Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

ReviewManvell and Fraenkel have produced...biographies of Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and the men who tried to kill Hitler in 1944....To the best of my knowledge there are no better biographies in existence. (_The New York Review of Books_ ) Product DescriptionJoseph Goebbels was possibly the most dangerous and intelligent member of the Nazi hierarchy, not excluding Hitler himself. Without Goebbels’ flair for propaganda and spectacular organization the Fuehrer might never have come to power. If Hitler was the Nazi genius of destructive evil, Goebbels was its constructive genius, for it was through his practical and intuitive understanding of the instruments of ‘public enlightenment’ that the dictatorship was built and maintained. As the founder of the Reich Chamber of Culture, the Gauleiter of Berlin and the architect of the complex machinery of modern totalitarian propaganda, Goebbels can be considered one of the most significantly evil and portentous figures of the twentieth century. A remarkable picture emerges of Goebbels’ mind as a schoolboy, student, lover, unsuccessful author and apprentice in political agitation. Interviews with his friends and family shed light on his character as a young man. This book charts the full trajectory of Goebbels’ career, showing him at the apex of his power, a master of oratory, a brilliant and cynical showman and a ruthless administrator. Doctor Goebbels also portrays the man at the end, in the Berlin Bunker, the most devoted of the Fuehrer’s henchmen, committing the last gesture of propaganda of which he was capable: the sacrifice of his life and that of his wife and six children.