Paul Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician who was the Gauleiter (district leader) of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted acolytes, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.

Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a doctorate in philology from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in its northern branch. He was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Nazi Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. Topics for party propaganda included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, and (after the start of the Second World War) attempting to shape morale.

In 1943, Goebbels began to pressure Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Hitler finally appointed him as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on 23 July 1944, whereby Goebbels undertook largely unsuccessful measures to increase the number of people available for armaments manufacture and the Wehrmacht.

As the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children joined Hitler in Berlin. They moved into the underground Vorbunker, part of Hitler's underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler's will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; he served one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife committed suicide, after having poisoned their six children with a cyanide compound.

During childhood, Goebbels experienced ill health, which included a long bout of inflammation of the lungs. He had a deformed right foot that turned inwards, due to a congenital disorder. It was thicker and shorter than his left foot. Just prior to starting grammar school, he underwent an operation that failed to correct the problem. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg and walked with a limp. He was rejected for military service in World War I because of this deformity.

Goebbels was educated at a Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur (university entrance examination) in 1917. He was the top student of his class and was given the traditional honour to speak at the awards ceremony. His parents initially hoped that he would become a Catholic priest, which Goebbels seriously considered. He studied literature and history at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg, and Munich, aided by a scholarship from the Albertus Magnus Society. By this time Goebbels had begun to distance himself from the church

Goebbels was antisemitic from a young age. After joining the Nazi Party and meeting Hitler, his antisemitism grew and became more radical. He began to see the Jews as a destructive force with a negative impact on German society. After the Nazis seized control, he repeatedly urged Hitler to take action against the Jews. Despite his extreme antisemitism, Goebbels spoke of the "rubbish of race-materialism" and of the unnecessity of biological racism for the Nazi ideology. He also described Himmler's ideology as "in many regards, mad" and thought Alfred Rosenberg's theories were ridiculous.

The Nazi Party's goal was to remove Jews from German cultural and economic life, and eventually to remove them from the country altogether. In addition to his propaganda efforts, Goebbels actively promoted the persecution of the Jews through pogroms, legislation, and other actions. Discriminatory measures he instituted in Berlin in the early years of the regime included bans against their using public transport and requiring that Jewish shops be marked as such.

A major focus of Nazi propaganda was Hitler himself, who was glorified as a heroic and infallible leader and became the focus of a cult of personality. Much of this was spontaneous, but some was stage-managed as part of Goebbels' propaganda work. Adulation of Hitler was the focus of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his moves were carefully choreographed. The rally was the subject of the film Triumph of the Will, one of several Nazi propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl. It won the gold medal at the 1935 Venice Film Festival. At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels declared that "Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself."

Goebbels was involved in planning the staging of the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin. It was around this time that he met and started having an affair with the actress Lída Baarová, whom he continued to see until 1938

At Hitler's invitation, Goebbels spoke at party meetings in Munich and at the annual Party Congress, held in Weimar in 1926. For the following year's event, Goebbels was involved in the planning for the first time. He and Hitler arranged for the rally to be filmed. Receiving praise for doing well at these events led Goebbels to shape his political ideas to match Hitler's, and to admire and idolise him even more.

Like Hitler, Goebbels practised his public speaking skills in front of a mirror. Meetings were preceded by ceremonial marches and singing, and the venues were decorated with party banners. His entrance (almost always late) was timed for maximum emotional impact. Goebbels usually meticulously planned his speeches ahead of time, using pre-planned and choreographed inflection and gestures, but he was also able to improvise and adapt his presentation to make a good connection with his audience. He used loudspeakers, decorative flames, uniforms, and marches to attract attention to speeches.

Goebbels' tactic of using provocation to bring attention to the Nazi Party, along with violence at the public party meetings and demonstrations, led the Berlin police to ban the Nazi Party from the city on 5 May 1927. Violent incidents continued, including young Nazis randomly attacking Jews in the streets.

Joseph and Magda’s wedding and Magda (Nazi 1st lady)

Propganda Minister

The Reich Film Chamber, which all members of the film industry were required to join, was created in June 1933. Goebbels promoted the development of films with a Nazi slant, and ones that contained subliminal or overt propaganda messages.Under the auspices of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), created in September, Goebbels added additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre.

Goebbels was particularly interested in controlling the radio, which was then still a fairly new mass medium. Sometimes under protest from individual states (particularly Prussia, headed by Göring), Goebbels gained control of radio stations nationwide, and placed them under the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (German National Broadcasting Corporation) in July 1934. Manufacturers were urged by Goebbels to produce inexpensive home receivers, called Volksempfänger (people's receiver), and by 1938 nearly ten million sets had been sold and given away for free. Loudspeakers were placed in public areas, factories, and schools, so that important party broadcasts would be heard live by nearly all Germans

1934 Nuremberg rally, Lida Baarova and Lene Riefensthal filming “The triumph of the will”

In November 1938, the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was killed in Paris by the young Jewish man Herschel Grynszpan. In response, Goebbels arranged for inflammatory antisemitic material to be released by the press, and the result was the start of a pogrom. Jews were attacked and synagogues destroyed all over Germany. The situation was further inflamed by a speech Goebbels gave at a party meeting on the night of 8 November, where he obliquely called for party members to incite further violence against Jews while making it appear to be a spontaneous series of acts by the German people. At least a hundred Jews were killed, several hundred synagogues were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of Jewish shops were vandalised in an event called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Around 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The destruction stopped after a conference held on 12 November, where Göring pointed out that the destruction of Jewish property was in effect the destruction of German property since the intention was that it would all eventually be confiscated.

Goebbels continued his intensive antisemitic propaganda campaign that culminated in Hitler's 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech, which Goebbels helped to write:

“If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”!

The Propaganda Ministry took over the broadcasting facilities of conquered countries immediately after surrender, and began broadcasting prepared material using the existing announcers as a way to gain the trust of the citizens. Most aspects of the media, both domestically and in the conquered countries, were controlled by Goebbels and his department. The German Home Service, the Armed Forces Programme, and the German European Service were all rigorously controlled in everything from the information they were permitted to disseminate to the music they were allowed to play. Party rallies, speeches, and demonstrations continued; speeches were broadcast on the radio and short propaganda films were exhibited using 1,500 mobile film vans. Hitler made fewer public appearances and broadcasts as the war progressed, so Goebbels increasingly became the voice of the Nazi regime for the German people. From May 1940 he wrote frequent editorials that were published in Das Reich which were later read aloud over the radio. He found films to be his most effective propaganda medium, after radio. At his insistence, initially half the films made in wartime Germany were propaganda films (particularly on antisemitism) and war propaganda films (recounting both historical wars and current exploits of the Wehrmacht).

Goebbels became preoccupied with morale and the efforts of the people on the home front. He believed that the more the people at home were involved in the war effort, the better their morale would be. For example, he initiated a programme for the collection of winter clothing and ski equipment for troops on the eastern front

Goebbels pressured Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. After receiving an enthusiastic response to his speech of 30 January 1943 on the topic, Goebbels believed he had the support of the German people in his call for total war. His next speech, the Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943, was a passionate demand for his audience to commit to total war, which he presented as the only way to stop the Bolshevik onslaught and save the German people from destruction. The speech also had a strong antisemitic element and hinted at the extermination of the Jewish people that was already underway. The speech was presented live on radio and was filmed as well. During the live version of the speech, Goebbels accidentally begins to mention the "extermination" of the Jews; this is omitted in the published text of the speech.

After midnight on 29 April, with the Soviets advancing ever closer to the bunker complex, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the Führerbunker. Afterward, he hosted a modest wedding breakfast. Hitler then took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. Goebbels and Bormann were two of the witnesses.

In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, he appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, as Reich President; and Bormann as Party Minister. Goebbels wrote a postscript to the will stating that he would "categorically refuse" to obey Hitler's order to leave Berlin—as he put it, "the first time in my life" that he had not complied with Hitler's orders. He felt compelled to remain with Hitler "for reasons of humanity and personal loyalty". His wife and children would stay as well. They would end their lives "side by side with the Führer".

In the mid-afternoon of 30 April, Adolf Hitler shot himself. Goebbels was depressed, and said he would walk around the Chancellery garden until he was killed by the Russian shelling. Voss later recounted Goebbels as saying: "It is a great pity that such a man [Hitler] is not with us any longer. But there is nothing to be done. For us, everything is lost now and the only way out left for us is the one Hitler chose. I shall follow his example."

On the evening of 1 May, Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to inject his six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of a cyanide compound could be then crushed in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's later testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but Magda Goebbels and SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, administered the cyanide.

At around 20:30, Goebbels and Magda left the bunker and walked up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves.