The book burnings were staged as a cleansing by fire, a ritual in the service of Nazi ideology. Goebbels used spectacle and pageantry to dazzling effect—the swastika banners, the flames, the nighttime marching. With his incendiary speech, he gave the racist act a government seal of approval. He ordered the film of the event to be shown in cinemas nationwide.
His goal was to turn the entire nation against the Jews. Propaganda is simply selling a political message and selling it hard until people buy it. The harder the thing you’re trying to sell, the better the propaganda has to be. Buy us, the Nazi party, and we will fix the economy.
Buy us, and we will get rid of the Jews. But who was this man who became Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda? In 1924, Joseph Goebbels was a 27-year-old PhD and failed author stuck in dead-end jobs. Germany’s economy was in ruins, and like many others, he was looking for someone to blame.
He was depressed, directionless, and became entranced by Adolf Hitler. He started reading anti-Semitic tracts and began to see Hitler almost as a religious savior. He wrote in his diary: “We need a firm hand in Germany. Throw out the Jews who refuse to become real Germans.
Give them a good beating too. ”
Goebbels realized Hitler was the answer to Germany’s problems. He joined the Nazi Party early and became a skilled speechwriter and powerful public speaker. In 1926, Hitler sent him to Berlin to lead the Nazi cause.
Goebbels began peddling propaganda, printing leaflets, and mounting an information war against the same old enemies: communists and Jews. It was the beginning of an unprecedented campaign of hate that would soon engulf Germany and the world. Today, that hate is echoing again. In Berlin, far-right groups are using internet propaganda to spread fear and misinformation, targeting migrants and asylum seekers.
Jörg Braunsdorf, who owns a left-leaning bookstore, fears Germany may be slipping back toward fascism. Groups in the local community are organizing counter-protests against neo-Nazi demonstrations, and I’ve been invited to observe one of these counter-marches. In the late 1920s, Goebbels organized similar marches to push the Nazis into power. The global depression following the 1929 stock market crash gave him the perfect conditions to exploit.
By 1933, Hitler was Chancellor, and Goebbels, as his Propaganda Minister, moved to control newspapers, radio, and film production. Anti-Semitism became official government policy. In the spring of that year, Goebbels took the podium before a massive Berlin crowd, and his speech sparked a wave of vandalism against Jewish businesses. Graffiti became a cheap, easy tool for spreading hate.
It’s a tool making a comeback. Graffiti artist Ibo Omari took me to a children’s playground where someone had painted a swastika just two years ago. It was enormous—over a meter wide—in a place full of families and kids. Ibo said it was the first swastika he’d personally seen in over 25 years.
Its sudden reappearance wasn’t a coincidence. That week, the two best-selling books in Germany were a racist tract arguing that intelligence is genetic, and a newly corrected edition of Mein Kampf. “If you see them and think it’s just one idiot,” Ibo told me, “but out of one idiot comes two, then four, then eight, and suddenly they have a party and get voted in. ”
Since then, Ibo has painted over dozens of swastikas and other Nazi symbols.
It’s an eerie reminder of the 1930s, when Goebbels’ propaganda campaign made Nazi ideology inescapable. Of all the mediums Goebbels obsessed over, film was his favorite. He made hundreds of propaganda films, sometimes personally overseeing their production. I met with documentarian Alexa Karolinski, a Jewish woman who grew up in Germany with Holocaust survivors as grandparents, to screen one of his never-released films.
The film was shot in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto in 1942. It showed Jewish policemen mistreating other Jews, designed to portray them as a subhuman infestation. But we noticed something off: the same boy appeared in two different shots, getting up twice. The film was staged.
A woman in a cream-colored trench coat stood out sharply against the gray crowd. It was visual trickery—the kind of manipulation we now call fake news. The public in the 1940s wasn’t used to mass media and wasn’t sophisticated enough to separate truth from fiction. Fiction and reality were cleverly blurred.
The films reinforced every stereotype Goebbels had been peddling for years: Jews bargaining, Jews up to no good, Jews weak and sheepish. “The consequence of being part of the Jewish world conspiracy is that this is how you end up,” Alexa said. The propaganda was absolutely vital for the Nazis. Without it, their grip on power would have been far weaker.
My experience dissecting Goebbels’ techniques was disturbing. But nothing compared to seeing the result of believing that propaganda firsthand. On the anniversary of Reunification Day, I attended Jörg’s counter-protest. Hundreds of counter-protesters stood behind barricades, dozens of police in riot gear lined the streets, and an armored vehicle rolled by.
The tension was thick. Then the far-right march arrived. People from nearby buildings threw objects at the marchers, and a scuffle broke out. One marcher was led away with a head injury.
It was Berlin, 2018, and it felt all too familiar. Back at Ibo’s studio, he was teaching young Berliners to transform swastikas into artwork. Kids were painting over the hateful symbols, turning them into kings, queens, stereos, and houses. “They are the future,” Ibo said.
“If they’re not taught to not tolerate this, who else will? Old heads are harder to teach. ”
The kids even pressured me into trying to paint over a swastika myself. I had no clue what I was doing, but I grabbed a can and made a cat.
One of the children proudly announced she could draw better than me. I agreed. “That’s because you’ve been to his workshop,” I said. The project is powerful.
It takes something horrible and sends a clear message: we are not going to let this stand. Anyone who attempted this 80 years ago would have been arrested, possibly killed. In Nazi Germany, resistance was near futile. By 1941, Germany was fully under Goebbels’ spell, and he was about to help launch an attack that was nothing short of madness.
He built fear of the Soviet Union. “We can never win that war without crushing the Soviet Union,” he told the nation. His propaganda claimed that if the Soviets won, Germany would face complete destruction. I visited the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, built to honor the soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin.
Historian Sebastian Gerhardt told me the brutal truth: the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the fighting in the Second World War. They lost millions of citizens. It was the Red Army that finally conquered the Nazi capital. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was a gamble.
Goebbels himself had doubts, but he was nothing if not loyal to Hitler. He used every propaganda tool he had to sell the war. In the opening days, German forces drove deep into Soviet territory. Goebbels was ecstatic, writing in his diary, “The divine judgment of history is being passed onto the Soviet Union.
”
But Russia’s sheer size and endless supply of troops were too much. The Red Army stopped Hitler’s advance at Stalingrad in the brutal winter of 1942. German losses were staggering. Goebbels could spin defeat, but he couldn’t spin the death of a family member.
No propaganda message could counter that sense of loss. By 1944, the Soviets had liberated their territory and pushed into Eastern Europe. More than a million Soviet soldiers died outside the USSR, including in the Battle of Berlin. In less than three weeks of fighting, approximately 80,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.
In total, about 27 million Soviet citizens—soldiers and civilians—died defeating Nazi Germany. Out of a population of 190 million, that means almost every family suffered a loss. As the Red Army approached Berlin, Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their six children took refuge with Hitler in the Führerbunker beneath the city. On April 30th, 1945, Hitler committed suicide to avoid capture.
Only a day earlier, he had named Goebbels as his successor as Chancellor. Less than two days later, Joseph and Magda Goebbels were dead. German soldiers tried to burn their bodies in the courtyard to keep the Soviets from using them as trophies. But the sight of Goebbels’ charred remains was nothing compared to what was found deep inside the bunker.
Joseph and Magda Goebbels made the most appalling decision any parent can make: they murdered their six children. They couldn’t imagine their children living in a world without Hitler and without National Socialism. For 21 years, Goebbels was devoted to Hitler and the Nazi party. It was his life, his everything.
It was an obsessional love for pure evil. To murder your six children requires a devotion that becomes evil in itself. After my journey across Berlin, I sat down with the experts to decide where Goebbels ranks in the hierarchy of evil. The site that struck me most was the book burning of May 1933.
Goebbels was there, acting as master of ceremonies, and he truly believed in anti-Semitism. Unlike some senior Nazis who became anti-Semites for practical reasons, Goebbels genuinely believed in it. The frenzy of Nazi rallies, the emotional whipping up of support, the mass participation—that was all down to Goebbels. Without him, the Nazi grip on power would have been far weaker.
But some argued his job was easy: he owned the radio and the newspapers. How hard is it to get your message across in a dictatorship? Yet Goebbels continued to blanket the nation with lies even after he knew the war was lost, knowing millions would continue to suffer and die. Other Nazi figures showed doubt.
Goebbels never did. That made him chilling. And then, to prove his loyalty, he killed not just himself but his six children. From a father’s perspective, that requires devotion that becomes evil in itself.
It’s hard to imagine a more severe version of fanaticism. The panels deliberated. Some ranked him lower because the media was state-controlled. But others argued his role was central to the systematic crimes of the regime.
He got his hands bloody—he murdered his own children for the cause. In the end, Joseph Goebbels, the master of propaganda who orchestrated the brainwashing of Germany and paved the way for the Holocaust and World War II, was ranked number three in Hitler’s hierarchy of evil.
