Goebbels was born in Rheydt, in the Rhine district, into a poor and pious Catholic family. Born with a clubfoot, he did not serve in the army in World War I; instead, he studied at the University of Heidelberg and earned a doctorate in literature and philosophy. After failing in his attempts to become a writer, Goebbels found ample room for his talents as a propagandist and speaker for the Nazi party, which he joined in 1924. At first he worked together with Gregor Strasser, a rival of Adolf Hitler, but before long he became one of Hitler's most ardent admirers and in 1926 was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin, his assignment being to win over the capital for the party. In 1928 he was elected to the Reichstag. Two years later he was also appointed the party's chief of propaganda, and it was he who ran the Nazis' stormy election campaigns from 1930 to 1933. On March 13, 1933, soon after Hitler's accession to power, Goebbels was appointed minister of propaganda and public information. He imposed Nazification upon the country's artistic and cultural life, working through the branches of the ministry that he headed. He controlled the media (although he had to contend with some rivals in that regard), and it was at his prompting that "un-German" books were burned on May 10, 1933. Goebbels was also one of the creators of the "Fuehrer" myth, an important element in the Nazis' successful bid for the support of the masses. By the time the Nazi regime was firmly established Goebbels's position was weakened and he also lost some of his standing in Hitler's eyes. Once the political forces that had opposed the Nazis were destroyed, Goebbels no longer had an "enemy" to fight (except for the Jewish "enemy"), and Hitler was angered by the frequent crises in Goebbels's marital life, fearing that they might cause damage to the party's image. When the war broke out, Goebbels assumed a key role in psychological warfare (although in that field, too, he had rivals), and when the situation on the fronts took a turn for the worse, he again played a central part in the leadership. His ties with Hitler resumed their closeness, although the feelers that he put out to bring the war to a "political end" were disregarded, as, for a long while, was his demand for the "totalisation" of the war. It was only in July 1944 that he was appointed to the coveted task of having responsibility for the total mobilisation of the population for the war effort. When Hitler put an end to his life in the besieged capital, Goebbels refused to accept the post of Reich chancellor, to which he was appointed in Hitler's will. On May 1, 1945, on the morrow of Hitler's suicide, Goebbels and his wife, Magda, followed Hitler's example and also committed suicide in the Fuehrer bunker, after first ordering the killing of their six children, aged four to twelve. Goebbels was the father of modern propaganda in a totalitarian state (a term that he coined), in which he made use of every available means. The propaganda he spread was remarkably replete with defamation, libels, and lies; he was convinced that people would believe the lies if only they were repeated often enough, and the bigger the lie, the better chance it had of being believed. Goebbels's propaganda always incited hate against some enemy. He was a radical and fanatic anti-Semite, but his hatred of Jews was also based on utilitarian considerations of exploiting anti-Semitism for the furthering of his propaganda aims. Goebbels was relentless in depicting "the Jew" as an abominable creature and the principal enemy of the German people. It was Goebbels who conceived the idea of the kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, and it was he who gave the event its flippant designation. Following these pogroms, he drastically reduced organised Jewish activities and freedom of movement in the sphere that he controlled. Once the war had broken out, the ministry he headed launched a concerted effort designed to aggravate living conditions for the Jews of Berlin. The first deportations of Berlin Jews to the Lodz ghetto, in October 1941, were carried out to fulfil an express promise that Goebbels had given to Hitler, to make Berlin judenrein ("cleansed of Jews") as soon as possible. In pursuit of this aim, Goebbels always kept in touch with Hitler and with the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office; RSHA). His diary contains specific mention of the destruction of the Jews; in an entry that he made in May 1943, when the extermination operation in Poland was at its height, Goebbels stated: 'The nations that were the first to reveal the true face of the Jew will be the ones that will take the Jew's place in ruling the world.' In the final stage of the war, in April 1945,Goebbels and his family were in Hitler's bunker in Berlin. When the coming defeat was clear, Goebbels shot his children and wife and then himself.
