Goebbels: Nazi Master of Illusion

Goebbels: Nazi Master of Illusion

Daniela Ozacky Stern

Published by Daniela Ozacky Stern, 2022.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

GOEBBELS: NAZI MASTER OF ILLUSION

First edition. February 28, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 Daniela Ozacky Stern.

ISBN: 978-9655999020

Written by Daniela Ozacky Stern.

The book is fascinating and innovative…I read it eagerly in one breath.

— Yitzchak Herzog, President of Israel

In-depth research—describing the power of the most fanatical, monstrous, and massive anti-semitic propaganda the world has ever known. A must read.

— Maya Gorodecky, Refusenik 

It provides a lot of answers—even to those who experienced the horror in the flesh.

— Abraham Vered, Survivor of Auschwitz 

Hopefully it will be read by those who do not yet understand the power of words.

— Reuven Miran, Author and Publisher

The author describes the dark figure and the distorted personality of Joseph Goebbels, an agitator with oral rhetorical ability.

 — Prof. Arie Naor

I was extremely impressed and overwhelmed of the depth of research. It’s written in a way that allures the reader.

— Eliyahu Yakir, Holocaust Survivor from Poland 

An amazing study of the most influential figure in Nazi Germany. A masterpiece worthy of praise.

—Yossi Ahimeir, Journalist and Publisher

Copyright © 2022 by Daniela Ozacky Stern

Lazar Institute for the Research of WWII and the Holocaust, Tel Aviv

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

For more information, address:

www.lazar-institute.org

First paperback edition in English 2022

Cover design by Rob Allen (n23art)

Book design by Allan Ytac

Cover photos by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem Photos Archive

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022902362

ISBN 978-965-599-901-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-965-599-902-0 (ebook)

www.danielaozacky.com

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Legacy of Nihilistic Pessimism in Germany

Chapter One: The Irreplaceable Joseph Goebbels

Chapter Two: Nazi Propaganda in the Face of Doom

Chapter Three: Der Untergang

Chapter Four: Final Triumph versus Final Solution

Epilogue

Timeline of the Life of Joseph Goebbels

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Preface

Many Germans saw the Nazi movement in its formative stage as a South German movement, lacking sophistication and intellectual depth, a movement that held meetings in beer halls, a movement assembled from a rabble of frustrated men, including veterans who had not adjusted to civilian life after their return from the Great War. They would sit around pub tables and discuss their problems and the disasters that had overtaken Germany. In gatherings held at the Hofbräuhaus, one of the breweries in Munich, Adolf Hitler would deliver energetic, sweeping speeches. In February 1920, he introduced a new movement, National-Socialism, aimed at fighting against those responsible for Germany’s defeat during the war. He referred obviously to Jews, Communists, Democrats, and those who had signed the Treaty of Versailles.

Supporters flocked to Hitler’s side, including one of the figures who would later be at the center of the transformation of the nascent Nazi party into a general German movement that appealed to the masses. This was Joseph Goebbels, a young intellectual and a native Rhinelander, a scholar well-versed in philosophy, political theory, history, and literature. Because what was Nazism until Goebbels influenced it?,¹ asked British historian Trevor-Roper, as Goebbels conquered Berlin, becoming the Gauleiter (head of the party district) when he was only 29 years old, and granting Berlin its power as the capital of the National-Socialist Reich instead of Munich —the party’s birthplace. Goebbels was the man who planned and arranged the conventions and large parades that drew the German public to the party. He also created the Führer Myth, which granted Hitler a divine nature, a ruler assigned from on high, and he saw this as his greatest propaganda achievement.

A central question in the historiography of World War II and Holocaust research that has gone unanswered is how the leaders of the Nazi regime managed to sweep so many people up with them? Furthermore, after defeats and disasters, bombings, and sacrifices, how were those same followers dragged into oblivion with their leaders, especially during the last year of the war?

That issue stands at the heart of this book. The foundational assumption is that one of these Nazi leaders, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Dr. Goebbels, caused this. He managed to pull the German masses together to support goals he presented before them, and when they stood at a dramatic turning point during the war, they continued to blindly follow him to their ruin.

Goebbels was a complicated man with a multifaceted personality. He kept diaries for over twenty years, from 1923 to his final days in the bunker in bombed-out Berlin, in April 1945.² He began writing diaries when he was young and anonymous, but his hobby became a true obsession when he served under Hitler’s command.³ He dedicated about an hour every day to writing in them. For years he would write his diaries himself, but a short time before Operation Barbarossa—the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941—and throughout the years of the war, he began dictating them. Thus, every morning upon his arrival at his office, before the staff meetings of the Ministry of Propaganda, which he led, Goebbels would memorialize his impressions.

Every day of the war he would document in his diary the events of the previous day, under the headline: Gestern: Militärische Lage (The Previous Day: Military Status). Goebbels believed that my diaries may be all that is left of my life’s work. It will be my legacy to my children. He believed these documents would one day be a rich source of information to describe the history of the Nazi movement. He likewise planned to retire from politics at the end of the war and dedicate himself to historical research—to be the Chief Historian of the Third Reich.

After the conquest of Germany and the death of Goebbels, his diaries were taken to the Soviet Union, and only in the spring of 1992, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the opening of the Soviet archives, were they made available to historians. The historian Elka Fröhlich deciphered and edited the diaries, with funding from the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and the Federal Archive in Koblenz.

The importance of Goebbels’s diaries lies in their providing World War II historians with a complete and extensive personal record, written as the events were taking place, by a man who belonged to the elite of the Nazi party and was close to Hitler. Other individuals in the Nazi elite wrote as well. Some wrote memoirs, others wrote fragmented impressions. Among them were Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments, who wrote his famous memoir Inside the Third Reich.⁴ The unique nature of Goebbels’s diaries is their continuity and the light they shine on the internal events and the relationships around Hitler throughout all the years of the war.

Diary writing was a literary genre Goebbels was particularly fond of, and he even used it in the first novel he published, in 1929—Michael, and in publishing the book From the Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery, which describes the sixteen months preceding the Nazi ascent to power.⁵ The latter book is finish with an expression of hope for Germany’s good fortune under Hitler’s leadership:

We sit together until dawn.

The long night has come to its end.

The sun shines again over Germany!⁶

From 1934, the year this book was published, onward Goebbels ceased referring to Hitler by name or his nickname at the time, Chef, in his personal diaries, and made sure to use the title Der Führer. This epithet—the Führer—was set as the formal manner of addressing Hitler at the end of 1931. Goebbels insisted that the party members only refer to their leader using that title, to which he added a pseudo-religious meaning. He was also responsible for the popular greeting Heil Hitler, which German public workers were obligated to use. Germany is Hitler and Hitler is Germany was an additional propaganda slogan from Goebbels’s stable.⁷

Joseph Goebbels was a brilliant propagandist who decisively contributed to the success of Nazism. He understood that entertainment was the best propaganda and that it had to be provided to the German people specifically in moments of crisis. Even terrifying propaganda, of incitement and cruel attacks on those he defined as enemies of Germany, was no less than a weapons in the critical moments of the war. In 1926, after having been present at a performance about the Prussian general August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, by German playwright Wolfgang Goetz,⁸ he declared he would never forget a line from the play: God gives you goals, and you must not be concerned as to what they serve. Goebbels’s goals in leading the Third Reich were clear, and he knew exactly how to achieve them to their fullest.

From the moment he joined the Nazi party until his death, Joseph Goebbels tied his fate to Hitler’s, and was in fact a full partner in leading Germany during the war. He knew that Hitler’s success was intrinsically woven into his own. Goebbels’s decisive role in leading the Third Reich is especially apparent during the last year of the war, when Nazi Germany was facing defeat. Then, more than ever, his propagandist talent was shown as a force that motivated the Nazi regime and army, trying to attain the coveted victory, even when the situation seemed hopeless. Because of events at the front and the defeats the Germans suffered, the Nazi’s spent the last year of the war accelerating the extermination of the Jews, in what seemed like a race against time. Here too, Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda played a decisive role.

This book will focus on the last year of World War II, which was also the last year of Goebbels’s life. The period discussed stretches from May 1944, when nearly half a million Hungarian Jews were sent to be exterminated in Auschwitz, to May 1, 1945, the day Magda and Joseph Goebbels committed suicide, taking with them their six children, the day after their admired leader, Adolf Hitler, committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin. One of the notes in Goebbels’s diary, written while in the bunker with Hitler as the Berlin he loved so much was being bombed into oblivion, is written with melancholy words that express despair and an acceptance of impending doom:

The evenings pass now always full of work,

but also full of worry…

We must not hope that the nightly, nerve racking, air raids

will end in the capital of the Reich.⁹

Examples from the Goebbels diary.

Institut für Zeitgeschichte München–Berlin

Introduction

The Legacy of Nihilistic Pessimism in Germany

In the prelude to his book How do Wars End? Bernd Wegner notes that the questions of why and how wars break out have been investigated much more thoroughly than the factors that bring about their ends. ¹⁰ While recent years have seen the publication of many important books that deal with the last years of World War II, it seems that little attention has been paid to a unique situation in the last year of the war. By this we mean the combination of the feeling of defeat and doom that the German Nazi regime experienced and the continued—and accelerating—annihilation of the Jews. This book will attempt to understand the connection between these two processes that might seem to contradict each other.

The Romantic movement and many of the European neo-mystic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rebelled against modernism and looked back to earlier times as utopian. Part of this involved what we might call irrational echelons, hierarchies involving the individual and the state. With the rise of nationalism, the nation was presented as a kind of supreme actuality that took precedence over the individual. The nation was perceived as a historical, cultural, and biological unit in which the individual was only a part of the greater organism. Thus, the future and welfare of the nation became the supreme value. At the same time, a culture of pessimism and restlessness developed throughout Europe—and Germany—peaking after the defeat of World War I. The Great War reminded the cultural world that, despite progress and the Enlightenment and the conquest of distant colonies, there was still a deep affinity to barbarism within the heart of Europe. The sight of the wounded, the crippled, and the shell-shocked walking through the streets of the great European cities, after the World War contributed to an atmosphere of decline.

But in Germany, there were also those who produced a new and attractive worldview out of the Great War, one that glorified battle and warfare, in which masculinity and brute strength reached their highest expressions and where blood and sacrifice had an added mystical value. According to this worldview, a heroic death in battle was more valuable than life itself.