Goebbels: A Biography

by Peter Longerich

  Goebbels sometimes criticized Hitler’s behavior, as for example at the time of the Party crises of 1929–30; in 1933, when it looked as if he was not going to get the ministry he had been promised; in 1942–43, when Hitler blocked his attempts to introduce total war; and most strongly in 1945, when he began to have serious doubts about Hitler’s leadership qualities. But he never made a serious attempt to oppose Hitler and indeed ultimately forgave him all his mistakes and weaknesses.

  Goebbels’s narcissism manifested itself in particular in his attempts to persuade his contemporaries (but also posterity) of his complete success as propaganda minister. That he, Joseph Goebbels, had succeeded in uniting the German people behind his idol, Adolf Hitler, not only represented the completion of a political task for him, it was also the fulfillment of a key aim of his life. He regarded even the slightest doubt raised about this as a personal attack to which he responded implacably. His attempt to meticulously document the perfect operation of the system that he had created provides a good example of this need for success and recognition in his professional work, which was at the core of his personality.

  Goebbels’s narcissistic dependence on Hitler also particularly affected his private and family life. His marriage to Magda in 1931 was based on an arrangement that he and his bride had together made with Hitler. Hitler, who had fallen in love with Magda, gave up his aspirations and—in a formal sense—approved the marriage. From then onward Hitler was treated as a member of the family. Not only did Goebbels see Hitler, when he was in Berlin, almost every day, the Führer also spent a considerable amount of his leisure time with the Goebbels family, either in their apartment or in their summer residence, on boat trips, visits to the theater, or film evenings in the Reich Chancellery, and they even went on vacation together. By making generous grants Hitler ensured that the Goebbelses could maintain their extravagant lifestyle. He also took part in the planning of their various residences, and there was even a plan to provide Hitler with a kind of informal sanctuary on the grounds of the Goebbelses’ villa on Schwanenwerder. Finally, Hitler developed, insofar as he was able to do so, a relationship with the Goebbelses’ children, whose first names all began with H. Goebbels’s diaries show—unintentionally—the extent to which his everyday activities were burdened by having to be continuously on call for Hitler and how much Goebbels and his wife were upset by even the slightest indications that he might withdraw his friendship from them. He noted, in the laconic tone to which he always resorted when he was describing unpleasant but unavoidable events, that Magda often spent days, sometimes weeks, alone with Hitler as his guest.

  Initially this triangular relationship brought a considerable amount of stability into Goebbels’s life and brought him considerable advantages. To a significant extent, indeed, it provided the basis for his professional success. But when, in the second half of the 1930s, he began to grow apart from Magda, he placed, perhaps unconsciously, the triangular relationship in jeopardy and thereby the basis of his position within the regime. When he wanted to abandon the marriage in 1938, Hitler, as the third person involved, intervened and dictated to the married couple the terms for the continuation of their marriage. From this point onward their marriage was likely one of convenience.

  As a result of these disputes, Goebbels’s emotional life seems to have become more or less numbed, and he became rather isolated. As propaganda minister he had ceased to cultivate friends from his youth and student days, and in his personal relations he had adopted a distant attitude, which was emphasized by his exclusive lifestyle. His behavior was determined by his narcissism, which, particularly in times of crisis, required a large amount of confirmation and recognition. He could achieve this only if, through his activities as propaganda minister, he succeeded in completely winning back Hitler’s approval, which to some extent had been withdrawn during his marital crisis. After the outbreak of war he did indeed manage to do this.

  During the war the contact between Goebbels and Hitler remained intact, even if they met less often. Hitler was particularly concerned about Magda’s delicate health. His concern went so far that in 1943 he told her not to have a facial operation that was planned because of his fear that it might affect her appearance. Goebbels naturally acted as a witness at Hitler’s wedding to Eva Braun in April 1945, as the latter had done at his wedding in 1931. In the meantime Goebbels had obtained Hitler’s express approval for his family to remain in Berlin.

  The decision of Magda and Joseph Goebbels to follow Hitler in committing suicide and to murder their children appears logical when one considers their relationship to Hitler from 1931 onward. They had tried to provide Hitler with a substitute family, and both felt in their different ways closely linked to Hitler, which led to the premise that in view of his death, no member of this family should remain alive.

  Goebbels was also concerned, as he wrote in a farewell letter to Magda’s son Harald, that his suicide should send a signal. From his perspective, at the end of the war he had finally succeeded in turning his relationship with Hitler into one of real trust and in establishing his position as that of a unique favorite. The old competitors for Hitler’s favor, the Görings, Speers, and Himmlers, were, not without his connivance, confined to the political margins, and Bormann seemed to have been reduced to the role of a mere secretary. Thus Goebbels had indulged his narcissistic needs to the limit. By following Hitler’s example and committing suicide with his family, he had confirmed for all time the special relationship he believed he had with his idol.

  In the end, his self-delusion had won out.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank all those who have helped me to write this book and prepare it for publication. Foremost are my colleagues and students at Royal Holloway College of the University of London, who once again provided me with time for my research, without which this book could not have been written. The staff of the archive and library of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich have, as always, been extremely helpful in providing me with assistance, as have the staff of the Bundesarchiv, the Landesarchiv in Berlin, and the other archives that I was able to use. I would particularly like to acknowledge the exceptional assistance provided by Herr Gerd Lamers of the Stadtarchiv in Mönchengladbach and the friendly cooperation of Andreas Kunz and Michael Weins of the Freiburg Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv. I have also been assisted in writing this biography by a group of Hamburg psychoanalysts who gave me the opportunity for extensive discussions about the personality of its main subject. I would like to thank Christiane Adam, Sabine Brückner-Jungjohann, Gundula Fromm, Rüdiger Kurz, Astrid Rutetski, and Dirk Sieveking for important suggestions that helped me to understand certain character traits of Goebbels. I am also indebted to the staff of the Siedler Verlag, in particular Antje Korsmeier, Jan Schleusener, Andreas Wirthensohn, and Elke Posselt for their painstaking work on the manuscript.

  Munich and London

  October 2013

  SOURCES

  As already mentioned in the prologue, the main problem of a Goebbels biography is the fact that by far the majority of documents about the propaganda minister were written by himself or by people close to him with the clear purpose of enhancing his historical significance, indeed of portraying him as a great man. In addition to critical analysis of the texts written by Goebbels himself, for which the author’s unrestrained compulsion to communicate provides a variety of starting points, it is important to explore as wide a range as possible of other sources that can contribute to penetrating Goebbels’s self-presentation and self-projection.

  For the period up to 1923—that is to say, before the diaries begin—we have practically no sources that do not come from Goebbels himself. Apart from the “memoirs” composed in 1924, what we have, aside from a few journalistic articles, is above all his early correspondence and his literary efforts, which, together with a few other documents, are preserved among his private papers in the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive) in Koblenz. The Goebbels collection in
the Mönchengladbach City Archive contains further important information, especially about his years in Rheydt. But the various texts Goebbels composed about himself at this time record above all his inner insecurity and conflicts: They show a young person playing with invented variations on his life story and with fantasy projections that gave him psychological support. Precisely because of their contradictory nature, these texts provide plenty of scope for interpretation.

  For the period from October 1923 onward, the chief source of this biography are the Goebbels diaries, published in full for the first time in 2006.1 These diaries, published without a commentary, represent, as the prologue makes clear, a particular challenge to the historian, amounting as they do to a conscious attempt by Goebbels the propagandist to create a main source for a future history of Nazism and in the process to exert a powerful influence on the future interpretation of his own historical role, if not to control it. Their sheer length, their countless details, and the prominent position of their author within the Nazi system have ensured that the diaries are now, in fact, among the original sources most often cited by historians of Nazism.

  The diaries demonstrate that from 1925 onward, when he became involved in politics, first as a full-time employee of the NSDAP in the Rhineland and then in his role as Gauleiter in Berlin, Goebbels worked increasingly to project himself as a successful, radical, early fighter for the Nazi cause and its leader. This self-projection also left its mark on his copious journalistic output. Other sources, however, allocate to him a much less impressive role in the “time of struggle.” We have at our disposal both a series of papers from various Party collections and, increasingly, documents deriving from state institutions of the Weimar Republic, among them, and particularly valuable, the court records of Goebbels’s numerous lawsuits from this time, which are available at the Berlin Landesarchiv. In addition, there are the reports from the non-Nazi press, which gradually began to take notice of him and provide a critical assessment of his role.

  There are far more sources available for Goebbels’s period as Reich propaganda minister. Useful here were the records of the Propaganda Ministry, incomplete as they are, and those of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Culture Chamber) as well as those of the Party’s Reich propaganda headquarters. For the period from the end of October 1939 to the end of 1942 we have the minutes of the “ministerial conferences,” briefings for which Goebbels daily assembled his closest colleagues. While these have been comprehensively edited through the end of May 1941, the subsequent incomplete edition (covering the time until March 1943) can be augmented by copies of the original minutes from the Moscow Special Archive covering the years 1941 and 1942 and for April 1943 by a single file in the Bundesarchiv.2 The Propaganda Ministry’s instructions to the press during the peacetime years are available in an edited form,3 and for the wartime period there are extensive collections in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz.4 Contemporary media sources give us an idea of the way these guidelines were put into effect; here Goebbels’s own journalistic writing (especially in the Völkischer Beobachter and in the weekly Das Reich) frequently provided guidance. In addition, there are the contrasting records of other ministries and Party agencies (most of them are in the Berlin Bundesarchiv), which illuminate the influence of the propaganda minister from the perspective of his competitors and partners. All in all, therefore, it is to a large extent possible today to reconstruct the process of producing Nazi propaganda and to make a critical assessment of the version provided by Goebbels in his diaries. By the same token, the self-image Goebbels conveys of being a close confidant of Hitler, consulted on all important decisions, is revealed to a high degree to be self-propaganda, and the same is true of his self-assigned role as the pioneer of “total war.”

  Naturally, any biography of Goebbels must be stimulated and influenced by earlier work. This is, however, less true of the purported diaries or memoirs of his former colleagues, some of which appeared shortly after the end of the war. These are of limited value simply because of their apologetic purpose and are therefore only occasionally quoted in this book.5

  The serious biographies provide two contrasting images of Goebbels: On the one hand there is the Machiavellian propaganda specialist, the intelligent cynic, the ice-cold, evil genius who was too intelligent to believe his own propaganda, and on the other the believer, weighed down by numerous complexes and highly dependent on Hitler. The following contributions were particularly significant in the development of this Janus-faced image of Goebbels.

  After a critical biography by Curt Riess, published in 1950, developed the image of an unscrupulous cynic,6 Heinrich Fraenkel and Roger Manvell, using a wider source base, undertook a more nuanced portrait of the propaganda minister’s personality in 1960, in which some of his personal difficulties are evident.7

  In 1962, Helmut Heiber produced an intellectually ambitious and well-written biography that settles very personal scores with the subject, being mainly concerned to unmask and demolish the propaganda minister’s personal character. Goebbels is presented here not only as a consummate liar but also as a windbag, a ham, and a thug, who fell victim to his compulsion to project his own self-image.8 Viktor Reimann’s 1971 biography places the emphasis on Goebbels’s role as a propagandist, among other things crediting him with being the architect of the “Führer myth.”9

  Ralf Georg Reuth’s 1990 Goebbels biography is a serious and reliable piece of work that also has the virtue of being based on a considerably broader range of sources. A slight weakness of the book, however, is that the image of the “believer,” which Reuth eventually succeeds in establishing, is not always consistently sustained.10 Claus Ekkehard Bärsch’s study of the young Goebbels is an unconventional and extremely stimulating book, which has to be regarded as an essential contribution, even though when his book was published Bärsch lacked access to important parts of the early diaries.11 It brings out Goebbels’s fundamental narcissism and his search for a god (including his attempt at “self-deification”) as well as his image of mothers and women. The book by the psychoanalyst Peter Gathmann and the writer Martina Paul about Goebbels the narcissist might have offered the opportunity of pursuing Bärsch’s insights further but is undermined as a biography because it is based on completely inadequate sources; what is inexplicable, above all, is why the authors did not use the edition of the diaries completed in 2006 and almost entirely ignored the relevant historical research literature, while at the same time relying heavily on the dubious memoirs of Goebbels’s former colleagues and on earlier publications of poor quality. Its countless banal mistakes, incorrect dates, muddled information, and erratic source references (for example, “ZDF”) make the book an irritating read.12

  The first Goebbels biography based on the full version of the diaries is the book by Toby Thacker, which was published in 2009.13 Thacker succeeds in providing a more nuanced assessment of Goebbels’s importance for Nazi propaganda. He rightly states that Goebbels was not the inventor of the Hitler myth, that he had no monopoly on Nazi propaganda, and that his propaganda enjoyed limited success with the German population. Although he is aware of Goebbels’s histrionic qualities and his role as the liar par excellence, Thacker convincingly resists the notion of the propaganda minister as an unprincipled cynic and emphasizes four central convictions that were essential to Goebbels: nationalism, anti-Semitism, his sense of the need for social solidarity, and his total devotion to Hitler. However, in point of detail, Thacker is only partially successful in balancing the self-image projected by Goebbels in the diaries with material from other sources and in anchoring his findings within existing scholarship, as he fails to make use of important source materials and research literature.

  In addition, there is a series of studies that deal with particular aspects of Goebbels’s life.

  Dietz Bering’s exceptional study has analyzed Goebbels’s campaign to defame the Berlin Police Chief Weiss by giving him the Jewish name Isidor.14 In a study based on a wide range of sources, Ulrich Höve
r15 portrays Goebbels as a “National Socialist,” though the present author cannot share his conclusions. Christian T. Barth has thoroughly researched Goebbels’s anti-Semitism,16 and Helmut Michels has convincingly demonstrated Goebbels’s lack of a coherent foreign policy agenda; in the final analysis the propaganda minister played only a minor role in foreign policy.17

  Finally, this biography was able to draw on the extensive literature, too extensive to be listed here in full, on the various aspects of Third Reich propaganda containing material concerning Goebbels’s role.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS

  12 Uhr Blatt

  Der Angriff

  Berliner Adressbuch

  Berliner Arbeiterzeitung

  Berliner Börsen-Zeitung

  Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger

  Berliner Morgenpost

  Berliner Tageblatt (BT)

  Berliner Zeitung am Mittag

  Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ)

  Einwohnerbuch Rheydt