LIES AND DECEIT

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 12 May 1945, Page 2

LIES AND DECEIT

CAREER OF GOEBBELS HITLER’S GREATEST PUPIL Cynical arch-priest of lies and deceit in the service of Hitler’s Germany, Paul Joseph Goebbels is reported to have taken his own life amid the ruins of Berlin. As Hitler’s greatest and truest pupil, he worked at the task in which none before had ever succeeded so well—the subjection and manipulation of German minds. Bom in the small provincial town of Rheydt in 1897, the child of poor, respectable, devoutly Catholic parents, he was handicapped from birth by a clubfoot, but displayed from his boyhood onward an unusually bright intelligence. As a student at Heidelberg University he enjoyed the tutorship of the eminent Jewish scholar Professor Gundolf. Politically, the undergraduate Goebbels belonged to student clubs of a radical complection and showed the greatest enmity against both reaction and the incipient Nazi movement. HARD TIME EXPERIENCED After his graduation he went through a hard time, writing a number of plays and novels, all of which proved failures. He lived the drab life of a provincial bohemian, earning a pittance by giving literary lectures, refusing to take up a bourgeois profession, and storing up the bitter and burning resentment of a misunderstood and rejected genius. Then the local Nazi leader discovered his oratorical gifts and offered him a paid post as a political platform speaker. Goebbels accepted, and during 1924 toured the villages and towns of *the northern Rhineland on behalf of the Nazi Party. Up to 1926 his career was that of a disgruntled, somewhat unstable leftwing intellectual, slowly and imperceptibly moving from idealism to cynicism. But in that year something happened to him. Meeting Hitler, he came at once completely under his spell. He wrote Hitler many letters filled with a glowing and delirious adoration, and under his influence something was unleashed in the little doctor—that wild and demoniac power of demagogy that later made him one of the most sinister forces in contemporary history. VENOMOUS PEN USED He deserted, betrayed and fought with his former friends. He shed his former opinions. He even—most astonishing of all—changed his style. It became almost impossible to recognise the involved, serious and somewhat heavy technique of his early writing in the incredibly vicious, vulgar, venomous pen which directed aftei 1927 the newly-founded paper “Der Angriff.” The methods by which Goebbels, in that paper, made Nazi propaganda for six years are without parallel. He developed libel and vituperation to an unprecedented pitch. He swept his public out of its senses through the sheer breath-taking vehemence of the hatred he preached, the pure audacity of his lies. He developed the fine art of mythcreation, choosing as his first object the Jewish deputy police president of Berlin. In a sustained campaign of several years he made, without any factual basis at all this highly respectable official seem the very embodiment of every vice and corrup f ion. He gladly paid fine after fine, heaping more enormous libels on those for which he had been convicted. It was the first dress-rehearsal for his later vilification of Churchill and Roosevelt. BLACK xMAGIC OF PROPAGANDA Under Hitler’s malign influence, Goebbels discovered the black magic of propaganda. He found out that it was possible to engineer whatever mass emotions were desired by a precise and mechanical psychological pressure, and he wielded this new weapon with a boundless contempt for both truth and the human mind. It was pointless to reproach him with inconsistencies and lies, for these were the very tools of his art. Like an experimenting scientist, he constantly sought to enlarge their scope of action and use them to complete the paralysis and subjection of the human mind, which was his goal. This intellectual turned traitor to his own intellect was no happy man, in spite of his successes. . His life was full of curious pathological contradictions, probably caused by a mixture of tortured nerves and acute re-sentment-psychosis, due to his physical defects. Though nobody wielded a greater and more sinister power over the German public mind, no one in Germany was more unpopular. He was universally hated, even throughout the Nazi party, and among his most bitter personal enemies were Himmler, Goer, ing, Ribbentrop, and most of the German generals. DISSOLUTE PRIVATE LIFE Goebbels had other dark traits. This man, who owing to his physical deformity had never seen war and was reputed on several occasions to have shown physical cowardice, constantly sought opportunities to surround himself with badly-wounded soldiers, addressing them and posing for photographs. Similarly, while he led a notoriously dissolute private life that was one unending public scandal, he widely publicised every new addition to his family in an altogether shameless manner and frequently posed for family portraits. After D-Day in the West, Goebbels’ task of maintaining civilian morale became increasingly difficult, and as Germany’s military position steadily deteriorated his claims and promises to the German people grew more and j more fantastic. In his broadcasts and in his newspaper articles he painted pic-

tures of Britain devastated by pilotless aircraft and flying bombs, of a secret tunnel being constructed beneath the Channel to invade Britain, of a mjfthical super-gun which would lay \vjßste all Russia from within the German borders. Final disillusionment has efrme to Germans only with his death the subjection of their country byjthe Allies.