Goebbels: A Biography

by Peter Longerich

  Goebbels added a postscript to the will stating that he would not follow Hitler’s instructions to leave the capital if Berlin’s defenses collapsed. “For the first time in my life I must categorically refuse to obey an order of the Führer’s. My wife and children join with me in refusing to do so.” “For reasons of humanity and personal loyalty” he could “never bring himself to abandon the Führer in his greatest hour of need.” Moreover, he believed that in doing this he was “acting for the best as far as the future of the German people is concerned for in the difficult times that are approaching models to live up to will be more important than men.” He and his wife were determined not to leave Berlin “and rather to end our lives side by side with the Führer, a life which in any case is of no more value for me if I cannot live it in the Führer’s service and by his side.” This “decision” he was also making for his children, “who are too young to be able to express themselves, but if they were old enough would entirely agree with this decision.”170

  It took more than a day, until the afternoon of April 30, before Hitler finally decided to take his own life. He had been forced to face the fact that the reserves he had requested had not managed to break through to Berlin. After saying goodbye to Joseph and Magda Goebbels and the other occupants of the bunker, he withdrew into his private apartment. A few days earlier he had presented Magda with a golden Party badge.171 Otto Günsche, Hitler’s servant, reported after the war that at this point Magda had wanted to speak to Hitler and urged him to leave Berlin, but the Führer had categorically rejected her request.172

  After a few minutes Günsche told those who were waiting that the Führer and Eva Braun had committed suicide. Goebbels, together with some other occupants of the bunker, now entered Hitler’s private room in order to establish that Hitler had in fact died. Shortly afterward he was one of the small group who, standing at the entrance to the bunker, watched Günsche burning the bodies of the recently married couple.173

  That sealed the fate of Joseph Goebbels and his family. Twenty-four hours later, after his attempt to start peace negotiations with the Soviet Union had been rejected, Joseph and Magda Goebbels murdered their six children and followed Hitler’s example by committing suicide.174

  * * *

  * Translators’ note: The War of Liberation against Napoleon.

  CONCLUSION

  In this biography we have gotten to know Goebbels primarily in three roles. In the first part we saw his development from a failed writer and intellectual to a Nazi agitator; in the second part his efforts as propaganda minister to introduce uniformity into the media, cultural life, and the public sphere; and in the third part we concentrated on his role as a wartime propagandist and advocate of “total war.” Or, to express it in visual terms, we have described the life of a person who initially preferred to wear a proletarian leather jacket or a worn trench coat, then once in power appeared in carefully selected suits or in exclusive leisure clothing, and finally, during the war, normally wore his Party uniform, however unflattering it was to his figure. But however Goebbels presented himself, the most important driving force in his life was a deeply narcissistic personality, which fed a desire for recognition that was never satisfied.

  I

  Goebbels’s ambition and narcissism cannot be attributed to an attempt to compensate for his disability and his origins in a depressing lower-middle-class milieu. His tendency toward narcissism had developed before his disability, which occurred during his primary school years. It originated in his failure to develop independence at the ages of two and three; his dependence on his mother, the model for his future girlfriends and his wife, lasted throughout his life. The image of a joyless youth and an unrecognized loner derives mainly from Goebbels’s own literary fantasy during the manic-productive phase of the years 1923–24. In fact he definitely experienced recognition and affection during his childhood and youth in Rheydt, had friends and love affairs, and, finally, in 1917, was free to choose the life he wanted to lead.

  The year 1923, which we have chosen for the start of this biography, sees Goebbels as a failure and as someone in despair. Despite having studied and acquired a doctorate, his plans to play a leading role in the reordering of the intellectual landscape of his fatherland had failed as a consequence of his own lack of ability; of his social background, which meant that he lacked an entrée into the middle-class intelligentsia; and of the times in which he was living. He was at odds with the Catholic faith in which he had been raised and was seeking “redemption” or rather a “redeemer” figure, which, after several detours, he finally found in Adolf Hitler. Goebbels’s development from being a seeker after Christ to the follower of a political Messiah, Hitler, can be traced in great detail. This phase of his life could function as a textbook for the phenomenon of political religion.

  He was inspired by the idea of finding a place in the völkisch movement as a political and cultural journalist, the prospect of which lifted him from his depression. He still had little time for ordinary politics, but his ambition and his passionate fixation on his idol, Hitler, and also his low regard for the political program of the Party’s “left wing,” with which he had at first been associated, all contributed to his winning a place in the leadership of the Nazi Party, albeit not yet in its innermost circle. His appointment as Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926 occurred in the context of Hitler’s seeking to achieve a balance among various Party groups. Goebbels developed his own style of agitation appropriate to this city, with its hectic way of life and penchant for sensation, a combination of rowdy propaganda and violence, aiming to focus attention on the Party at all costs, challenge the left for control of the public sphere, and provoke the authorities. During the 1920s he was already making propaganda for himself by publishing “Fight for Berlin” as the story of his success. In fact his provocative tactics resulted in bans, prosecutions, and opposition from within the Party, while the election results were below the Reich average. Without the support of the Party headquarters in Munich, his Berlin career would soon have come to an end. The overtly proletarian orientation of the Berlin Nazi Party and its Gauleiter could not disguise the fact that the Party’s main support came above all from middle-class districts.

  Early in 1930, after his appointment as head of the Party’s Reich propaganda department, over which Hitler had hesitated for a long time, Goebbels began to centralize the Party’s propaganda organization and took increasing control of the big election campaigns, which during the early 1930s turned the Nazi Party into a mass movement. However, it wasn’t until 1932 that he was able to establish a uniform approach during election campaigns. In 1930 the campaign’s main theme was rather conventional, with Goebbels concentrating on attacking the Young Plan.

  Under Goebbels’s guiding hand, Hitler appeared for the first time as the central figure in the Party’s propaganda during the Reich presidential elections of 1932, in which he was portrayed as the “leader of young Germany” and as the man to rescue Germany from the crisis. After Hitler had clearly lost the presidential elections Goebbels concentrated the election campaign for the July 1932 Reichstag elections more on practical issues, and it was only during the months after the election that he could bring himself to focus Nazi propaganda on the image of Hitler as a popular leader. The increasing prominence given to Hitler and the personalizing of the political struggle was not a brilliant invention by Goebbels but rather the result of the Nazi Party’s structure as a “Führer party” and was supported by a broad consensus within the Party leadership. After 1933, however, Goebbels had the chance of using the Führer propaganda that was already in full swing to establish a full-blown Führer cult through a campaign involving all the media.

  From 1931 onward, apart from leading the Party in Berlin, Goebbels had been increasingly involved in the politics of the Party as a whole. His diaries document in detail the influence of the Party leadership on the presidential cabinets and its attempts to position itself to take over the government. It is clear that wh
ile Goebbels was well informed, he did not belong to the small inner circle of Nazi leaders whom Hitler allowed to participate in his discussions and negotiations.

  That Hitler distanced himself somewhat from Goebbels may also be attributable to differences in their respective political strategies. Whereas from the end of the 1920s Hitler concentrated on coming to power through a coalition with conservative elements, Goebbels wanted to get the Party into power without assistance and thus adopted a more uncompromising and radical stance, one that brought him into frequent conflict with the “policy of legality” being pursued by the Party leader.

  Given his strong antibourgeois prejudices, Goebbels’s overt radicalism appears logical, but in fact it was largely inspired by tactical considerations. Goebbels was especially dependent on the Berlin SA as the people who had to carry out the Party’s propaganda. The Party troops had to be kept happy with organized violence and constantly whipped up with extreme rhetoric. Although he always supported Hitler in the conflicts between the Party leadership and the SA, he tried to do so without alienating the SA. When in the spring of 1932 Hitler’s attempts to come to power with the aid of right-wing elements initially failed—he had not succeeded in winning the support of the “Harzburg front” for his candidacy in the presidential elections—Goebbels was remarkably quick in coming to terms with Hitler’s alternative strategy of seeking power in the Reich and in Prussia with the help of the Center Party, in other words a party associated with the hated Weimar “system.” Goebbels now downplayed his radicalism and went over completely to Hitler’s policy of negotiation.

  The conflict in which the Party was involved at the end of 1932 and which ended with the resignation of Gregor Strasser from all his offices turns out, on the basis of a detailed analysis of the originals of Goebbels’s diaries, which have only recently become available, to have been far less serious than has generally been thought until now. The alliance between Strasser and Schleicher, the core of a “cross front” that was designed to split the Party and that allegedly collapsed at the last minute, turns out to have been a propaganda myth. Goebbels propagated it after the “seizure of power” in the heavily edited version of his diaries, which he published under the title “My Part in Germany’s Fight” in order to get his revenge on his old political mentor and rival.

  In fact Hitler was concerned to use the Strasser crisis to impose stricter conditions for his willingness to tolerate the Schleicher government, contrary to the views of his Party opponents. Goebbels was prepared to go along with this line adopted by the Party leader, just as a few weeks later he was willing to accept the latter’s decision to come to power with the aid of right-wing conservative partners. During the last decisive year of the Weimar Republic Goebbels did not have his own plan for how to secure power.

  II

  In 1933 Goebbels received only part of the Ministry for Popular Education with extensive responsibilities for the whole of German culture that had long been promised him by Hitler. Essentially he was confined to the role of Reich minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda. During the following twelve years he was not even successful at getting control of the whole of the propaganda machine in a way that could match his ambition as Reich minister and head of the Party’s Reich propaganda department or that corresponded to the very effective myth that he had propagated of a virtuoso master of an all-powerful propaganda machine.

  As far as control of the press was concerned, the Reich press chief, Otto Dietrich, retained considerable powers to shape press reporting, while the structure of the press was largely determined by Max Amann, who was in charge of the publishing side. The Wehrmacht possessed its own elaborate propaganda organization, and from 1938 onward Goebbels had to share foreign propaganda with the Foreign Ministry and from 1941 propaganda in the occupied eastern territories with Rosenberg.

  Apart from such problems concerning the division of responsibilities, it is clear that Goebbels’s “successes” in directing the media were very dubious. By 1934 he had effectively achieved complete success in imposing Nazi norms on the press and silencing opposition views. He had to put up with the uniformity and boring quality of the German press, about which, particularly during the early years, he frequently complained. In the Third Reich there was no conceivable alternative to the rigid system of instructions and restrictions on what and how events and issues could be reported.

  The political and propaganda broadcasts of German radio were marked by the same uniformity. However, by the mid-1930s Goebbels had abandoned the idea of turning this modern medium into an instrument of political leadership. That every listener could easily evade the broadcasts of German radio by turning the dial to a foreign radio station convinced him that it was advisable to respond increasingly to the desire of the people for light entertainment, and he proved flexible in terms of the level of quality he demanded.

  As far as film production was concerned, Goebbels made multiple attempts over the years to extract from the film industry both high-quality entertainment and relevant political propaganda. But although he increased his control of film production to the extent of imposing his personal views on casts, scripts, and editing, neither he nor—which was more serious—Hitler was content with the films that were produced. It became clear that, as a result of the complexity of the conditions involved in the production and distribution of films, the minister’s frequently changing requests could not be met at all or, apart from a few exceptions, not to his satisfaction. In the end here too Goebbels had to make do with cheap mass entertainment, which was far beneath his original ambitions, both aesthetically and in terms of political propaganda.

  Cultural policy presented a similar picture. Between the end of 1936 and the beginning of 1938 Goebbels made serious effort to establish himself as the dominant figure in cultural policy but failed in his attempt to shape the arts in accordance with Nazi ideology. The Nazis launched a campaign against the artistic avant-garde in order to cover up the fact that their attempts to impose Nazism on the visual arts had, in the view of both Goebbels and Hitler, met with only modest success. After initial attempts Goebbels did not make much effort to continue trying to introduce Nazism into the theater or musical life on a large scale. On the other hand, Goebbels claimed that his propaganda had played a major part in ensuring that the German people were united and totally committed, indeed enthusiastic in supporting the regime’s policies, a claim that is apparently supported by a large amount of contemporary material and is still believed as part of the myth of the oppressive Goebbels propaganda to which the German people fell victim.

  In fact Goebbels was not concerned with securing support for Nazi policy from a majority of the population or convincing or seducing them through more or less intensive propaganda. He saw himself rather as the brilliant controller of an elaborate and highly complex propaganda machine who, in intuitive harmony with his political idol, Hitler, and possessing an intimate awareness of mass psychology, had brought about a near-perfect understanding between the nation and its political leadership. This image developed by Goebbels, one that reflected his narcissistic personality, is in a sense his historical legacy; it represents the main challenge facing historical study of the “public sphere” during the Nazi period.

  In order to decipher this mythmaking initiated by Goebbels himself, it is necessary to remember that his propaganda was not confined to control of the media and the “coordination” of cultural life but operated as a closed system.

  In this system, first of all, alternative views were not tolerated. As early as 1933–34 Goebbels ensured that even criticism from within the system made on the basis of Nazi principles disappeared from the media. If it occurred, he responded angrily. This aversion to criticism led him to ban artistic criticism in 1936 and to a systematic attack on political references in cabarets, on satirists and comedians, and on critical comment in literary journalism. He tried as much as he could to prevent disruptive influences from outside. Foreign films were subjected to t
he same careful censorship as German ones, the sale of foreign newspapers was controlled and in the end largely banned, listening to foreign broadcasts was disapproved of and after the outbreak of war could be harshly punished.

  Second, a central feature of this system, its sounding board so to speak, was its substantial control over the public sphere, which appeared to function in accordance with Nazi norms. People were expected to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime’s policies through their public behavior.

  The claim that the nation and its leadership were in tune with one another was expressed in a variety of forms of behavior. They included mundane things such as the Nazi salute or wearing the Party badge but also the everyday response to those sections of the population that had been excluded, such as the Jews, as well as participation in the various national celebrations, mass rallies, and plebiscites, whose results were not left to chance. If the population behaved as the regime wished, and in general it did so, it became propaganda’s task to document this behavior and thereby to strengthen the desired impression of the national community’s solidarity.

  Third, Goebbels’s system provided its own proof of its success in the form of pictures and recordings, in press reports, and in internal reports on the popular mood, which were specifically designed to convey the positive resonance of the propaganda and to present negative reactions as departures from the norm. When negative reactions went beyond what was considered acceptable, the reports were altered, the criteria for judging positive responses were changed, or the critics and complainants were silenced. Finally, Goebbels’s own diaries, which were to be published posthumously, were also intended to form part of the documentation of his success.