Goebbels.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

An adroit and compelling biography of Hitler's propaganda minister and leading advocate of the extermination of the Jews. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Why another book on the master of propaganda for the Third Reich? According to Reuth, a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a number of years have passed since there has been a good biography on Goebbels. Furthermore, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, some additional new diaries of the former Nazi and other documentation have come to light. Reuth traces Goebbels's life from a strict, lower-middle class, Catholic family, through his education and eventually his captivation by Adolf Hitler. Reuth's writing style is lucid, which makes the complexities of the Nazi propaganda chief a little easier for the general reader to follow. Still, the student of Nazi Germany will learn nothing new from this book. For public libraries that have no works on Goebbels; in any case, the book should be augmented by the diaries: The Early Goebbels Diaries (1962), Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels (1978), and The Goebbels Diaries 1939-1941 (1983).-Dennis L. Noble, Eastern Montana Coll., Billings

Gilbert Taylor

Unlike his fuhrer, who assiduously erased most traces of his background, the reich minister for public enlightenment and propaganda spewed out torrents of verbiage from youthful days and preserved almost all of it. But it has been secret until recently, as were two other sources, his diaries from 1944 to 1945 and court proceedings against him in the 1920s, when he created the National Socialist force in Berlin from scratch, chiefly by instigating street battles that produced broken Communist heads and martyred brownshirts. With new material to work from, Reuth seizes the biographical opportunity to sketch a man of chillingly analytical, clear-sighted mendacity, a tragic figure only to the extent that his end, as a charred corpse in Berlin, was in such ignoble contrast to his origin. Since he was the hope of his devout Rhinelander family, his father spared no sacrifice for his son's education, which bent toward the literary studies in which he earned a Ph.D. But somewhere in his 20s--in his resentment at not being published and reduced to clerking in a bank--young Joseph became a radical socialist. All the more poignant the paternal query, quoted by Reuth: "Do you intend to take up a profession unsuitable for a Catholic?" Of course he did, and scored a critical success in creating the fuhrer myth of the 1930s, that Hitler was Providence's agent to redeem the Germans from their woes. As commander of German press and radio, who, words and lies aside, personally contributed to the Final Solution by making Berlin "Jew free," Goebbels isn't easy to sympathize with, but Reuth avoids easy indignation to present insights not just into the horror but also into the internal politics of fanatical Nazidom. A definitive account.