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Joseph Goebbels: The Propaganda Maestro

May 30, 2021
In modern times, we look back on the Nazi Third Reich and wonder how anyone could have followed Adolf Hitler when he was so clearly an evil dictator. This was all thanks to Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. He knew exactly how to manipulate the minds of a nation with fake news, Nazi-romanticized books, and

propaganda

films. Goebbels was solely responsible for brainwashing entire populations and destroying people caught in his web of lies. Today, in Biographies, he will learn how one man convinced millions of ordinary Germans to become loyal Nazis. Early life Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on October 29, 1897 in a small town outside Düsseldorf.
joseph goebbels the propaganda maestro
His father, Fritz, worked in a factory and his mother stayed at home to take care of him and his four other siblings. His family never had much money, but they still paid for him to go to a private, all-boys Roman Catholic high school. Goebbels was born with a disability in which the bone marrow in his feet never developed properly and he had clubfoot. His parents paid for an operation to correct the problem, but even with both feet pointing in the right direction, he still needed to wear a metal leg brace for the rest of his life.
joseph goebbels the propaganda maestro

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The operation stunted his growth and left one leg permanently shorter than the other, causing a permanent limp. He also had chronically inflamed lungs and fell ill frequently. He grew up very angry at the world and felt that life was unfair. He decided to devote much of his time and energy to reading books and getting good grades. His disability prevented him from performing military service during the First World War. He was able to obtain an academic scholarship and attended the University of Heidelberg. He remained in school for years, until he earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1921. At that time, he completely rejected the teachings of the Catholic Church.
joseph goebbels the propaganda maestro
He wrote about his personal ideas about how he thought the world should be and considered himself a great philosopher and thinker. Unfortunately for him, no one else agreed. He was very loud and outspoken, and he always tried to get noticed. Even then, he was anti-Semitic and many of his opinions were so hateful that his articles and books were rejected for publication. He decided to create his own publication to express his opinions, but very few people were interested in reading it. By all indications, he was a failed writer and an incredibly damaged little man. He made a little money tutoring and eventually sold some items, but other than that, he had little to no money to speak of.
joseph goebbels the propaganda maestro
All of this motivated him to join the Nazi Party in 1924. At that time, Germany was going through a tremendous financial depression and the Nazis promised that they would fix the country. With the Nazis, Goebbels finally found a home and a group of people who were actually willing to read his work. They thought he was excellent at creating pro-Nazi

propaganda

and was good enough to convince new members to join the party. His work helped get Adolf Hitler elected. When he came to power, Hitler appointed Goebbels Minister of Propaganda. Since he was unemployed at the time, this literally changed his life overnight.
Suddenly, his life took on meaning and he truly admired Adolf Hitler as his best friend and savior. Hitler charged Goebbels with the task of censoring any media that might have conflicted with Nazi ideals. He began to give the order to burn books that were written by certain authors. Some of the books Goebbels destroyed made a lot of sense, like the socialist philosophy of Karl Marx. However, some of the choices of banned authors seem to be a bit random and there is no logical explanation as to why Goebbels would want to erase them from history. This has led some people to believe that he wanted to destroy certain authors out of petty jealousy that they were better writers than him.
He was starting to know the taste of control and he loved it. Lights, camera, action In addition to censoring the media, Goebbels set out to create new content to replace it. Joseph Goebbels knew that one of the most powerful ways to understand the emotions of human beings was through cinema. The largest film studio in Berlin is called Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft or UFA for short. They were highly respected around the world for producing beautiful silent films like Metropolis in 1927. One of Goebbels' first orders of business was to take over the studio by force on behalf of the Nazi government.
Goebbels and Hitler were great film buffs, but they also made the decision to censor American films to the public. Adolf Hitler still had all the Hollywood stuff in his personal collection, but no one in the general population was allowed to see it. Joseph Goebbels set out to ensure that everyone working in the German film industry was loyal to Hitler. Any of the actors who refused to remove any Jewish people from their lives and join the Nazi party were blacklisted from working again. Many of them were even prevented from leaving the country, and some actors even chose to commit suicide.
Actresses from across Europe who auditioned for the prestigious UFA studio had no idea they were falling into a trap, and many of them signed multi-year contracts before the Nazis came to power. So while there were some actors who were Nazis, many of them were forced to participate in these films against their will. Goebbels set out to create German versions of some of America's biggest blockbusters. He also created films where the only goal was to brainwash people into believing in Nazi ideals. Some of them were clearly propaganda, like one called Hitler Youth Quex, but other films were so cleverly disguised that they convinced the German people to change their opinions to suit the needs of the Nazis.
For example, the 1941 film I Accuse was orchestrated to get the general population to agree with the Aktion T4 Program, which promoted the euthanasia of disabled and terminally ill people. The plot of Yo Acuso is about a doctor at the peak of his career. He marries a beautiful young woman, only to discover that she has been diagnosed with MS. Back then, treatment for MS was nothing like it is today and there is no cure for the disease. This means that the wife was suffering a very slow and painful death. She begged him to give her a lethal injection so she could get out of her misery.
He struggled with her decision, but ultimately assisted in her suicide. Much of the film takes place in a court of law where they are trying to decide if this man should be guilty of murdering her wife or if he was doing her a favor by killing her. The truth is that the film was very well written. Even today, anyone who watches the film may find themselves questioning their own morals, which is why it is considered one of the most dangerous propaganda films ever made. The film convinced people that assisted suicide would only help their friends and family who were suffering.
So, the Aktion T4 program was approved. Innocent people were taken from their homes and murdered, in the name of a perfect master race. This same type of brainwashing happened over and over again in the movies. Personal and social life The Nazi party not only changed Goebbels' career. He also helped her get into a relationship. After graduating from his all-boys school, he wasn't used to talking to girls. At age 34, he married a fellow Nazi named Magda in 1931. Hitler was his best man. In the eyes of the public, they seemed to have the perfect German marriage. They had several children together and lived in a huge enclosed compound in the woods outside Berlin.
However, Joseph Goebbels had a reputation for objectifying women and, as he was surrounded by beautiful actresses, he took full advantage of his position. According to the testimony of a woman named Anneliese Uhlig, she was given the leading role in one of the films that was going to be made at the UFA studios. Goebbels asked her if she wanted to go for a drive to talk about the film and instead took her directly to her compound. He offered her a drink and began to force himself on her. She started kicking and screaming and broke free of him.
He said that if she did not comply with his demands, he would ensure that she would never have a career in film. He decided to take a chance and ran out the door. But when she showed up for work the next day, there was an announcement that the film had been canceled and Anneliese Uhlig was blacklisted from working in Germany again. Joseph Goebbels did this with women regularly, but he actually fell in love with a woman named Lida Baarova. She was one of the few actresses who was actually a faithful Nazi, and even turned down opportunities to work in Hollywood to move to Germany.
He moved from Prague to Berlin in 1935 and married an actor named Gustav Frohlich, who divorced his Jewish wife to continue his successful acting career. According to Lida Baarova, she felt pressured into a relationship with Joseph Goebbels because she had heard all the stories about him ruining other actors' careers. She knew that if she said “no,” there was a strong possibility that she and her husband would never be able to work again. But she must have been a good actress, because he was convinced that they should run away together. Goebbels told his wife, Magda, about the affair and told her that he wanted a divorce.
Magda went directly to Adolf Hitler and told him that Lida Baarova was seducing him and trying to break up her marriage. Goebbels asked Hitler for permission to divorce her. He also wanted to move to Japan and give up his position of power. He was willing to leave everything to be with Lida. But even as one of the most powerful Nazis in the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels remained a prisoner of Hitler's power. Hitler refused to allow Goebbels to resign from his job because he was too valuable to the Nazi cause. The two men got into a shouting match that was witnessed and heard by dozens of people.
Hitler urged him to give his relationship with Magda a second chance. He insisted that they live together for another three months to try to repair the relationship. If they couldn't fix their marriage within three months, he could get a divorce. Hitler ordered Lida Baarova to leave Germany within 24 hours, giving her a one-way ticket to Prague. After this incident, Joseph Goebbels was no longer one of Hitler's favorite men, his wife hated him, and his mistress had disappeared. They no longer invited him to dinner at Hitler's house and they barely spoke. The other top Nazi commanders believed that Goebbels had weakened and that he was going mad.
They questioned his loyalty and he was no longer seen as the powerful man he once was. If he wanted to get back on good terms with Hitler, he would have to do something extreme. Inciting hatred against Jews Goebbels was desperate to regain Hitler's trust. Then, in 1939, he incited a mob by publishing a false story in the newspaper that a Jew had shot a German in Paris. He spoke in the streets, claiming that Jews were trying to destroy society. He led an angry mob to burn down a synagogue. That same year he traveled to Poland with a team of documentary filmmakers to show what life was like inside a Jewish ghetto.
The people who lived in the ghetto had sunken faces, wore rags, and were generally dirty and sick. We now know that this is because the Nazis forced them to live in inhumane conditions in the first place. However, Goebbels took this as an opportunity to compare them to animals, saying that they had chosen to live that way. He said they are less than human and need to be exterminated. This film was called The Eternal Jew and was released in 1940. In this film, he tried to say that the Jews were all criminals, and that if the Nazis ever lost the war, then they could even take over the world, forcing the Germans . people to live in misery.
He said: “Humanity would sink into eternal darkness, fall into a dull and primitive state, if the Jews won this war. They are the embodiment of that destructive force that in these terrible years has guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against everything we consider noble, beautiful and worth preserving. For that reason alone the Jews hate us. They despise our culture and learning, which they perceive as superior to their nomadic worldview. “They fear our economic and social norms, which leave no room for their parasitic impulses.” This documentary really scared the German people, who felt that the concentration camps were justified.
After visiting Auschwitz in person, Joseph Goebbels wrote that the death and torture of these prisoners were so gruesome that he did not even want to write the details in his private diary. He wrote: “It may be outrageous, but they really deserve it.” All his efforts to incite hatred against the Jewish people bore fruit and Adolf Hitler began to trust Joseph Goebbels once again. Their mutual hatred was enough to repair their friendship, but it was at the cost of millions of lives. At this point, Hitler began to confide in Joseph Goebbelsmore decisions in the government, and it had even more power than ever before.
Hitler stopped making so many public appearances and instead allowed Goebbels to speak on his behalf. He even gave him authority to declare war. In 1941, Joseph Goebbels announced on the radio that Germany would go to war with the Soviet Union. Goebbels did exactly the same thing he did when he filmed The Eternal Jew in Poland. He brought another documentary film crew to show Soviet prisoners who lived in the mud and looked half dead. He claimed that this is how the Russian people normally lived and that the Bolshevik party was controlled by Jews who were trying to take over the world.
He successfully convinced the German public that, by fighting Russia, they were fighting for their freedom. He stood in front of a crowd of thousands at a sports stadium in Berlin and said there needed to be a “total war.” He was greeted with thunderous applause. But, as you may already know, the German invasion of Russia is what led to his downfall. The Germans could not withstand the harsh winters and the United States had joined the Allied forces. Italy also switched allies, and its stronghold in World War II suddenly fell like dominoes. Descending into Madness Now, so far in this story you can probably tell that Joseph Goebbels was always a little crazy.
But after the invasion of the Soviet Union, his mental state increasingly fell apart. He encouraged old people and children to sacrifice their lives for the good of Germany, and baby-faced child soldiers were sent to war. He said that every man, woman and child should be willing to die for the country. According to Wilfred von Oven, a man who worked on Joseph Goebbels' staff, they were at a meeting when a bomb fell in the garden of his house. The glass in all the windows shattered. While all the other staff members ducked for cover, Joseph Goebbels didn't even flinch.
He simply cleaned the broken glass from his notes and continued reading his speech, as if nothing had happened. He somehow remained completely calm on the outside, while panic secretly tore him apart. At the end of the war, Hitler told Goebbels that he knew they were going to lose the war. He was preparing to go to his bunker, with plans to commit suicide. He appointed Goebbels as Germany's new chancellor and wanted him to stay and run the government once the Allies invaded. Goebbels was so devout that he refused to live without Hitler. He told his wife and all of his children to clean up, put on their Sunday best, and go to the Führer's bunker.
On April 30, Hitler committed suicide, leaving Goebbels as Germany's new chancellor. It's not a position he would hold for long. The next day, Goebbels and Magda poisoned their six children, before also ending their own lives.

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