Joseph Goebbels - Propagandist to the End

Today they are called spin-meisters, public relations consultants, image creators, and public affairs specialists. But during World War II, they were called propagandists.

Some of them may have winced at the word, but not Joseph Goebbels. His official title was Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and he loved it. His job was to buttress German morale at home and smear Jews, Bolsheviks, and the Treaty of Versailles abroad. The Germans, he maintained, were fighting in Europe to save the West from Communist slavery.

That is what he emphasized after the war began, particularly after Adolf Hitler (Number l) invaded the Soviet Union.

In the years before World War II began, Goebbels concentrated on building the Nazi state, glorifying Hitler and Hitlerism, and extolling the theory of an Aryan “master race.”

Wielding Absolute Control of the German Media 

Given Goebbels’s uninspiring physical appearance, one can only wonder how the Germans glorified his depiction of the tall, blond, blue-eyed, handsome pure-blooded Aryan. A short, dark man with a leg brace, he would undoubtedly have been relegated directly to the gas chamber on stumbling off the cattle car at Auschwitz.

However, he was very good at what he did on the German home front. That is because he had complete control over German radio, newspapers, magazines, books, theater, and motion pictures. It was illegal for Germans to listen to foreign broadcasts over shortwave radios. This monopoly of the media enabled Goebbels to brainwash a nation during a 12-year period. There were dissidents and there was a German under-ground trying to fight Hitler. But the Nazi secret police kept anti-Hitler activities to a minimum, and those who were caught were severely punished.

Goebbels had only one client to please—first, last, and always: Adolf Hitler. The propaganda minister’s loyalty was absolute to the very end. Who else would have had his six children murdered so that they could join Goebbels and his wife in death following Hitler’s suicide in Berlin?

The Propaganda Campaign 

Joseph Goebbels was born in 1897 in Rheydt, Germany. After graduating from Heidelberg with a Ph.D., he did some writing but was not particularly successful at it. His life changed when he heard Hitler speak at a rally during the 1920s. Goebbels was captivated by the Führer. He joined the Nazi Party and became editor of its newspaper. When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Goebbels became his propaganda chief.

He began by arranging for the public burning of books of so-called “degenerate” writers, including Thomas Mann, Erich Remarque, Jack London, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. Goebbels continued with a major campaign against German Jews. Jewish businesses were boycotted, German Jews were beaten on the streets as police stood by, and they were subjected to vicious attacks in the media. The groundwork was being laid for the Holocaust to come.

In the blood purge of 1934, conducted against elements out of step with the rest of the Nazi Party, dozens of prominent Nazis were murdered at Hitler’s behest. Goebbels, considered a left-winger and thus out of step, narrowly escaped death. It is possible that Hitler himself saved his propaganda chief.

Public Spectacle and the 1936 Berlin Olympics 

Assured he was in the Führer’s good graces, Goebbels went forward with his propaganda program for both domestic and foreign consumption. He staged huge Nazi Party rallies as ritual spectacles. He also prepared for the approaching Berlin Olympics of 1936. Goebbels wanted to show the international community how far Germany had progressed under Hitler. One of the things Goebbels did to improve the German image was to temporarily remove the signs in public places that read “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.”

The Olympics were largely a public-relations success, as German athletes racked up the highest number of medals among the nations. There was, of course, the embarrassment of an African American named Jesse Owens, who easily outran the German athletes; Hitler had to “leave early” so he did not have to shake hands with Owens, a black man. But the situation was eased a bit when the American Olympics Committee removed Marty Glickman, a Jew, from a competition he was expected to win. The role of Goebbels in that international intrigue has never been established.

War-Time Propaganda 

When war came in 1939, Goebbels set up his enemies list: Jews, the English, the French, the Poles, and international bankers. (Bolsheviks would be added in June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.) According to Goebbels, these were the enemies that the German people were fighting, and he used all the media at his command to inflame German passions against them.

In addition to manipulating media and finding scapegoats, Goebbels was shrewd at analyzing special situations.

Once he sent a camera crew to photograph what was going on inside a Jewish ghetto. He had expected to show people acting like animals. Instead, the photographs conveyed humaneness in the face of privation and danger. The pictures were sup-pressed, for Goebbels believed they would only evoke sympathy for those struggling to survive behind the ghetto walls. At the time of the German entrapment at Stalingrad, he ordered that the letters of German soldiers addressed to their families back home be sent to him first, for possible propaganda purposes. The letters were suppressed as defeatist and never delivered.

Goebbels was quick to seize on the discovery of the bodies of thousands of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest of Poland in 1943. He maintained that they had been killed by the Soviets,; Joseph Stalin (Number 4) insisted that they had been killed by the Nazis. (Half a century later, the Russian government would confirm that the Soviets had indeed carried out the massacre.)

The last act of propagandist Goebbels was to die with his wife and children beside his beloved Führer. As the Russian forces approached Berlin, Hitler ordered Goebbels to leave the bunker with his family and save himself. The propaganda chief told Hitler that for the first time in his life, he would have to disobey him.

Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Goebbels, his wife, and all of his children joined him the following day.