Adolf Hitler's Lieutenants

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22949, 29 January 1938, Page 15 (Supplement)

Adolf Hitler's Lieutenants

IF Goering is the battering-ram for Hitler, Goebbels is the brain. Dr. Paul Goebbels, a 40-year-old Rhinelander of Westphalian peasant stock, has a strange record. Educated in a Catholic school in his birthplace of Rheydt and later at Beven universities, he became a journalist. Like so many others, he heard Hitler speak in 1922 and immediately joined the party as a propagandist. He founded National Socialism in the Rhineland and the Ruhr, and was so successful there that Hitler, at the end of 1926, made him a party leader for Greater Borlm and sent him to win over that nest of Communists for the Nazis. . Biting Tongue Not the, least of the mysterious features of Hitlerism has been the success of his ten years' fighting in Berlin, especially the way in which he perfected the methods of propaganda in his newspaper, Der Angriff. He also obtained a reputation for calculated brutality and a cold precision that took heed of human values.

No. II. — Dr. P "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN EUROPE"

By PROFESSOR S. H. ROBERTS,

Challia Professor of History, Sydney University—(Copyright)

Becoming a member of the first Nazi group in the Reichstag, his biting tongue made him the most feared of all in debate. He is the only man, it is said, who could stand up to the Communist Torgler in the Reichstag.

When Hitler became Chancellor, Goebbels was appointed Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. As such he became lord of the written and spoken word in Germany, and latterly he has even secured a dictatorship of the films. His huge department in the Kaiserhofplatz is the most effi-

cient in Germany Contrary to general opinion, its main work is in Germany aud not abroad. There is not a hamlet in the whole length and breadth of the country that is overlooked by it, and it must be remembered that the word "propaganda" in a totalitarian State like Germany covers far more fields of activity than it does elsewhero. Contempt for Humanity The outstanding feature about Goebbels is his searing contempt for humanity. One feols that he despises the human race and looks on the people as so many ants to be managed and stamped on. His attitude may easily be explained by u mixture of tortured nerves and acute resentment-psychosis, due to his physical defects. Dr. Goebbels' book on the struggle for Berlin, "Das Erwachende Berlin," marks an epoch in political methods. It temporarily converts the reader who knows its specious falseness and its unfair methods. That is Goebbels' great inspiration—that propaganda seemingly fully documented by word and picture may triumph over reason.

Every investigator in Germany feels this—whatever his beliefs may be, the constant repetition of propaganda, in the press, on the air, and through personal media, wears down his resistance, until he has to exert a conscious effort not to acquiesce in a campaign he would instantly question if considering it aloofly in hii study in his own country. Doubting Foreigners Goebbels has arrived at a mathematical relationship between the stream of propaganda and any individual's power of resistance, and if his margin is sufficient to wear down doubting foreigners, how much more effective is it for his own nationals, predisposed as they are to be converted to the achievements of the new regime? In appearance Goebbels is not impressive. He has a dwarfish, deformed body, and is lame. He is never still for a second. Nobody is permitted to mention his extremely non-Aryan weakness of body. Not long ago a society for the aid of cripples mentioned him in one of their booklets as the supreme case in which mental powers triumphed over physical drawbacks; Berlin still talks of the fate of the unfortunate sponsors of that book! It is impossible not to associate Goebbels with malignity. He appears to have a first-class mind, but one warped and embittered, aud now, from his position of power, concerned with hate and revenge, especially against the Jews and the Communists. Concentrated Venom The way in which his diatribes against Russia dropped from his lips at Nuremberg made one shudder with their

concentrated venom. He uses every device of oratory and effect to embellish his speeches; he speaks a slow and limpidly perfect German (very different from Hitler's hoarse tumult of words or Goering's crude shouting); and he is far and away the best speaker among the Nazis. Nobody denies his claim to be the party's brain, but he has always been an apostle of bitterness, and it is doubtful if anything constructive can ever come out of undiluted hate. Even his many books are concerned with tearing down rather than building up; ho has none of the dreams of a Hitler, or even the wide theories of a Rosenberg. Goebbels dislikes England, and thinks it ridiculous that her plodding trial-and-error methods should still leave her a high position in the world. In foreign policy he wants an understanding with Italy and activity in Central Europe. Austria is obviously his next goal, although there is some discrepancy be-

tween this and his reliance on Mussolini's bayonets in the widerfight against Bolshevism. Gigantic Task I should call Goebbels the most dangerous man in Europe, .precisely because ho is so diabolically clever and so frankly Machiavellian in his views of mankind generally and the 'methods he would employ. Throughout the length and breadth of Germany I heard nobody speak of him with affection. They all feared him even where they admitted that the party could not get on without him. Such is the man who, despising humanity, is engaged in the gigantic task of moulding the minds of 66,000,000 human beings into uniformity— to think and act as he dictates from his all-powerful Ministry of Propaganda. At close quarters ho seems ageless, and that is in keeping—tho forces he represents have always been with mankind.— L.I.P.