Hitler's Henchmen E-Book

Guido Knopp

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 566

Beschreibung

Josef Goebbels, Hermann Goring, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolph Hess, Albert Speer and Karl Donitz. These were the men who smoothed Adolf Hitler's path to power and became the perpetrators of a reign of terror unparalleled in history. They were the supporters and executives at Hitler's regime, carrying out his orders with deadly efficiency. This radical new assessment of power under the swastika reveals many unknown facts and gives a unique but disturbing glimpse behind the scenes of the Nazi state.an TV journalist and presenter Guido Knopp has unearthed a wealth of new material about the Third Reich. Based on meticulous research and countless interviews, this is essential reading for anyone interested in Hitler and the Second World War.

Leseprobe

HITLER’SHENCHMEN

HITLER’SHENCHMEN

GUIDO KNOPP

First published in 1996 by C. Bertelsmann Verlag GmbH, Munich.

This English translation first published in 2000

This edition published in 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved

© Guido Knopp, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2010

English translation © 2000, 2005, 2010

© 1996 by C. Bertelsmann Verlag, München, within Verlagsgruppe

Bertelsmann GmbH

In collaboration with Peter Adler, Christian Dieck, Peter Hartl, Rudolf Gültner, Jörg Müllner

Research: Bettina Dreier, Klaus Sondermann

Translation: Angus McGeoch

The right of Guido Knopp to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 07524 6933 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Picture Credits

List of Illustrations

Foreword: Perfectly Ordinary Germans?

1    The Firebrand: Joseph GoebbelsKnopp/Hartl

2    The Number Two: Hermann GöringKnopp/Müllner

3    The Enforcer: Heinrich HimmlerKnopp/Gültner

4    The Deputy: Rudolf HessKnopp/Deick

5    The Architect: Albert SpeerKnopp/Adler

6    The Successor: Karl DönitzKnopp/Müllner

Select Bibliography

PICTURE CREDITS

Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte 12, 16, 17

Bundesarchiv 3, 19

Deutsche Press-Agentur 21

Keystone 2, 10, 29

Library of Congress 7, 8

National Archives 5, 6, 13, 14

NEXT EDIT 23, 24, 26, 27

Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach 1

Süddeutscher Verlag 4, 11, 15, 18, 25, 28

Ullstein Bilderdienst 9, 20

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. The unemployed Dr Goebbels, 1923

  2. Gauleiter Goebbels conquers ‘Red Berlin’

  3. Goebbels, deluded by the myth he himself invented

  4. Goebbels with his wife and six children (1942)

  5. Goebbels and his stepson, Harald Quandt

  6. Joseph Goebbels and Robert Ley, head of the ‘German Labour Front’

  7. Göring on his yacht, Carin II

  8. Hitler visiting Göring’s country estate, Carinhall

  9. Göring with his Chief Quartermaster of the Luftwaffe, Ernst Udet (1938)

10. Göring at a press conference after his arrest (1945)

11. Heinrich Himmler (1901)

12. Heinrich Himmler with his fellow-pupils at the Landshut High School

13. Himmler with Streicher and Ley

14. Himmler with Hitler and Göring

15. Himmler visiting a camp for Russian PoWs in the rear of the Eastern Front (1941)

16. Survivors of Himmler’s camps (1945)

17. Himmler after his suicide on 23 May 1945

18. Rudolf Hess as a child with his mother Clara (1895)

19. Rudolf Hess as a student

20. Hitler and his Deputy, Hess (with Goebbels) (1941)

21. Rudolf Hess in his prison cell at Nuremberg

22. Hess in the garden of Spandau gaol

23. Hess’ son Wolf-Rüdiger after his father’s post-mortem (1987)

24. Speer with Goebbels and Nazi Party functionaries at the opening of the Berlin regional headquarters of the NSDAP (1932)

25. Speer and Hitler on the construction-site of the Reich Party assembly ground

26. The ‘Palace of the Führer’ on the ‘Great Square’ of the ‘world capital Germania’

27. View of the ‘Great hall’, looking down the north–south axis to the ‘Triumphal Arch’

28. Dönitz with staff officers at his headquarters (1943)

29. Dönitz as Hitler’s executor (May 1945)

FOREWORD:PERFECTLY ORDINARY GERMANS?

We cannot conceive of the Third Reich without Hitler. And once he was gone, deprived of its evil centre of gravity, it disintegrated like a chimaera. The Reich’s murderous existence depended solely on him. Without him it became a ship of the dead.

But the dictator was reliant on henchmen who dedicated themselves entirely to serving him. They, the paladins of his court, were supporters, indeed guarantors of his power: Hitler’s willing executives – and executioners. They put into effect whatever the despot commanded, and sometimes rather more.

It is far from the truth to say that Hitler’s Reich was a weak dictatorship headed by a work-shy drifter, who let things run away with him, who only occasionally intervened in the power-structure of the Nazi regime and had to be forced into committing his evil deeds. Hitler knew perfectly well that none of his henchmen would ever dare to try doing anything that did not conform with his objectives.

Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Hess, Speer, Dönitz – six careers whose effect upon the workings of the dictatorship varied greatly. The psychological profiles of all these men do, however, help us to find an answer to the question of ‘how it could have happened’. Were they criminals of a very special kind? Were they equipped with the same criminal energy that possessed their chief? Or were they ‘perfectly ordinary Germans’ who by reason of particular circumstances and chance events were able to build extraordinary careers, which put them in a position to commit extraordinary crimes?

*

Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Hess, Speer, Dönitz – six of Hitler’s henchmen, six executors of his power. Without them and many others Hitler would not have been able to maintain his dominance.

But not until the present day has it been revealed that the actual ‘writing on the wall’ of his dictatorship, the original sin of the twentieth century, was not the war with its very obvious horrors, but the crime which was concealed within it: Auschwitz, the synonym for mass-murder on an industrial scale. The war, terrible as it was for those who lived through it, is retreating further and further into the sober pages of historical evaluation – and now, after more than half a century, appears more like a cloak beneath which the Holocaust could be hidden and carried to its conclusion.

Of course, those who were directly implicated were not just Hitler’s henchmen but also many other accomplices: probably as many as half a million Germans were guilty through their involvement.

In addition to those, how many more knew or suspected what was going on, but remained silent? A survey carried out for Second German Television in 1996 produced some very surprising figures. One question was: did you know anything about the annihilation of Jews in concentration-camps? One might have supposed that the death-camps were pretty well isolated and that news of the terrible things happening there scarcely penetrated into the world beyond. But among Germans over sixty-five years old no less than 8 per cent stated that they had ‘themselves found out about’ the extermination-camps. Applied to the whole wartime population that represents 6 million Germans! Nineteen per cent of those questioned said that at the time they had heard of the killing of Jews and of the concentration-camps. Again, if we apply that percentage to Germany’s wartime population, we get this appalling result: 22 million either had direct knowledge of or had heard about the extermination of Jews in the camps.

Yet knowing about something is not necessarily the same as condoning it. The American historian Daniel Goldhagen (author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners) believes that hardly a single German was plagued by moral scruples. But if that were true, how do we explain other contemporary evidence, such as Victor Klemperer’s diary entry on the day in 1941 when the wearing of the Star of David by Jews was made compulsory? Klemperer, himself a Jew, noted that some excitable youths jeered at him, but more often he encountered gestures of friendliness and even of shame on the part of non-Jewish Germans. Some of the people of Dresden made it clear to him that they were not happy about the way Jews were being treated. But they also showed him their fear of being denounced themselves for showing the smallest gesture of human solidarity. Is that the reaction of a people obsessed by an ‘all-consuming anti-Semitism’? Goebbels himself confessed to the armaments minister, Albert Speer, that the introduction of the Star of David was not having the desired effect: ‘Everywhere people are showing sympathy for the Jews. This nation is simply not mature, it is full of idiotic sentimentality.’

The Nazi regime was extremely interested in the way public opinion was moving. Numerous authorities – the SD (security service), the police, the civil service and the judiciary – all produced weekly reports on the mood of the people. These reports were compiled at a local and then regional level, and the essential points were fed into the Reich reports of the SD. The latter were published, but without the regional and local breakdowns. A research project by the universities of Stuttgart and Jerusalem (led by Eberhard Jäckel and Otto Dov-Kulka) has now published a comprehensive review: thousands of individual reports – the only scientifically reliable primary source from which to judge what Germans knew, how much they knew and what they made of the information. In the following paragraphs I will quote from these sources.

The first thing to emerge from them is that the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws were widely accepted by the population. What the Germans did not accept were uncontrolled pogroms. From hundreds of reports about the Reichskristallnacht in November 1938, we find that the Germans took a rather poor view of these violent excesses. For example the chairman of the town council in Minden, Westphalia, writes: ‘There is an embarrassed silence about the action ordered by the Party; opinions are seldom voiced openly; people are ashamed.’

Another report states: ‘The mood of the population and the broad mass of the Party is dejected.’ According to a report from Stuttgart on the November pogrom: ‘The action against the Jews gave rise to very widespread criticism. It was pointed out that the destruction of Jewish shops and even of synagogues was in no way intended in the Four Year Plan.’ Here the argument was not a moral but an economic one. In individual cases, conscious acts of support for the Jews were heard of; thus an eighty-one-year-old retired colonel, a member of the Nazi Party, was reported as having sent a bunch of flowers to a Jew after 9 November, as a token of his deep sympathy.

It was not like that everywhere and it was certainly not true of all Germans. But there was a widespread feeling of shame. How did the population react to the deportation of their Jewish fellow-citizens from October 1941 onwards? The reports tell us that the branding of Jews with the yellow star in the previous month was often the subject of criticism: ‘The identification of Jews is being rejected.’ Then there was mounting criticism of operations which could no longer be read about in the papers. In one report from Westphalia we read:

People are saying that Jews were being forced to work in former Soviet factories, while elderly and sick Jews were ordered to be shot. It was incomprehensible that human beings could be treated so brutally. Whether Jew or Aryan, they were all God’s creation.

And in another report:

It could be observed that a large proportion of the older Volksgenossen [national comrades] are generally very critical of the measures to deport Jews from Germany. Within churchgoing circles it is being said openly that the German people must surely one day be prepared for the punishment of God.

How much horrifying detail had penetrated to the Germans at home is shown in a report by the SD in Erfurt:

The wildest rumours are circulating about operations by the Security Police in the occupied eastern territories. For instance, stories are being spread among the population that the Security Police have been given the task of exterminating Jewry in the occupied areas. Jews, it is said, are being rounded up and shot in thousands, having first had to dig their own graves. These shootings are said sometimes to be on such a scale that even members of the firing squads have had nervous breakdowns.

That was a pretty accurate description of what was actually happening. But the fears and concerns of ordinary Germans give the lie to any theory that ‘the Germans’ were indifferent or insensitive – to say nothing of the presumption that the Holocaust had been greeted with enthusiasm. One claim, in a report from Minden, was that

There is a lot of talk among the people that Germans in the United States are obliged to wear a swastika on their left breast for identification purposes, in the same way that Jews are identified here in Germany. The Germans in America are having to pay a heavy price for the mistreatment of the Jews in Germany.

In 1943 a mass-grave of Polish officers, shot by the Soviet secret service, was found at Katyn, a discovery which the Nazis used as the basis for anti-Soviet hate-campaigns. However, the Gestapo noted that ‘a large part of the population found this propaganda strange or hypocritical, because far greater numbers of Poles and Jews had been liquidated by the Germans’. Is this the reaction of a people who regarded the ‘Final Solution’ as a national project?

The findings from these unpublished sources and from the recent opinion survey are more or less identical: many Germans knew quite a lot; they suppressed it, even tolerated it, but to a large extent they did not want it to happen. This is the view held, incidentally, by the overwhelming majority of the 1,285 people questioned.

In 1996 30 per cent of Germans said they were convinced that their contemporaries at the time had known about the murder of the Jews, whereas 62 per cent held the opposite view. A mere 1½ per cent stated that in their view the slaughter of the Jews was supported by most Germans. Around 22 per cent believed there was ‘a tendency to tolerate’ it. And only 6 per cent of Germans in 1996 held the view that the killing of Jews ‘tended to be condemned’ by the majority of Germans. The people are sometimes shrewder than historians think.

Would that there had been more ‘condemnation’! When Cardinals Faulhaber and Galen used their pulpits to denounce as murder the ‘T4’ programme, which the regime dressed up as ‘mercy killing’, Hitler had the programme stopped. In Berlin, early in 1943, the non-Jewish spouses of Jews who had been listed for deportation to death-camps staged a public protest outside the collection centre. This became known as the Rosenstrasse Incident, and resulted in the release of many of those registered for deportation. In Germany, at least, the regime wanted to avoid attracting public attention. Everything was supposed to run in a calm and orderly manner – right up to the gas-chamber. Could similar focused protest in Germany and abroad have even prevented the Holocaust, or at least brought it to an end sooner? No one dared put this to the test.

Who bears the responsibility for the crime of the twentieth century, the murder of Europe’s Jews? We put this question, as well, to German respondents in 1996. Nearly 70 per cent replied Hitler; the next largest number (37 per cent) said his henchmen; followed by 32 per cent who said the SS. Only 20 per cent replied that ‘the Germans as a whole’ were to blame for the killing of the Jews. It is striking to note here that young people under thirty were more inclined to lay part of the blame on ‘all Germans’ (35 per cent), whereas only 5 per cent of those over sixty-five took that view.

However much of the blame ‘the Germans’ as a whole should accept, without Hitler the Third Reich would have been inconceivable. This does not mean the shifting of guilt onto one individual. Yet it was his criminal energy which released the criminal energies in others. Hitler held his henchmen in a firm grip. They carried out what he decided – or what in their view was the Führer’s intention. The killing of the Jews was not the result of the bureaucratic processes of a dictatorship going berserk, but an official crime deliberately staged by Hitler. Hitler not only initiated the killings, he managed them – through powers delegated to Himmler. Without Hitler there would have been no invasion of the Soviet Union, without Hitler no Holocaust.

This does not amount to an acquittal for his henchmen and accomplices. For Hitler’s Holocaust was put into effect by the many ‘little people’ – willing executioners – who later pleaded that they were forced to obey orders. They were not psychopaths, but perfectly ordinary Germans from a population of supporters and hangers-on.

However, the murders they committed were no more a predetermined and logical product of German history than Hitler himself was. There is no straight path running from the battlefields of Flanders to Auschwitz. There is no direct route taking us from Luther, via Bismarck, to Hitler. Nothing in history is inevitable. That is certainly true of Hitler’s so-called Machtergreifung (seizure of power) which in truth was more of a Machterschleichung, sneaking into power by devious means. Although there was always the possibility that it could happen that way, it did not have to happen.

The disgrace remains: millions of Germans looked on and looked away. Millions knew enough, certainly, to know very well that they did not want to know any more. Hundreds of thousands of Germans proved to be Hitler’s willing executioners. Yet what drove them was not only and not principally a murderous anti-Semitism. It was the opportunity which a satanic regime offered them to realize their basest, most unpleasant urges – and not just against Jews.

That was possible in Germany, and if there, then why not everywhere? History has proved that genocide in the twentieth century has not been exclusive to Germany. Millions met their death in Stalin’s gulag, in Turkey, in China and Cambodia. What makes the Jewish Holocaust so unique is the industrial efficiency with which it was planned and carried out.

Those of us who were born after the war cannot be held responsible for Auschwitz. But we are responsible for the memory, for preventing it from being obliterated or suppressed. That does not mean collective guilt, but it does mean collective responsibility.

It is necessary to consider how ‘perfectly normal people’ under very specific conditions become criminals, when a criminal government encourages them to do so. What makes a person inhuman? Pondering that question also means preventing, for all time, man from being the ‘wolf of man’. Bosnia and Rwanda were only yesterday.

All the lessons of Germany’s Holocaust, all the pictures and the reports have not been able to change human nature. But they can prevent the same thing ever happening again, at least in Europe. I think that is service enough.

CHAPTER ONE

THE FIREBRAND: JOSEPH GOEBBELS

KNOPP/HARTL

I have now learnt abstinence. And a boundless contempt for the common herd.

There is a curse hanging over me and women.

Here is a man who knows the way. I want to be worthy of him.

Hitler talks to me in a very friendly, confidential way. How fond he is of me as a person, too . . .

I suppose it will always be one of the biggest jokes about democracy that it has itself presented its deadliest enemies with the very means by which to destroy it.

The Bolshevists can teach us a lot, especially about propaganda.

It was rather a good thing and helpful to us that at least some of the Jews thought: Oh well, it won’t really be as bad as all that.

This plague of Jews must be wiped out. Completely and utterly. Nothing must be left of them.

Now, let the nation arise, let the storm break!

We will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time.

Or else the greatest criminals.

Goebbels

You know of course that I am not very keen on this exaggerated anti-semitism. But nor can I really say that the Jews are particular friends of mine. However, I don’t think they can be got rid of by insults and polemics or even by pogroms, and even if this were possible, it would be most ignoble and inhuman to do so.

Goebbels to Anka Stalherm, 1919

He has taught us again the old German virtue of loyalty; we are going to stand by him until victory or defeat. Let us thank Destiny for having given us this man, the helmsman in our hour of peril, the apostle of truth, the leader into freedom, the confessor, the zealot, the voice calling us to arms, the steadfast hero, the emblem of Germany’s conscience.

Goebbels on Hitler, 1924

Germany longs for this one man, as the earth thirsts for rain in summer. O Lord, show the German people a miracle! A miracle!! A man!!!

Goebbels, 1924

Soon he will listen only to his generals, and things will get tough for me.

Goebbels, 1938

Why can’t women be our equal in every way? Can they be educated to it? Or are they simply inferior? Only in rare cases can women become heroines!

Goebbels, 1925

Men of Dr Goebbels’ type have always been alien to me, though I have refrained from passing judgement. But today he is the most hated man in Germany. At one time we used to complain about Jewish managing directors sexually harassing their female employees. Now Dr Goebbels is doing it.

Himmler, 1939

We Germans may not know much about living, but when it comes to dying – we’re fabulous!

Goebbels, 1932

If I’d told those people to jump from the third floor – they’d’ve done it!

Goebbels after his ‘Total War’ speech at the Sportpalast, 1943

This is the secret of propaganda: those whom the propaganda is aimed at must become completely saturated with the ideas it contains, without ever realising that they are being saturated. Obviously the propaganda has a purpose, but this purpose must be so cleverly and innocently disguised that the people we intend to influence simply do not notice it is happening.

Goebbels addressing senior radio executives, 1933

The rhetorical gifts and organisational talents this man displayed were unique. There was nothing he did not seem capable of. The party members were absolutely devoted to him and the SA would willingly have been cut to pieces for him. Goebbels, well, he was just our Goebbels.

Horst Wessel, 1926

To hell with this loud-mouthed propaganda boss, Goebbels by name. The man who, crippled in body and soul, deliberately and with inhuman malice strives to elevate the lie to godlike status, the sole master of the world!

Thomas Mann, 1933

The press today is no longer the enemy but is working alongside government. Today press and government are in fact pulling in the same direction.

Goebbels, 1934

He was without doubt the most intelligent of them all. He was an academic, as you could clearly tell from his choice of words and way of speaking. Unlike Göring, Himmler and Bormann, he possessed the ability to distance himself to some extent from day-to-day events. He wasn’t self-centred and he was no coward. He told Hitler what he thought, even when he believed the war was over – and Hitler always listened to him. To me, Goebbels was a propaganda genius and I believe it can equally well be said that he made Hitler as that Hitler made him. He was a very complex personality – completely cold. Where National Socialism was at its worst – in its anti-Jewish measures in Germany – he was the driving force.

Speer, 1979

* * *

As Paul Joseph Goebbels, the undersized 29-year-old philology graduate, stepped out into the forecourt of Munich’s massive central station on 8 April 1926, a chauffeur was already waiting for him in a supercharged Mercedes with gleaming chrome. Thanks to the ‘gigantic’ roadside posters advertising the appearance of ‘Dr Goebbels’ in the Bürgerbräu beer hall the following day, the drive to the hotel turned into a triumphal procession for the newcomer.

‘What a splendid reception!’ he enthused in his diary. Then, in the evening, when his fatherly host appeared in person to pay his respects to the visitor, Goebbels finally achieved a state of bliss: ‘Hitler telephoned. Wants to welcome us in person.’ He exulted in his diary: ‘He arrives in a quarter of an hour. Tall, healthy, full of vitality. I like him so much. He is embarrassingly kind to us.’

Hitler generously put his limousine at the guest speaker’s disposal for a spin around Lake Starnberg before the initiation began the following evening in the Bürgerbräukeller: ‘I give it everything I’ve got. They cheer, they roar. At the end Hitler embraces me. There are tears in my eyes. I’m in a kind of heaven.’ A wave of ecstasy floods through Goebbels’ diary: ‘I bow down before the greater man, the political genius!’ Later he adds another verse to the hymn of praise:

He is a genius. The unquestioned creative instrument of a divine destiny. I stand before him in a state of shock. But he is like a child; kind, good, compassionate. Yet catlike, cunning, clever, agile; and like a lion, huge and roaring. What a chap, what a man!

To the young admirer, Hitler was more than a father-figure or exemplar. Fired with zeal, Goebbels elevated the backroom demagogue into the Messiah and Redeemer in human form. In Hitler his ill-defined search for religious faith had found an icon. ‘What one believes in is immaterial; the important thing is believing.’ These were the words Goebbels put into the mouth of Michael Voormann, the hero of his bombastic attempt at novel-writing. Having abandoned both Catholic piety and left-wing revolutionary exuberance, he now worshipped with glowing faith an earthly deity who would become the leitmotiv of his existence and was already filling his failed career with a new purpose.

‘I am gladly departing this life, which has been nothing but hell for me,’ Goebbels had cried out in his testament to posterity at the age of only twenty-two. Yet this theatrical exit was postponed to a later date and he was forced to continue his meagre existence as a student. A small bursary from the Catholic Albertus Magnus Society, occasional earnings as a tutor, endless loans from friends, visits to the pawnbroker, and most of all the money which his father donated from his meagre income, all helped to keep the literature student’s head more or less above water. When necessary he just went without meals for a few days. Wherever his student wanderings took him – Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg, Munich and Heidelberg – the spectre of poverty was his constant companion.

His experience of terrible shortages in Germany after the First World War combined with his personal penury to shape his vision of a world in which men of ability became the victims of sinister machinations. ‘Isn’t it monstrous,’ he wrote in frustration to his boyhood sweetheart Anka Stalherm in 1920, ‘that people with the most brilliant intellectual gifts languish in poverty, because the rest are squandering, blowing and wasting the money that could help them?’

In this Goebbels was portraying himself: he felt that he was destined for higher things, was convinced his future was to be a famous writer, an idealist who would change the world. His first steps in life had in fact led him single-mindedly up the social ladder. He was born on 29 October 1897 in the small Lower Rhineland town of Rheydt, the third son of a bookkeeper who had doggedly worked his way up from blue-collar to white-collar status. For this gifted boy, attending the town’s high school meant crossing what was in those days still a very rigid class barrier. He enjoyed the privilege of piano lessons and an education in the humanities. As the brightest pupil in his year the university doors were open to him. For the son of a lower middle-class family this success was both a satisfaction and a compensation. For it was not only his humble origins that permanently labelled him an outsider. ‘Why had God made him in such a way that people mocked and scorned him?’ he made his fictional Michael Voorman complain. ‘Why could he not love himself and love life as others did?’ It was this cry of self-hate and self-pity which would reverberate to the end of his life. From his childhood he was denied access to the world of the carefree and the undamaged; as a sickly four-year-old he contracted osteomyelitis in the right leg. Despite all the efforts of doctors, growth of the limb was stunted. And for the rest of his life he had to drag the affected foot behind him in an unsightly orthopaedic shoe. While others played, danced or enjoyed sport, the crippled boy always remained on the sidelines. In 1914, excited by the general euphoria of war, he presented himself for an army medical check, only to be wearily waved aside by the doctor. ‘When he saw the others running, jumping and romping about,’ Goebbels confessed in Michael, ‘he berated his God for . . . doing this to him; he hated the others for not being like him; he even mocked his mother for being happy to have such a cripple.’

In the solitude of his attic room he learned to hate with a passion: to hate himself in all his ugliness, to hate the others who did not take him seriously, despised him or else smothered him with pity, and lastly to hate the whole of mankind. ‘I have now learnt abstinence,’ he wrote in his journal of the soul, ‘And a boundless contempt for the common herd!’

The malign delight with which he later dissected the weaknesses of others, the vengeance with which he pursued opponents and colleagues alike, the mistrust which led him to suspect treason and plotting all around him, and his incapacity to feel pity – all had their origin in those early days of humiliation. At the same time experience taught him to play down his physical shortcomings by behaving in a particularly assertive way.

He never lost control. He was calculating and cold. Ice-cold and diabolical.

Otto Jacobs, stenographer

It was no coincidence that he cut quite a figure on the stage. With forceful phrases and sweeping gestures he was able to spellbind those around him. He used his repartee and mental acumen to divert attention from his appearance. The success which was denied him on the sportsground and the field of battle, he seized with relentless energy in the classroom and at his desk. In November 1921 Goebbels’ ambition to rise in the world was crowned with success: he graduated in the faculty of philology at Heidelberg and was now ‘Herr Doktor’. For hours he practised a flamboyant signature, now embellished with academic credentials. Never again would he sign his name without adding his full title. In his home town of Rheydt the neighbours greeted him on the street with respect. For the 24-year-old Goebbels, graduation from university brought social recognition and personal triumph. Yet, far from gaining employment and status, he found himself back in the attic of his parents’ house. On its own, his academic title did nothing to free him from material hardship. In the next two and a half years the struggling young man became painfully aware that even ‘Doctors’ have to earn their keep and write job applications. In his little study the obscure writer filled reams of paper with poems, articles and tracts – but the outside world paid him precious little attention. Apart from the reprinting of six of his essays in the Westdeutsche Landeszeitung, the public completely ignored the prolific recluse.

It seemed, therefore, like an admission of total defeat when he was forced to seek gainful employment in a Cologne branch of the Dresdner Bank. Instead of addressing an illustrious audience, his resonant voice was now heard shouting out share-prices on the trading-floor.

His detested duties in the ‘Temple of Materialism’ reinforced his disgust at the ‘hectic dance around the Golden Calf’. ‘You talk of capital investment,’ Goebbels raged in his diary over speculation during the runaway inflation of 1923 ‘but behind these fine words lurks nothing but a bestial hunger for more. I say bestial, but that is an insult to animals, for an animal only eats until it has had its fill.’ The fertile soil of anti-capitalism brought forth the first shoots of anti-Semitism. His latent prejudice, something frowned on by the Catholic lower middle-class, hardened into a sinister conspiracy theory. In ‘the Jews of international finance’ Goebbels discovered the perfect scapegoat, both for his personal penury and for the economic hardships of his time. For him Jewish finagling was not only at the heart of Western materialism – the very ‘spawn of evil’ – but also of international Marxism. The men pulling the strings in both worlds had a common ambition to remove every trace of national autonomy. Fed by the relevant writings of the period, Goebbels distilled from the murky philosophical brew the ‘inexorable logic’ that only a ‘life-or-death struggle’ against ‘international Jewry’ would open the way to a better world.

As yet he apparently found no contradiction between this belief and his acquaintance with actual people of Jewish descent. The Heidelberg literary historian, Friedrich Gundolf, whom Goebbels greatly admired, was Jewish, as was his supervisor, Professor Max von Waldberg, and a close family friend was a Jewish lawyer who gave literary advice to the budding poet. When his fiancée, a teacher named Else Janke, revealed that her mother was Jewish, he was taken aback, but did not end the relationship – at least not immediately. When Goebbels later rose to be a spokesman for the Nazi Party, he threw out his bride-to-be as a tiresome leftover from his youth.

At first, however, it was he who was out on the street. After only nine months his career as a bank employee came to an abrupt end. In order to conceal the disgrace from his family, he continued to commute to Cologne for weeks without a job, until his lack of funds forced him to reveal the truth.

‘As a result of a slight nervous disorder brought about by an accident and overwork, I was obliged to give up my employment in Cologne.’ That was how he described his failure in a neatly written letter to the Berlin publishing house of Mosse, applying for an editorial position. But all his euphemism was in vain. The applicant was turned down, as he was by the long-established Vossische Zeitung and the liberal Berliner Tageblatt. His rejection by the metropolis fitted perfectly into his view of the world; the owners of these publishing houses and their featured journalists were obviously Jewish. The whole world, which denied him access to a livelihood, appeared to him ‘Jew-ridden’.

Goebbels complained in his diary:

I live in a permanent state of nervous agitation. This miserable, cadging existence. I rack my brains to find a way out of this undignified situation. Nothing seems to work, nothing can work. First of all one has to put aside everything that can be called an independent viewpoint, moral courage, personality or character, if one is to count for anything in this world of patronage and careerism. I count for nothing. A big zero.

But in the Bavarian capital, Munich, the itinerant political preacher did count for something. Reports of Hitler’s unsuccessful putsch in 1923 roused the deskbound dropout from his lethargy. With growing enthusiasm Goebbels followed the chief protagonist’s stage-managed appearances at his trial in Munich for high treason. He said later, in obeisance to his new prophet:

The words you spoke there are the catechism of a new political faith amid the despair of a collapsing and godless world. You did not remain silent. God gave you the voice to express our suffering. You put our torment into words of redemption, formed sentences of trust in the miracle to come.

Inspired by a belief in miracles, Goebbels accompanied an old schoolfriend now and again to public debates and meetings of the ‘Popular Socialist Bloc’ in his home province of Rhineland-Westphalia. Through the murky ‘mixture of cowardice, nastiness, self-importance and naked ambition’ which he found there, an illuminating shaft of light penetrated the gloom of his existence: he could become a political commentator! The Völkische Freiheit (National Liberty), the splinter party’s campaign sheet, published in the industrial town of Elberfeld, was prepared to print the polemical essays of ‘Dr G.’ – albeit without payment to begin with. Before long almost the entire contents of the paper were being written by Goebbels and shortly afterwards he took over the editorship – ‘with idealism and without thanks’ but nonetheless with great satisfaction as his reward: ‘I am just the tiniest bit happy. The first visible success from my efforts,’ noted the editor in his diary. ‘Now I am back on top again.’

Hitler has arrived. He shakes me by the hand. He is still completely worn out from delivering his great speech. Then he goes on talking here for another half-hour. With wit, irony, humour, sarcasm, but also with seriousness, intensity and passion. This man has all the qualities of a king. A born tribune of the people. The coming dictator.

Goebbels, 1925

Working for the Party also gave the new member the experience of success on the speaker’s platform. It took iron nerves to survive the laughter that initially greeted the appearance of this gaunt and undersized speaker with the disproportionately large head, but after that he was able to cast his spell over the audience. The strangely fascinating timbre of his voice, which could penetrate the loudest barracking, the precise and telling phrases, which were nevertheless comprehensible to every last Party member, the unbridled aggressiveness and biting wit left his audience in rapt silence. With his convincing appearance of inner passion he succeeded in carrying his public with him. He himself remained completely cold, while carefully studying every reaction.

With unfailing instinct he found the turns of phrase which at the right moment touched a nerve among his listeners. Now flattering, now caustic, now beaming, now troubled, he drew from his repertoire on each occasion the tone which best matched the mood in the hall. He garnered the greatest approbation when he attacked his opponents with biting sarcasm; his success was assured whenever he turned the shouts of critics and hecklers back on themselves in stinging ripostes. Every speech was a Herculean labour for him; hoarse, exhausted and streaming with sweat, he would finally stagger from the rostrum. Each gesture was painstakingly rehearsed, every jab of the finger applied with deliberation. The script showed the delivery of the speech in minute detail, the content devised in the seclusion of his study. His target was certainly not the integrity, honesty or good sense of the masses, but it was their intelligence. He relied on the effect of wordplay, jokes and disarming arguments. With these he could stir up his listeners, transport them and astonish them. But he did not send them into ecstasy. Whereas Hitler’s appearances drove his supporters into an almost sexual delirium, Goebbels seduced them with psychologically calculated persuasiveness. ‘I am becoming a demagogue of the worst kind,’ he assured himself with pride.

The essence of propaganda is – I might almost say – an art. And the propagandist is in the truest sense of the word an artist in popular psychology. His most important task is to keep his finger, daily and hourly, on the pulse of the people and to adapt his measures to the heartbeat.

Goebbels, 1935

In a group of political agitators not overprovided with brilliant orators, this gifted speaker was soon getting himself talked about. Local branches queued up to book him and very soon Goebbels, now promoted to Gau (district) manager, was performing nightly to Party rooms and assembly halls up and down the country. It was not long before the little doctor’s pulling power came to the attention of Hitler, recently released from prison in Landsberg Castle. It was Gregor Strasser, the Nazi Party organizer in northern Germany and Goebbels’ mentor, who had told Hitler about the able agitator, and the latter looked with favour on the acolyte, scarcely nine years younger than himself: ‘He stood there in front of us. Shook my hand. Like an old friend. And those big, blue eyes. Like stars. He is glad to see me,’ Goebbels was moved to write in his diary for 1925. The man who greeted him was, in his eyes, without question ‘the coming dictator’. The unequal friendship between the two men was in no way marred by the fact that Goebbels was known as an exponent of the left, socialist wing of the Party.

In 1926 the internal dispute between the right-wing southern element of the party and the leftists of northern Germany came to a head at a conference in the Bavarian town of Bamberg. The hopes of the ‘revolutionary’ wing all rested on the eloquent doctor. But he kept a low profile after a monologue by Hitler that lasted for hours, and remained silent ‘as though he had been pole-axed’. The Führerprinzip (principle of sole leadership) made all debate superfluous. Any reservations he had about the ‘damned sloppy management’ at the Party headquarters in Munich were put in the shade by the radiance of his new idol. ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are at once great and simple.’

Yet it was not Hitler’s simplicity that tipped the balance. The penniless son of a petty-bourgeois was much more flattered and pleased by the outward pomp and splendour with which his fatherly patron proceeded to pay court to him in Munich. And Hitler had an ulterior motive in this, for he had bigger plans for the resourceful young agitator: as the new Gauleiter of the Berlin–Brandenburg region Goebbels’ task would be to raise the Nazi flag in the extremely hostile territory of Germany’s ‘red’ capital city. True, the chosen candidate hesitated at first and played hard to get, but in reality he had recognized this as a chance of a lifetime: a position with a future and an assignment which appealed to his fighting spirit. On 7 November 1926 he left Elberfeld for Berlin – it was a journey with no return ticket.

In the metropolis with a population of millions the new Gauleiter commanded a pitifully small fraternity of just 300 members. It had absolutely no popular support but merely a pronounced desire to tear itself apart. With full authority from Hitler, and an iron fist, Goebbels separated the brawling factions and imposed his leadership. He founded a ‘victim support society’ to collect money, and a school for training young speakers. But none of this attracted any public attention.

It was impossible to see into Goebbels’ heart. He always wore the same poker-faced expression. We just couldn’t make him out.I think he really believed in his own phrases – and in the possibility of ultimate victory. He had fallen for his own slogans.

Dietrich Evers, picture-editor on Wehrmacht propaganda

‘Berlin needs sensation like a fish needs water,’ the self-taught politician realized. ‘That’s what this city lives on and no political propaganda will succeed if it has not recognized that fact.’ Consequently, Goebbels never missed an opportunity to grab the headlines. As venues for his parades and meetings he deliberately chose the communist strongholds in industrial suburbs and relied on the effect of the fighting in halls and streets which this would provoke. To this end he recruited his own mobile strike force. Their orders were to create the greatest possible disturbance: ‘In riots, when damage to property exceeds 400 Marks, the riot damage law comes into effect. I just mention that in passing,’ were the ringleader’s disingenuous instructions to his bully-boys.

Once, when the demagogue was in the middle of a racist tirade, a heckler shouted: ‘You don’t exactly look like a good Teutonic lad!’ Foaming with rage, Goebbels gestured to his hit-men to give the troublemaker a lesson he wouldn’t forget. It was unfortunate that the man they beat up later turned out to be an evangelical pastor. For Berlin’s Chief of Police this incident provided a welcome pretext to outlaw Goebbels’ brown-shirts.

But the latter made a virtue out of the ban. The SA troop was transformed into apparently innocent little groups such as the ‘All Nine’ skittle club, the ‘High Wave’ swimming association and the ‘Old Berlin’ ramblers, and the Party parades were moved to venues beyond the city limits. Since the ban had silenced Goebbel’s voice, he replaced it with another organ: a campaign paper with the unambiguous title of Der Angriff (The Assault). Its attacks were now constantly aimed at one man: Berlin’s Deputy Police-Chief, Bernhard Weiss. As a determined defender of the democratic system Weiss was right at the top of Goebbels’ hit-list. But that was not the only reason he was targeted. The brown-shirted racists picked out Weiss as the prototype of those they hated most. Under the pejorative name of ‘Isidor’ he became the object of a disgraceful campaign of ridicule and slander which thrived on widespread anti-Jewish prejudice. Berliners laughed at the malicious – and mostly quite unfounded – stories and the crude caricatures. Thanks to ‘Isidor’, Goebbels also became famous. Why should he be worried by the long-drawn-out defamation trials – they simply brought him even greater publicity.

Admittedly this notoriety did not gain him any electoral advantage. After the Party had been allowed to re-form on 27 February 1925, the Nazi Party (NSDAP) achieved precisely 2.6 per cent of the Berlin vote in the elections of 1928. Yet for Goebbels himself the elections meant a big leap upward: now at last the one-time pauper could hobble up the steps of the national parliament, the Reichstag. The democratic mandate gave Goebbels an effective public arena in which to attack democracy itself. He sneered in the Angriff:

I am not a member of the Reichstag, I am simply a Possessor of Immunity, a Holder of a Free Travel Pass. What has the Reichstag to do with us? . . . We were elected to oppose the Reichstag, and we will indeed carry out our mandate in the way our voters intended us to . . . We are entering the Reichstag in order to equip ourselves from the arsenal of democracy with the weapons of democracy . . . We come not as allies, not even as neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf descends on the flock, so do we come.

His newly won immunity protected the anti-parliamentary parliamentarian from pursuit by the courts of law, and he used the speaker’s rostrum for harangues against the republic, while his official allowances filled the coffers of the local Party. However, the real political battle was taking place on the streets. The more massively the economic crisis swelled the ranks of the unemployed and the dispossessed, the more extreme became the animosity between the opposing political forces.

What a nation! In tearing itself apart it kills the last remnants of national identity. In any other country the masses would rise up in violent protest. Poor old Germany! What riff-raff! What a rabble! The Jews have certainly got the measure of us!

Goebbels on the lynching trials in 1928

The bloody brawls not only provoked a continuous outcry from the press, they also furnished a steady supply of ammunition for propaganda. Goebbels always arranged to pack the first few rows in front of the rostrum with SA toughs, whose heads were ostentatiously swathed in bandages. An even greater draw, he thought, would be some ‘genuine martyrs’ from his own camp. With exaggerated emotion and regardless of the actual circumstances of death, Goebbels placed a hero’s wreath on the head of every SA man who lost his life. Each burial was staged as a major propaganda event. The death-worship reached its climax when the twenty-three-year-old Horst Wessel was shot dead in a seedy milieu of pimps and prostitutes. For Goebbels the death of the young terrorist meant the birth of a heroic myth. ‘One of us has to set an example and offer himself as a sacrifice,’ he declaimed beside the open grave. ‘Then so be it, I am ready!’ Acting swiftly, he arranged for a pamphlet of doggerel written by Wessel to be turned into a rousing anthem, which was later to become part of the basic ritual repertoire of the Third Reich.

The anthem was even pressed into service when Goebbels met his communist adversary, Walter Ulbricht, on the platform for a face-to-face duel of words. First the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ clashed discordantly with the ‘Internationale’, then punches flew. The debate was drowned out by the hideous din of an indoor battle in which over a hundred people were injured. When the occasion arose, however, the Gauleiter did not hesitate to make common cause with the ‘red rabble’ against the republican government. Many of his methods, such as the unison chanting of slogans, mass-demonstrations, lurid placards, party cells in the factories and door-to-door leafleting, had in any case been copied from his political opponents.

In his black leather jacket and with a tremor in his voice, the gaunt figure, like a Roman ‘tribune of the people’, addressed workers in their meeting-rooms and became a champion of the ‘little man’. He exploited the hardship of the masses as fuel for his inflammatory speeches. He pinpointed the economic crisis as proof of the bankruptcy of the ‘system’ and of its policy of total compliance with the Treaty of Versailles. Following a simple and constantly repeated formula, he put the blame on the capitalists and Jews who held ‘decent, honest Germans’ in a stranglehold. Like a preacher he affirmed his congregation in their faith in a ‘national resurrection’ and in Hitler as their Saviour. But all the time the political prophet felt nothing but cold contempt for the disciples who hung on his words: ‘The masses remain what they have always been: stupid, gluttonous and forgetful.’

In his dealings with Party colleagues he soon became adept at employing the whole apparatus of power and intrigue. The opportunist who mouthed ideologies, but never absorbed them, always knew how to side with the majority at the right moment. When his devoted Berlin SA troops led by Walter Stennes staged an open revolt against the Party HQ in Munich, his initial sympathy quickly evaporated and on Hitler’s orders he struck back. ‘I will fire the traitors with a bang,’ he boasted in his diary, and then rigorously ‘cleansed’ the Party of its rebellious faction. Once again his fear of losing Hitler’s protection prevailed over other ties of loyalty. He proceeded with equal ruthlessness when instructed to do away with his former campaign comrades, the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser. Hitler himself had given him carte blanche for the ‘ruthless purging’ from the Party of all those ‘rootless scribblers and muddle-headed armchair bolshevists’.

In gratitude for his unquestioning loyalty and brilliance as an agitator, the master promoted his vassal to be the NSDAP’s Head of National Propaganda. The wearisome round of general elections in the dying days of the Weimar Republic offered Goebbels ample opportunity to display his skills as an organizer, propagandist and orator. In a wave of restless activity he masterminded the election campaign, which covered the entire country, and spread a rallying message presenting Hitler as an omnipresent saviour, soaring over Germany in an aircraft. Goebbels himself was scarcely able to snatch a moment’s rest.

Confiding to his diary, the exhausted Goebbels wrote:

One hardly has time to think. We are carried the length and breadth of Germany by train, car and aircraft. We arrive in a city half an hour before we are due to begin, sometimes even later, then we step on to a platform and speak. . . . When the speech is over, one is in such a state that one feels as if one has just been taken out of hot bath fully clothed. Then we get into a car and drive for another two hours.

Despite all the hardship and the shortage of funds, this punishing programme provided the arch-publicist with one of the happiest periods of his life. In a party which was built on propaganda, he was seen as the man of the hour. On the speaker’s platform he had the opportunity to indulge his passion for self-promotion. With placards, banners and leaflets, with gramophone records, films and press campaigns, with demonstrations, parades and mass rallies he could pull out all the stops on the mighty Wurlitzer of audience-manipulation. And most important of all, as Hitler’s companion and adviser, he could spend all his time within touching distance of his master. He was needed, he was famous, and he was being rewarded: both with sweeping election victories and with the encouraging praise of his ‘Führer’.

Yet for all that, his success still did not earn him comradeship in the brown-shirt ranks. In a party that had adopted the emblems of muscularity, an upright bearing and blond hair, rather than mental ability, Goebbels, the malformed intellectual, carried a double handicap. Both his brain and his affliction branded him throughout his life as an oddity, to be eyed with suspicion. ‘I have few friends in the party: Hitler is almost the only one,’ he confided to his diary. ‘He agrees with me on everything. He will stand right behind me.’

What first struck me about Goebbels was that there was something puppet-like about him. Not in his movements – they were those of a demagogue. But when he opened his mouth wide, and that was his speciality, he reminded one rather of a marionette.

Stéphane Roussel, French foreign correspondent

The ‘boss’ did exactly that, even when, late in 1931, Goebbels went to the altar with Magda Quandt, née Ritschel, who was already expecting his baby. By acting as their witness, Hitler gave his blessing to the marriage, thus making it not only acceptable in Nazi eyes but also a prestigious boost in every respect for the man on his way up. The bridegroom could now boast a wife from the best of families, who until her divorce had been married to one of Germany’s wealthiest industrialists and who had committed herself, shapely body and gullible soul, to the Nazi Party. The change in marital status was underlined by a change of accommodation: the imposing and elegant Quandt residence on the Reichskanzlerplatz became a rendezvous for the Nazi elite and a second home for Hitler, who found there a substitute for the family he never had.

On 30 January 1933, in the Hotel Kaiserhof which stood opposite his house and served as the Party’s election headquarters, Goebbels experienced the triumphant culmination of his ceaseless efforts: the Germanized Austrian, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Reich Chancellor, the Weimar Republic slunk out of the back door, and Goebbels exulted: ‘It is impossible to describe what we feel in our hearts. You want to cry and laugh.’

In reality he felt more like crying. For while the brown-shirted battalions celebrated the ‘Seizure of Power’ with a grandiose torchlight procession, the propagandist who dreamed it up was sunk in a deep depression: contrary to Hitler’s ‘formal’ promise, there was no place for a rabble-rouser in the government of ‘national retrenchment’. So he had to settle for harnessing the national broadcasting service for his purposes in a final electoral battle. More than any politician of his era, Goebbels recognized the huge potential for influence which this medium presented. He would only allow Hitler to appear in cities which had local transmission facilities. And the Führer’s broadcast speeches were always preceded by Goebbels at the microphone giving a glowing description of the atmosphere among the audience. With a sense of mission he made sure that throughout the land it would be impossible not to hear the message of national revival. Naked violence and officially sanctioned terrorism, especially after the burning of the Reichstag, did whatever else was necessary to cement Hitler’s sole domination of the country. Once the new political masters had got rid of their conservative coalition partners, the drummer was also allowed to join the procession. The little man from Rheydt had completed the first lap: On 14 March 1933 Goebbels was officially sworn in as ‘Minister of National Enlightenment and Propaganda’.

The Minister of Propaganda always signs himself ‘Dr Goebbels’. He is the one educated man in the government, which is to say the quarter-educated man among illiterates. The impression of his intellectual potency is remarkably widespread; he is often called ‘the brains’ of the government. If so, then the demands on him must be modest indeed.

Victor Klemperer, Jewish novelist (Diary), 1934

Inwardly, he would rather have sworn a different oath than that of warding off misfortune from the German people. ‘One day the sword of our wrath will whip down upon the evil-doers and strike them to the ground in their bare-faced arrogance,’ he prophesied darkly in the diary. To the notorious misanthrope the completion of the ‘national revolution’ had always meant more than the exchange of ministries and posts. For him the hour of victory would also be the hour of reckoning.

But to begin with other calculations determined his agenda. Following plans which had been lying ready in a bottom drawer, Goebbels took only a few days to carve out a ministry which was unparalleled in German history. Never before had such a massive frontal assault been mounted on people’s consciousness.

In a neo-classical palace on Wilhelmplatz, to which he later added a severely functional new wing, the minister gathered a posse of young Party members, who were highly educated but lacked any administrative experience. Carefully assigned to departments for propaganda, film, radio, theatre, art, music and the press, they swamped the country with a publicity campaign the like of which had never been seen before. Goebbels’ stated objective was clear: ‘We are going to work on those people until we’ve got them at our feet.’

Having seized the reins of government, their job was now to gain mastery over public opinion. The messages were simple and memorable: ‘You are nothing. Your nation is everything.’ – ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.’ – ‘The Jews are our misfortune.’ The pernicious ideologies harked back to the Dark Ages, but the means of dissemination were ultra-modern. Cinema screens were used to project feelings of hope and elation. Loudspeakers in public areas and inexpensive radio-sets with the Volksempfänger (People’s Receiver) label – popularly known as ‘Goebbels’ Gab’ – enabled the new masters of the land to create an aura of omnipresence in the media. The vast geometry of mass rallies, the mystic symbolism of the flames, colours and banners, and the calendar of pseudo-religious festivals, scarcely allowed the Volksgenossen (national comrades) a moment to reflect for themselves.

Anyone who still trusted their own intelligence had difficulty in filtering a picture of reality from the flood of misleading reports, euphemisms and half-truths. Goebbels possessed the necessary guile to recognize that the most effective means of clouding people’s awareness was not the obvious lie but manipulation of the truth. And he was convinced he could bend the masses to his will. He instructed his Nazi colleagues:

This is the secret of propaganda: those whom the propaganda is aimed at must become completely saturated with the ideas it contains, without ever realizing that they are being saturated. Obviously the propaganda has a purpose, but it must be so cleverly and innocently disguised that the person we intend to influence simply does not notice it.