The devil’s devoted disciple

It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day of a general election filled with Joseph Goebbels’s hallmarks: mendacity, media manipulation and the big lie.

Seventy years after the spectacular suicide of Goebbels and his wife Magda, and their murder of their six children, in the Berlin bunker, the ‘little doctor’ is still a byword for the black arts of political spin and politicians regularly accuse each other of telling fibs ‘worthy of Goebbels’.

The Nazi specialist Peter Longerich, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, offers a compelling chronicle not because he writes with sparkle — German historians rarely do that and no fewer than three translators don’t help the plodding style — but because his book is based on Goebbels’s own caustic words. For, evil and twisted though he was, Goebbels is our most important eyewitness to the Nazi era from the early days of the party’s struggle for power to the final Götterdämmerung in burning Berlin. His daily diaries — filleted and analysed by Longerich — give us an intimate, candid and cynical inside view of the Third Reich from its second chief creator.

Longerich’s central thesis is psychological rather than political. Goebbels had a narcissistic personality disorder — call him the ‘Nasty Nazi Narcissist’ — causing him to identify Hitler as the one who could help him achieve his deep and dark desire for power and acclaim ahead of any considerations of morality.

His unswerving adoration of Hitler, rather than his marriage or his numerous affairs, was the leitmotif of his life. Indeed, Longerich reveals that there were three people in the Goebbels ménage: the couple themselves, and the Führer — who was a permanent guest in their home, doted on their children and chastely loved Magda.