Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda and the Annihilation of the Jews during the Last Year of World War II
This book focuses on the last year of WWII. During that fateful year, Nazi Germany suffered severe military defeats on several fronts, and the massive bombings by the Allies on the home front turned its cities into ruins. At the same time, the situation within the Nazi leadership deteriorated. Rifts appeared within the inner circle, among people who were closest to Adolf Hitler, reaching a peak in the failed coup d’État and the attempt to assassinate him on July 20, 1944. But although the situation was catastrophic for Germany, during that same period, the extermination of the Jews – which required vast resources – never halted. In fact, it was accelerated, as Germany chose to extend the implementation of the “Final Solution” into new territories, the most prominent being Hungary. In the course of May-July 1944, approximately 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, mainly to Auschwitz. An additional aspect of the policy of exterminating the Jews and the acceleration thereof was the liquidation of the remaining ghettos in the final year of the war. For example, between June and August 1944 approximately 81,000 Jews from the Łódź ghetto were deported to the Chelmno and Auschwitz death camps. In July 1944 the Kovno ghetto was liquidated as well. The Germans started evacuating concentration camps and death camps and sent the surviving inmates on “Death Marches,” in the course of which many of them died. Simultaneously, the operation to destroy evidence of the mass murder of the Jews (Sonderaktion 1005) continued: witnesses to the crimes were executed, documents were burned and murder sites were bombed by the Germans.
Against the background of the events in the last year of the war, I examine the actions of one of the people closest to Hitler during that period, and one of the most influential leaders in Nazi Germany – Joseph Goebbels. He served as “the minister for public enlightenment and propaganda” from March 1933. After the failed attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, Goebbels received the new official title of “the Reich’s Plenipotentiary for Total War.” And thus, while Germany was facing doom and defeat, and had reached its worse hour, for Goebbels it was a time of advancement in his career, and he used his abilities and talent to their full potential. His status within the Nazi leadership improved and he tried to implement a more radical policy of Total War. I describe Goebbels’ complex and ambiguous character and his problematic relations with other party members and close associates. This will be achieved by reading his diaries, writings and speeches, etc.
A leading theme is an investigation of the Nazi propaganda machine created by Goebbels, and its role in preserving and reinforcing the motivation to continue the extermination of the Jews. In a continuous appeal to the suffering German Volk, the propaganda emphasized the necessity to continue the war and the fighting, precisely in spite of the defeat and the losses.
Two major themes stood at the core of Goebbels’s propaganda: The Bolshevik danger – the hell Germany could expect if the Soviets won the war and took over, and the Jewish danger – the controlling international Jewry, which threatened to take over the world, and wished for nothing less than the full extinction of the German people.
Therefore, the Nazi propaganda preached over and over to the German Volk to carry on, and continue fighting in a struggle which was no less than one of life or death (Sein oder Nichtsein).
The emphasis of this research is on the attempt to comprehend those two seemingly contradictory processes: the near defeat and the continuation of the Jewish extermination. Its central argument is that against the background of the feelings of despair and loss, which spread among the Nazi elite, the physical and mental deterioration of the Führer, and the increasing treachery in the leadership and the military, the motive of Der Untergang became dominant, like in the era of Pessimism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when anti-Semitic ideas appeared as well. Another argument is that the acceleration of the Jewish extermination became possible, inter alia, as a result of Goebbels’ propaganda, which encouraged the Germans to continue the fighting despite their military defeats, and the gloom among its leadership and within the military.
After coming to the realization that they would not come out of the war victorious, Hitler and Goebbels decided to take their own lives. They chose to do so in a dramatic and, to their minds, glorious way, a kind of “Wagnerian” ending to the “Thousand-Year Reich” and its commanders. Goebbels committed suicide together with his wife Magda, not before they killed their six young children in the bunker in Berlin, one day after the suicide of their beloved Führer. In that way, Goebbels hoped to be remembered in the pages of history as the greatest symbol of loyalty to Hitler and to Nazi Germany.
