which they were killed. A photograph of Goebbels' incinerated face was widely published. [4] The bodies of the Goebbels family, along with those of Hitler and Eva Braun , were secretly buried. Later they were reburied together by the Soviets, ultimately in the courtyard of KGB headquarters in Magdeburg , Germany. In April 1970, all the remains were reburned and scattered in the Elbe river.
[ edit ] Diaries
Goebbels kept a diary for much of his life. From 1923 to 1941, he wrote the entries himself. From 1941 to 1945, he dictated lengthy passages to aides. He sometimes telephoned them in the middle of the night when he wanted to add some text. The dictations usually opened with a description of the military situation, followed by his personal comments. The dictated diary is not as personal as the earlier one he wrote himself.
Much of the diaries were thought to have been lost during World War II . However in 1992, Dr. Elke Fröhlich found a large portion of them in Russian archives. (Many believe they were first found by David Irving. He cites so in his biography of Goebbels). A 29 volume edition edited by Elke Fröhlich and others is said to be 98% complete. The last two volumes were expected to be published in 2006. [5]
[ edit ] Goebbels in popular culture
Das Goebbels-Experiment , a narrated biographic film based on Goebbels' diaries. [6]
Goebbels is represented by the character Giuseppe Givola in the parody play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht . The play is a parody of the rise of Hitler, written while Brecht was in exile at that time (1941), with various scenes added afterwards. The play has been translated into English by Ralph Manheim and published by Methuen Modern Plays.