Goebbels - Proof That The Nazis Really Meant The ´Socialist´ In Their Title!

Peter Longerich, the author of previous works on the Holocaust, as well as a biography of Himmler, has now written the most comprehensive account we have of Goebbels’s life. Based heavily on the detailed diaries that Goebbels began to keep in the autumn of 1923 – 32 volumes in all – the biography presents the Nazi propaganda chief as a narcissistic personality constantly seeking recognition. Born in 1897 into a lower-middle-class family in the Catholic Rhineland, he was a talented but wayward student who completed a doctorate at Heidelberg on a minor figure from the German Romantic movement. He saw himself as a major writer, produced a string of unpublished works, and at the time he began his diary was an isolated, resentful figure under the sway of a fashionable cultural pessimism. Guardian.