GOEBBELS: A SPIDER WHOSE WEB OF WORDS SNARED A CONTINENT

Life and death of ‘evil genius’ minister ‘Voice of the Nazis' faced the fate of a liar

The Prussian philosopher Ferdinand Lassalle declared a century ago that ‘the lie has become a european power’.

But it was not until the 1920s that this aphorism became a tragic truth fulfilled in one man: Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda in hitler’s Third Reich.

Through the power of the radio, Goebbels spun a web of words that ensnared the mind of a Continent. his was the voice, the brain, that had earlier galvanised his own country.

Take this entry from his diary: ‘Oct. 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 fashioned a uniform type, manifested in thought and action, face and figure.’

This sallow little man with a thin and strident voice — a club-footed gnome — was, in his perverse way, a genius.

hitler was the first man in German public life to use the idiom of the man in the street: Goebbels, more intelligent and better-educated, used both slang and high rhetoric at will.

he had something of the same gift for unconventional speech as Winston Churchill. Some ‘Goebbels-isms’ were as popular in Germany as ‘Churchillisms’ are in the free world. he once accused foreign correspondents (whom he loathed) of ‘scraping the dirt from under their fingernails’ to make the stories they sent out of Berlin.

Goebbels might be said to have modelled himself on the 18th-century British radical John Wilkes.

Like Wilkes he was a rake: his private life was a scandal even in pre-Nazi Berlin.

Like Wilkes he was a lover of luxury: he had a film made of his home.

Like Wilkes he was a man of personal courage — he was ‘gauleiter’ (a Nazi official) of Berlin when gauleiters were illegal: he faced the Communist quarter from a soap-box.

And like Wilkes, he was no mean journalist. But the difference between Goebbels and Wilkes was that one loved liberty and the other hated it.

Goebbels was born in 1897 and joined the Nazis in 1922. he guided his Fuhrer through the difficult early days of the party, preparing his speeches and teaching him how to deliver them: the man with a doctorate in philosophy from heidelberg correcting the grammar of the Austrian sloven.

he joined the Nazis because he preferred to be a big frog in a little puddle.

In the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934, he saw his great opponent in the party, Goering, vested with the executive power of the firing squad. he attached himself to hitler’s side and did not leave it until the purge was over.

Once the Nazis were in power and Goebbels was installed in his official position, he began to dabble in international matters, smearing them with his perfidy.

Goebbels was clever — yes: but he was not wise. The fate of the liar fell on him. After a little while, nobody outside Germany believed his canards.

even when he told the truth, he was not given credence. he had created out of the German nation 80,000,000 people that he could fool. But freedom

— of discussion and of thought — carries within itself a disinfectant against an atmosphere of falsehood.

hitler, some Germans said, was an orator to whom Cicero and Demosthenes must yield the palm. In return, Hitler said, appointing the little Doktor to be gauleiter of Berlin: ‘Goebbels burns like a flame.’

But the flame Berlin knows now — and has known for many weeks — is not the verbal flame of Goebbels but the fire of destruction the Germans brought down on their own heads.

PAUl Joseph Goebbels, born October 29, 1897, died May 1, 1945, aged 47.