Evil genius who loved luxury and lying for Hitler
A LIE can travel halfway round the world while the truth is still putting on i ts boots. The man who fulfilled the dictum was Herr Doktor Paul Josef Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda in Hitler’s Third Reich.
Through radio broadcasts, Goebbels spun his web of words to snare the mind of the Continent.
To help disseminate the odious Nazi message, he made cheap radio sets available i n their millions to families throughout Germany. As he proclaimed: ‘It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio.’
It was his relentless campaign to spread the National Socialist creed that encouraged millions to sign up as party members. His was the voice, his the brain, which made this entry possible in his own diary:
‘October 2, 1923: Potsdam. For six hours German Youth marches past the Fuhrer. They are our pride and joy. Always the same boys with the same faces.
‘The movement has already fashioned a uniform type, not manifested merely in thought and action, but also in f ace and figure.’
For the little sallow man with the thin and strident voice, the creature called a gnome with a club foot, was, in his perverse way, a genuine genius.
Hitler was the first man in German public life to use the idiom of the man in the street: Goebbels, a more intelligent and better educated personality, had something of the same gift for unconventional speech as Winston Churchill.
There were ‘ Goebbels-isms’ t hat were a s popular in Germany as ‘ Churchill-isms’ in the free world.
He once accused foreign correspondents ( whom he loathed for letting the Nazi cat out of the German bag) of ‘scraping the dirt from under their fingernails’ to make the stories they sought to send out of Berlin.
Goebbels was a rake: his private life was a scandal even in notoriously louche pre-Nazi Berlin.
He was a lover of luxury, and he had a fi l m made of his home. He had a quick and even flashing wit in debate, but he hated liberty. He was born in 1897, and joined the Nazis in 1922.
He i t was who guided his Fuhrer through the difficult e arl y days of t he party, preparing his speeches and even teaching him how to speak them: the Herr Doktor of Philosophy of Heidelberg correcting the grammar of the Austrian sloven.
The truth is that he was born a clever man and quite unscrupulously determined to capitalise his gifts.
He joined the Nazis because he preferred to be a big frog in a little puddle — and he thought the little Nazi puddle might grow to a German ocean.
Once t he Nazis were in power and Goebbels firmly installed in his official position, the propagandist began to dabble in international matters, smearing them with perfidy.
Hitler said, appointing the little Doktor from the Rhineland to be gauleiter of Berlin: ‘ Goebbels burns like a flame.’
But the flame Berlin knows now— and has known f or many weeks — is not the verbal flame of Goebbels, but the fire of destruction.