the last hours of Joseph Goebbels, the head of Nazi propaganda

He was one of Adolf Hitler’s most loyal collaborators. It was nothing less than the voice of the Nazi regime and especially anti-Semitic propaganda. He didn’t want to live after the defeat. Joseph goebbels committed suicide on May 1, 1945, with his wife Magda. Before, he had killed his six children with cyanide.

“The world that succeeds the Führer in National Socialism is a world that is not worth living for,” the Nazi propaganda chief wrote in the letter he left before committing suicide.

His name is still synonymous with the darkest regime responsible for the Holocaust, 76 years after his death.

Born October 29, 1897 in Rheydt (North Rhine-Westphalia, near the Dutch border), he was the son of a Catholic family.

They were never rich and the boy always had a problem with his right foot that forced him from childhood to walk with braces.

As a young man, he studied philosophy and in 1922 obtained his doctorate. Then he started working as a journalist for the “Völkische Freiheit”, a nationalist magazine.

Goebbels joined the Nazi Party in 1928 at the same time as the Reichstag elections and in March 1933 Hitler appointed him Minister of Education and Propaganda.

Hate speech author

From there Goebbels became the man in Nazi Germany who controlled everything to do with propaganda, education or the media and was in the first anti-Semitic decisions, such as the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933.

Was always among the most radical of the Nazi regime and played a key role in organizing the Night of Broken Glass on November 9, 1938.

His massive anti-Jewish propaganda campaign was the basis of that night, Nazi militants attacked thousands of Jews, their synagogues and their properties. They took over 10,000 Jewish prisoners and killed 91 of them.

During World War II, he was always one of Hitler’s closest people.

He tried to uphold the fiction that Nazi Germany could win the war to the end, and until the last minute he continued to target the “enemies” of Nazism, primarily Jews and Bolsheviks.

His name was forever associated with the will of propaganda and communication of the hateful masses of totalitarian regimes.

The long journey of the body

Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. Immediately afterwards, the Goblins attempted to negotiate a peace deal with the Soviet Union separate from Moscow’s Western allies. But he did not even contact the Soviet military authorities already occupying Berlin.

On May 1, he committed suicide with his family. The few soldiers around him attempted, as in Hitler’s case, to burn his body, but they were unsuccessful because they had no gasoline.

On May 4 or 5, Goebbels’ remains were found by Soviet troops and they managed to identify him.

Then his remains and those of his family were transferred to a forest in Rathenow and buried. After digging them up and burying them in a military barracks, the Soviets finally decided in 1970 to burn them down. and scatter his ashes in the Elbe. They no longer wanted a place to serve as a pilgrimage for the neo-Nazis.

Radio messages

Propaganda and total control of public information in Nazi Germany enabled Goebbels to maintain a level of tension in the German population sufficient to support the Nazi war adventures and their anti-Semitic measures. But not too exaggerated to cause riots and an atmosphere of chaos.

Its propaganda was based on tools that were booming at the time, such as radio. He also had full control over the newspapers in circulation and the entire education system. Their slogans were simple, powerful and repetitive.

Radio was totally politicized and was the main tool for spreading propaganda and hatred. He also used cinema, theater, music or literature, but the main element was radio, of which Goebbels said: “It is the most modern and important instrument of mass influence that exist.”

The goal of all this talk was total control of the German population through angst and fear.

Brussels, special

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