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Joseph Goebbels

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1897-1945
German politician

  1. Introduction
  2. Stories
  3. Biographical summary
  4. See also
  5. Further reading
  6. References

1. Introduction

Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s chief propagandist, serving him devotedly for 19 years. He gained a doctorate in literature, intending to be a writer. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924 and was soon appointed leader of the Berlin section, then head of party propaganda. He targeted Churchill in the early 1940s before focussing more on the Russians as the war progressed. He moved into Hitler’s Berlin bunker complex in April 1945 and succeeded him as chancellor after Hitler’s suicide. The next day he and his wife Magda also committed suicide, taking their six children with them.

2. Stories

  • Goebbels was the academic member of the Nazi leadership.
  • Goebbels initially disagreed with some of Hitler’s views but was soon completely devoted to him.
  • Goebbels’ propaganda against Churchill changed over time, reflecting Churchill’s level of threat to Nazi goals.
  • Propaganda was not as tightly controlled in the UK as in Germany but was also significantly influenced by a key individual.
  • Goebbels was forbidden by Hitler from divorcing his wife Magda.
  • Magda’s stepfather was Jewish and died in Buchenwald concentration camp; her ex-husband was an industrialist whose descendants are still highly influential.
  • Goebbels was chancellor of Germany for 29 hours before committing suicide with Magda, after killing their six children.

Goebbels was the academic member of the Nazi leadership.

Goebbels (pronounced approximately GRR-bulls) began his university studies with an undergraduate degree in literature and history, completed while attending four different institutions. He ran out of funds in Bonn, was given free tuition in Freiburg, and received a loan from a Catholic charity which assisted him in Würzburg and Munich. He then scraped by financially while completing a doctorate on Wilhelm von Schütz, a minor writer from the Romantic era, at the University of Heidelberg, supervised by a Jewish professor.

His academic achievements were partly the consequence of a ‘foot complaint’,1 as he called it. He had lengthy treatments in his childhood for his in-turned right foot, of which the cause is not clear. He wrote in his diaries that the prognosis of a foot that was ‘lame for life’2 had a significant effect on his childhood. He became a loner but developed a love of books and excelled at his studies. It is commonly assumed that his later ambition and womanising were compensation for his ‘complaint’ and relatively short stature (5’5”; 1.65 metres) but they may have been more to with a narcissistic personality.

Not many of the senior Nazi leadership had university degrees. Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, wrote that Goebbels looked down on the others as non-intellectuals. They, in turn, had their own sense of superiority. Hermann Göring, for example, Germany’s most senior military officer, looked down on his colleagues as non-aristocrats. Heinrich Himmler considered himself special as head of the elite SS (Schutzstaffel) paramilitary.

The leadership was riven with factions, partly due to Hitler’s deliberate method of creating overlapping responsibilities. These antagonisms resulted in some punishing nicknames and insults. Goebbels was ‘the poison dwarf’; Göring was ‘Fatty’; Himmler was Heini (a diminutive, implying a scared little boy, as he never saw military action; it can also mean ‘idiot’); and von Ribbentrop was a ‘dirty little champagne salesman’ (from his occupation after World War I). Hermann Göring was also known as ‘Hermann Meier’ because he had said in a 1939 speech that if enemy aircraft reached Germany, his name would be ‘Meier’, a common German name, indicating his sense of aristocratic superiority. Behind his back, Hitler was known as ‘the corporal’, his lowly World War I rank.

Goebbels initially disagreed with some of Hitler’s views but was soon completely devoted to him.

Goebbels’ political ideas were nebulous at first, beginning with frustrated nationalism after World War I. He started to develop a socialist outlook as he read the works of Marx, Engels and others. He admired Hitler’s oratory and dedication to his beliefs, and in 1924 joined the NSDAP (translated as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, known as the ‘Nazi Party’ in English), aligning himself with the left-wing Gregor Strasser.

Goebbels attended a party gathering in 1926 during which Hitler denounced orthodox socialism, saying that it was a Jewish creation. He declared that Germany would not form an alliance with bolshevist Russia, nor would it expropriate German princes’ property, both being demands by many socialists at the time. Goebbels was shocked, writing in his diary that ‘I feel devastated. […] I no longer believe fully in Hitler.’3

Nevertheless, he realised how much support Hitler had and subjugated his inclinations to Hitler’s increasingly right-wing trajectory. Hitler invited him to give a speech in Munich two months later and embraced him afterwards. They met again the next day, after which Goebbels wrote, ‘I love him […] He has thought through everything. […] Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius.’4 After another meeting a few days later in Stuttgart, he wrote, ‘I believe he has taken me to his heart like no-one else’.5

He was appointed party leader of the Berlin section later that year, then head of propaganda for the whole party in 1930, replacing Strasser. When Hitler became chancellor (equivalent to prime minister) in 1933, he put Goebbels in charge of the new Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. As the war situation deteriorated in 1944, Goebbels was also give the role of ‘plenipotentiary for the total war effort’.

Three months after Hitler and Eva Braun moved into an underground shelter (the Führerbunker: ‘leader’s bunker’) in January 1945, Goebbels moved into the connecting shelter (the Vorbunker) with his wife and six children. After Hitler committed suicide on 30 April, Goebbels became chancellor, as stipulated in Hitler’s will. The next day he too committed suicide, fulfilling his postscript to Hitler’s will that he would die with the Führer.

Goebbels’ propaganda against Churchill changed over time, reflecting Churchill’s level of threat to Nazi goals.

In 1928, the Nazi Party gained only 2.6 percent of the national vote. From 1930 to 1945, Goebbels’ main objectives were to promote Hitler’s rise to power, support his policies and secure the country’s support for war efforts. At the same time, his remit was to undermine enemy foreign leaders. His domestic targets included Jews, Bolsheviks and moral and artistic ‘degenerates’. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and press chief Otto Dietrich sometimes had similar objectives, resulting in turf wars.

The nature and level of Goebbel’s efforts directed at Churchill varied according to the latter’s role and importance. In the 1930s, he was portrayed as a hostile agitator who fabricated numbers about German rearmament, and Goebbels highlighted his shipping losses in 1939 as first lord of the Admiralty. After Churchill became prime minister, Goebbels attacked him as a warmonger, liar, drunkard, plutocrat and criminal who was bringing destruction on his own people and on others. He was portrayed as being under the control of Jews and the USA (also controlled by Jews), and was deluded about winning the war. The British Empire was being squandered by his recklessness.

Goebbels went into remarkable detail in his invectives, including quotes from Churchill’s early books and criticisms of him by British public figures. He mocked Churchill’s statistics, derided his speeches (particularly his 1940 speech referring to ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat‘) and poured sarcasm on his leadership. He was usually careful to criticise Churchill as an individual and not the British people, an approach that Churchill (but not always his staff) also took with regards to the Nazi leadership and the German people. As the war progressed, Goebbels’ propaganda turned increasingly against Russia, attacking Jewish-controlled Bolshevism as the primary enemy, with Churchill and Roosevelt as its accomplices.

‘Final victory will be ours,’ stated Goebbels at the end of his final written piece, entitled Resistance at All Cost (1945). ‘It will come through tears and blood, but it will justify all the sacrifices we have made.’6 In the war of words, it is no small irony that Goebbels ended up paraphrasing Churchill.

Propaganda was not as tightly controlled in the UK as in Germany but was also significantly influenced by a key individual (Churchill).

World War II propaganda in the UK was coordinated primarily by the Ministry of Information which was recreated in 1939, the day after the UK’s declaration of war, having been dissolved at the end of World War I. Churchill’s wartime ministers of information were Duff Cooper and Brendan Bracken. Some aspects of propaganda were handled by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Foreign Office.

British communications were aimed at domestic morale-boosting and the undermining of enemies. They also sought to persuade the USA to enter the war. The covert British Security Co-ordination (‘BSC’) organisation was established by MI6 in New York in May 1940 for this purpose, primarily by providing pro-British and anti-Nazi stories to the media. Authors Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl were two of its members.

After Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, three secret UK entities were established with propaganda-related activities: the Foreign Office’s Department EH (named after Elizabeth House, the department’s base); MI6’s Section D (enemy subversion); and a War Office research department called ‘GS (R)’, investigating guerrilla warfare. Churchill prompted their merger to create the Special Operations Executive (‘SOE’) with a remit that included sabotage and support for anti-Axis resistance movements (see Colin Gubbins).

In 1941, the SOE’s propaganda section SO1 joined some staff from the Ministry of Information and the BBC to form the Political Warfare Executive (‘PWE’, known as the ‘Peewees’), reporting to the Foreign Office. Based at Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, it also had an office in the BBC’s Bush House in London. PWE activities included broadcasts from fake German radio stations (located in England), leaflet drops, rumour campaigns and loudspeaker broadcasts targeting demoralised soldiers.

In addition to creating government propaganda capacity, Churchill also pursued his own initiatives. Understanding the influence of the big screen, he co-opted director Alexander Korda and actors Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to make a Hollywood movie about plucky Britain taking on a foreign aggressor (That Hamilton Woman, 1941).

The Ministry of Information was not known for its efficiency or effectiveness, and it is notoriously difficult to evaluate the success of propaganda. In the end, Churchill was perhaps one of his own best weapons in the psychological war through his rousing speeches.

Goebbels was forbidden by Hitler from being divorced from his wife Magda.

Goebbels kept a record of many of his youthful female relationships in his diaries, starting with his first girlfriend in the final year of high school. At university he became involved with two sisters simultaneously, then with Anka Stahlherm, with whom he had a turbulent time, taking her more seriously than she did him. When she became engaged to someone else, he wrote a will with a note saying that he was going to depart from this world but did not attempt to do so.

In 1922 he met a schoolteacher called Else Janke. Their relationship developed until Else mentioned that her mother was Jewish. He wrote in his diary that the enchantment had been ruined but he wavered and it was not until 1927 that the relationship ended.

From 1928 he had numerous liaisons, including with Anka again, who was by then unhappily married. His rising position in the Nazi party brought him into contact with many women, including Magda Quandt, recently divorced. She was impressed by his oration, joined the party and became his administrative assistant, then girlfriend. Hitler also seemed to take a fancy to her, and Goebbels was consumed with jealousy and worry. Nevertheless, Magda and Goebbels married in 1931, with Hitler as a witness, and all seemed well. Goebbels even wrote sympathetically that Hitler was ‘very lonely. Has no luck with women.’7

Hitler already knew Eva Braun at this point, but their close relationship did not begin until a year later. Hitler would not permit the relationship to be known about publicly, and he refused to marry until just before their suicides, presenting the image of an elusive bachelor who was devoted only to his country.

Goebbels was not faithful; nor was Magda. When he became infatuated with Lída Baarová, a Czech actress, Magda went to Hitler to explain that she was planning to get divorced, but Hitler opposed this and insisted to Goebbels that the affair must end. A high-profile divorce involving the proxy First Lady, as Magda had become, would not do. Hitler lent the couple a cottage for a ‘second honeymoon’ and they remained married, although not particularly happily, until their premature deaths.

Magda’s stepfather was Jewish and died in Buchenwald concentration camp; her ex-husband was an industrialist whose descendants are still highly influential.

Magdalena (‘Magda’) Ritschel was born in Berlin in 1901, a few months before her parents married, but they divorced when she was three. Around four years later, her mother Auguste married Richard Friedländer, a wealthy Jewish businessman living in Brussels, who adopted Magda and gave her his family name. She had a good relationship with her adoptive father, but her mother divorced again in 1914, shortly after relocating to Berlin at the beginning of World War I.

When she was 18, she met 37-year old industrialist Günther Quandt who proposed to her. She accepted but was obliged to change her maiden name from Jewish-related Friedländer back to Ritschel for the marriage. They had a son, Harald, in 1921, but the marriage was unhappy, with Quandt being focussed on his work. Magda had an affair with a student and the couple divorced in 1929 with a generous settlement for Magda, perhaps assisted by some incriminating extra-marital love letters to Quandt, found by Magda.

The identity of the student has never been proven. Some have argued that it was Magda’s Jewish friend Victor (later Haim) Arlosoroff who subsequently moved to Palestine and became a Zionist leader. This has been extended fancifully to claim that Arlosoroff’s unexplained assassination on a Tel Aviv beach in 1933 was commissioned by Goebbels to eliminate his wife’s Jewish past.

Magda’s stepfather Richard Friedländer was transported to Buchenwald concentration camp in central Germany in 1938. Family appeals to Magda and Goebbels were ignored and he died there in 1939. In 2016, it was reported that Friedländer’s recently-discovered Berlin residence card states that Magda was his biological daughter, although this relationship is unproven.

Magda’s ex-husband Günther Quandt joined the Nazi Party in 1933, four years after divorce. Hitler gave him and other cooperative industrialists the title Wehrwirtschaftsführer (‘leader of the armament economy’). He was interned after the war and released in 1948. His sons Herbert (by his first wife) and Harald (by Magda) extended his business, which continues today through their children. In 2019 Bloomberg listed the Quandts as the eighth wealthiest family in the world with a net worth of around US$43 billion (£30 billion), including a large stake in BMW.

Goebbels was chancellor of Germany for 29 hours before committing suicide with Magda, after killing their six children.

Magda and Goebbels had five girls and one boy, all with names beginning with ‘H’, in honour of Hitler. Magda also had at least three miscarriages. In 1939, she was the first person to be presented the Cross of Honour of the German Mother, which came in three versions: gold for having produced eight children; silver for six; and bronze for four. Having had a seventh child, Harald, from her first marriage, she was one short of a gold.

Goebbels said in a radio address in February 1945 that a war defeat would mean that life would be ‘not worth living, either for myself or for my children’.8 Three days before their suicides on 1 May 1945, Magda and Goebbels sent letters to Harald, telling him of their intention to end their own lives and those of his half-siblings.

A few hours after Hitler’s death on 30 April 1945, Goebbels, as the new chancellor, wrote to the Soviet commander-in-chief, proposing a ceasefire and peace negotiations. The message was delivered across the front line (now only a few hundred metres away) early the next day and was communicated to Stalin but was promptly rejected.

In the evening, Magda dressed her children in white nightclothes and arranged for an SS dentist to render them unconscious with a morphine injection. Each then had a cyanide tablet crushed in their mouth, either by Hitler’s physician or by Magda. The eldest was twelve; the youngest was four.

At 8.30 p.m. Goebbels and Magda came out of their room. Goebbels calmly put on his coat, hat and gloves and they left the bunker for the Chancellery garden. Shortly afterwards, Hitler’s adjutant Günther Schwägermann followed them into the garden and found them lying still, self-poisoned. As previously instructed by Goebbels, Schwägermann arranged to have the bodies shot. They were then burned using petrol. The bodies of the Goebbels family underwent the same multiple reburials and eventual cremation as Hitler and Eva Braun (see Adolf Hitler). Like Hitler, their ashes were scattered on the river Biederitz in eastern Germany.

3. Biographical summary

OccupationPropagandist, politician
CountryGermany
CareerUnsuccessful writer (1922-23). Tutor and bank clerk (1923). Joined Nazi party (1924). Leader of Berlin section (1926-45). Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (1933-45). Plenipotentiary for Total War (1944-45). Chancellor of Germany for 29 hours (30 April-1 May 1945).
Born1897 in Rheydt, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire (23 years younger than Churchill)
FatherFriedrich ‘Fritz’ Goebbels (1867-1929), factory clerk
MotherKatharina Odenhausen (1869-1953), blacksmith’s daughter
SiblingsFourth of six children:
1. Konrad (1893-1949); publisher; jailed in 1948 for anti-Semitic editorial policy; died aged 56
2. Hans (1895-1947); insurance company manager then Nazi officer; died in French internment camp
3. Maria (1896-1896); died in infancy
4. Paul Joseph (1897-1945)
5. Elisabeth (1901-1915); died age 14 from tuberculosis
6. Maria (1910-1949); married Max W. Kimmich, propaganda film director
EducationUniversities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg and Munich (undergraduate); Heidelberg (doctorate); literature
SpouseMagdalena ‘Magda’ Ritschel (1901-1945), m. 1931 until their joint deaths in 1945; her first marriage was to Günther Quandt, industrialist (1881-1954), m. 1921, div. 1929; illegitimate daughter of Oskar Ritschel, building contractor, and Auguste Behrend, housemaid; adopted by Jewish stepfather Richard Friedländer who died at Buchenwald in 1939
RelationshipsNumerous before and during marriage including Lída Baarová, Czech actress; Magda had affairs with Kurt Lüdecke (Nazi fundraiser) and Karl Hanke (Nazi leader; head of SS in final days of war)
ChildrenMagda’s first child was with Quandt: Harald (1921-1967). Five daughters and a son, all killed by parents on 1 May 1945:
1. Helga (1932-1945), died age 12
2. Hildegard ‘Hilde’ (1934-1945), died age 11
3. Helmut (1935-1945), died age nine
4. Holdine ‘Holde’ (1937-1945), died age eight
5. Hedwig ‘Hedda’ (1938-1945), died age six
6. Heidrun ‘Heide’ (1940-1945), died aged four
Died1945 in Berlin, Germany (20 years before Churchill); suicide, aged 47
Resting placeBurned in Chancellery garden near Führerbunker; charred remains buried by the Soviets in Magdeberg, East Germany; exhumed in 1970, burned again and ashes scattered on River Biederitz in eastern Germany
NicknamesThe Poison Dwarf; the Nazi megaphone; the Doctor; Mahatma Propagandhi; the Ram (for sexual appetite)
Height5’5” (1.65m)
Time magazineFront cover: 1933

4. See also

Nazi leadership

  • Hitler, Adolf

Fascism

  • Mussolini, Benito
  • UK fascist groups

Nationalists who sought Nazi support

  • Al-Gaylani, Rashid Ali (Iraq)
  • Al-Husseini, Amin (Palestine)
  • Bose, Subhas Chandra (India)

UK propaganda and subversive operations

  • Bracken, Brendan (minister of information)
  • Cooper, Duff (minister of information)
  • Gubbins, Colin (head of Special Operations Executive)
  • Korda, Alexander (film director)
  • Leigh, Vivien (actress)

Churchill controversies

  • Anti-appeasement
  • Lifestyle and health
  • Warmongering

5. Further reading

Goebbels

  • Fraenkel, Heinrich, and Roger Manvell, Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death (Frontline, 2010)
  • Longerich, Peter, Goebbels: A Biography, trans. by Alan Bance, Jeremy Noakes, and Lesley Sharpe (Random House, 2015)

Hitler’s inner circle and Nazi wives

  • Görtemaker, Heike B., Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, trans. by Damion Searls (Penguin Books Limited, 2011)
  • Klabunde, Anja, Magda Goebbels, trans. by Shaun Whiteside (Little, Brown, 2002)
  • Knopp, Guido, Hitler’s Henchmen (History Press, 2016)
  • Read, Anthony, The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle (W.W. Norton, 2004)
  • Wyllie, James, Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler’s Germany (History Press, 2019)

World War II propaganda

  • Garnett, David, The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive, 1939-1945 (St Ermin’s Press, 2002)
  • Kallis, Aristotle, Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2005)
  • Rankin, Nicholas, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914-1945 (Faber & Faber, 2008)
  • Welch, David, World War II Propaganda: Analyzing the Art of Persuasion during Wartime (ABC-CLIO, 2017)

Nazi Germany

  • Caplan, Jane, Nazi Germany: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019)

6. References

1. Peter Longerich, Goebbels: A Biography, trans. by Alan Bance, Jeremy Noakes, and Lesley Sharpe (Random House, 2015), p. 5.

2. Longerich, p. 5.

3. Longerich, p. 66.

4. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. by Elke Fröhlich (Saur, 2005), I.1, pp. 172–73. (13 April 1926)

5. Goebbels, I.1, p. 175. (19 April 1926)

6. Joseph Goebbels, ‘Resistance at Any Price’, German Propaganda Archive – Calvin University, 1945 <https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb48.htm>.

7. Longerich, p. 221.

8. Longerich, p. x.