Joseph Goebbels

October 29, 1897 – May 1, 1945

Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) was a German Nazi politician who was Gauleiter of Berlin and Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. One of Hitler's closest followers, he was an extreme antisemite who drove the regime's propaganda and persecution of Jews.

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Biography

Joseph Goebbels was born in Rheydt in the Rhineland in 1897. He studied at several German universities, including Bonn, Würzburg and Freiburg, and in 1922 earned a doctorate in philology from Heidelberg University with a thesis on a minor romantic dramatist, hoping to become a writer. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924 and worked with Gregor Strasser in its northern branch before becoming a devoted follower of Adolf Hitler.

Appointed Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926, he founded the newspaper Der Angriff and developed the party's propaganda techniques. In March 1933 he became Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, taking control of the press, radio, film and the arts. He drafted Hitler's decree for the April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses, spoke at the Berlin book burning in May, and in November 1938 released inflammatory material that set off the Kristallnacht pogrom.

A fanatical antisemite, he pressed for ever harsher persecution of Jews, up to their extermination. In his Sportpalast speech of February 1943 he called for total war, and in July 1944 Hitler made him Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, a post in which he had little success.

In April 1945 Goebbels moved with his family into Hitler's bunker in Berlin. Under Hitler's will he became chancellor after Hitler's suicide on 30 April; the next day he and his wife Magda killed themselves after poisoning their six children.