When I stood in Bebelplatz, the vast square in the heart of Berlin, I tried to imagine the night the books burned. The empty shelves of the memorial rose before me, a silent monument to the thousands of volumes that went up in flames in May 1933. It was here, just months after Hitler took power, that Nazi supporters threw twenty-five thousand books onto a pyre, books by Jewish authors, books that represented everything the regime wanted to destroy. Forty thousand people gathered to watch.
It was staged as a purification, a cleansing by fire, and the man orchestrating the spectacle was Joseph Goebbels. I came to Berlin to understand how Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, managed to brainwash a nation. I wanted to know where he belonged in the hierarchy of Nazi evil. It is a chilling question, but one worth asking.
My name is James Ellis, and I set out to rank the most wanted men of the Third Reich. Goebbels, I discovered, was a strange figure to stand at the heart of a movement built on the image of the perfect Aryan. He stood barely five feet tall and walked with a limp from a clubfoot. He was no ideal specimen, yet he was quick-witted and charming, and he knew how to use both.
He came across as narcissistic, insecure, and occasionally deeply depressed, but he wielded immense power nonetheless. I met with political activist Jörg Braun at the memorial to the book burning. He explained that the event was not just an act of destruction, but an official government-sanctioned ritual of hatred. Goebbels even commissioned a film of the burning to be screened in cinemas across the country.
His goal was simple: to turn the German people against the Jews. Propaganda, I came to understand, is the selling of a political message with relentless force. Goebbels understood that the harder the product he had to sell, the better the propaganda needed to be. Buy us, he seemed to say, and we will fix the economy.
Buy us, and we will get rid of the Jews. In 1924, Goebbels was a twenty-seven-year-old drifter with a doctorate and a failed writing career. Germany’s economy was in chaos, and he was lost, depressed, and desperate for someone to blame. Like so many others, he found his answer in Adolf Hitler.
Goebbels saw Hitler as a kind of messiah. He wrote about the need for a strong hand in Germany, about kicking out the Jews who refused to become true Germans. He believed Hitler would solve Germany’s problems, and he was frankly dazzled by him. He joined the Nazi Party.
Hitler, in turn, recognized a valuable ally. Goebbels was intelligent, a gifted speechwriter, and a brilliant public speaker. In 1926, Hitler sent him to Berlin to lead the Nazi cause there, where he began producing propaganda, printing pamphlets, and waging an information war against the same old enemies: the communists and the Jews. It was the beginning of an unprecedented campaign of hate that would soon engulf Germany and the world.
Jörg Braun fears that history is repeating itself. Far-right propaganda and groups spreading fear and misinformation are on the rise in Germany. I stood among people planning a counter-protest against an imminent neo-Nazi march. I saw the anger and anxiety in their faces.
It was a reminder of just how fragile the peace can be. Goebbels’s efforts got a massive boost from the global crisis of 1929. The stock market crash and the resulting depression created devastating conditions in Germany, and he exploited them relentlessly. By 1933, Hitler was Chancellor, and Goebbels, now Minister of Propaganda, moved to control the newspapers, the radio, and the film industry.
He now commanded a national stage, and the promotion of antisemitism became official government policy. In the spring of that year, Goebbels stood on a platform before a massive crowd in Berlin. The speech unleashed a wave of acts of sabotage, intimidating Jewish business owners and turning customers away. Graffiti became a cheap and easy way to spread hate.
In Berlin, I met Ibo Omari, an artist on a mission to paint over Nazi graffiti. He took me to a children’s playground where a huge swastika had been painted. The sight of it stunned me. It was a meter and a half tall, right where children played.
Ibo told me that when the swastika appeared, the two best-selling books in Germany were a racist book about genetics and intelligence, and a new edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It was a worrying trend. He has painted over dozens of Nazi symbols since. If you see one, you think it’s a single fool, he said.
But from one fool comes two, then four, then eight, and suddenly they have a party, and they get elected. It is a terrifying reminder of what happened here in the 1930s. I wanted to understand the techniques Goebbels used, particularly in film. So I went to a cinema in Berlin to watch one of his propaganda films with Alexa Karolin슴ki, a documentary filmmaker who grew up as a Jew in Germany.
She explained that propaganda is designed to make you feel part of something larger, a kind of collective narcissism. The film we watched was a Nazi production shot in the Warsaw Ghetto. It showed cruel Jewish police mistreating their fellow Jews, intended to portray them as an inhuman invasion of Poland. We noticed a boy, the same boy, getting up twice in different shots.
Alexa pointed out how he wore a light coat that stood out from the crowd. It was all staged, a clever orchestration. The idea was that any violence you see is not committed by Nazis, but by Jews themselves. The reaction of a woman seemed genuine, though, the panic was real.
In 1942, audiences were not used to mass media and could not see through the manipulation. Goebbels was producing a forties version of fake news. It was racism in its most vicious form, and it reinforced the stereotypes he had been pushing for years. The counter-protest day came.
It was October 3rd, the anniversary of German reunification. Instead of a celebration, it became a confrontation between two opposing ideals. There were hundreds of people, news of up to a thousand far-right marchers. The atmosphere was tense.
Police in riot gear lined the streets. I saw an armored vehicle. The far-right march came directly towards us. People in nearby buildings began throwing objects, and a brawl broke out.
A marcher was led away bleeding. It was surreal to be in the middle of it and realize this was Berlin in 2018. Fortunately, there were no serious confrontations, and I spoke with Jörg afterwards about why it was so important to protest. Ibo’s workshops are another form of resistance.
He teaches young people to transform swastika posters into works of art. I saw children turn hateful symbols into kings and queens, into something completely different. It sends a powerful message to those who put the symbols there in the first place, showing that people will not stand for it and will turn it into something else entirely. It was inspiring, and I thought about how, eighty years ago, anyone who did this would have been arrested, or killed.
By 1941, Germany was completely under the spell of Goebbels’s propaganda. But he was about to use that control to help launch an attack that was nothing but madness. His method relied on one of the oldest tricks in the book: he planted fear. My search for Goebbels’s place in Hitler’s hierarchy of evil took me to a war memorial in Treptow Park, built to honor the Soviet soldiers who died in the battle of Berlin.
I was struck by the sheer size of the monument. Historian Sebastian Gawrt explained that the burden of the fighting fell heavily on the Soviet Union, which lost millions of its citizens in the process. It was the Soviets who eventually conquered the Nazi capital. On June 22, 1941, Goebbels went on the air to announce the invasion of the Soviet Union.
He had been inciting against the communists since his earliest days in the party, but the invasion was a real challenge for him. He had his doubts about leading all those tanks and planes east. But Goebbels was loyal and adaptable. He built a strong argument by invoking fear of Soviet communism, insisting that Germany could never win the war without crushing the Soviet Union.
He called it a war of fullbrutaation against a lesser people. But what really fought against his propaganda was the death of a family member. If you lost a son, a husband, or a father on the Russian front, no words would bring them back. The German losses were astonishing.
The Red Army stopped Hitler’s advance in the brutal winter of 1942 at Stalingrad. Goebbels realized the war was going badly and tried to rally the nation. But the irony was that the Soviets had already come and defeated the Nazis and occupied half of Germany. Even after liberating all parts of the Soviet Union from Nazi occupation by the end of 1944, and then moving into other Eastern European countries and reaching Berlin, over a million Soviet soldiers died.
Around 27 million Soviet citizens, soldiers and civilians, died during World War II. Out of a population of around 190 million, that meant every family suffered losses. The numbers were unbelievable. The Soviet Union simply had no choice but to win the war against Hitler, or face extinction.
In April 1945, the Red Army reached the gates of Berlin. Fierce fighting continued until May 2. In the battle of Berlin, around 80,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in less than three weeks. While the battle raged in the streets, Joseph Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their six children sheltered in the underground hitler bunker with Hitler and other top Nazis.
My search for Goebbels’s place in the hierarchy of evil brought me to the site of that bunker. It was not easy to find. There was nothing left of it, only a sign. I met with journalist Lutz Hanke to learn about Goebbels’s final hours.
On April 30, 1945, Hitler killed himself to avoid the humiliation of capture. Just one day earlier, he had appointed Goebbels as his successor as Chancellor of Germany. Joseph and Magda Goebbels died. German soldiers tried to burn their bodies in the courtyard to prevent the Soviets from using them as trophies.
But the charred remains were nothing compared to what was discovered deep within the bunker. Joseph and Magda went through with the most terrible and evil decision any parents could make. They killed their own children. They could not imagine any purpose in living, or in leaving their children in a world without Hitler and without National Socialism.
For twenty-one years, the party had been Goebbels’s entire life. It was everything to him. In many ways, it was love, the worst kind of love, an obsessave passion for a man. It was the ultimate sacrifice of a true fanatic.
Knowing how devoted Goebbels was to Hitler was a disturbing revelation. My journey through Berlin gave me a new perspective on the role Goebbels played in the Nazi regime. I spoke with experts about where he should fall on the pyramid of evil. Among all the places I visited, the book burning site was the most striking.
Goebels was there, acting as a master of ceremonies, celebrating the end of thought and culture. He was a true believer in antisemicism. Some of the other top Nazis were antisemitic for pragmatic reasons, for advancement. But Goebbels truly believed.
I asked historian Anthony Rowell what impact his message of hate and violence had on the German masses. He said that without Goebbels, the Nazi party would not have gotten the mass support and widespread grass-root participation. He oversaw the frenzy of the rallies, the excitement of the crowd. I also spoke with others who felt he was sometimes overrated, arguing that in a dictatorship, it is not that hard to get your message across when you control the radio and the newspapers.
But even so, Goebbens continued to flood the German people with lies long after he knew the war was lost. Millions would continue to suffer and die. With other Nazi figures, there is often a sense that they knew what they were doing was wrong. With Goebbels, there seems to be no doubt at all.
That makes him truly terrifying. He was absolutely loyal to the cause. To prove it, he killed not only himself, but all his children. Killing your own six children takes a devotion that in itself becomes evil.
I see it as a genuine conviction that there was no point in his children living in a world without Nazism, without Hitler as a savior. It is hard to imagine a more brutal version of extremism. When I asked the experts to rank him, they placed him third in the hierarchy of Nazi evil. The crimes were not random; they were systematic.
As Minister of Propaganda, as the designer of the Nazi spectacles, and as a fanatical antisemitic, he was central to that system, the master of ceremonies. He stained his hands with blood. He killed his own children for the cause. His sons became victims of Nazism.
The message that was broadcast, for all its extreme violence, played a major role in the crimes of the Nazi regime. For that reason, and for the murder of his six children, he is third on my list. Cards were laid out, and the answer was clear.
