Minister of Propaganda throughout the Hitler years, Josef Goebbels had no rival in the black art of lying to the public. Down the centuries, cynical rulers had habitually exhorted their subjects to commit crimes for the sake of empire and power. Goebbels went further, pioneering a modern technique of presenting crime as the pathway to virtue. Still today the memory lingers of this man, gnome-like in his brown shirt and swastika armband, on the platform of an auditorium in Nazi Germany whipping up mass audiences apparently only too eager to accept what was in fact incitement to robbery and mass murder.
Could Goebbels have been compensating for some inadequacy? One of six children of humble parents, he had a difficult start in life. In particular he suffered from a neurogenic clubfoot. An unsuccessful operation left him permanently lame. A dissatisfied student, Goebbels tried his hand at novellas, lyric poetry, and a dramatization for the stage of the story of Judas Iscariot. None of this was good enough to find a publisher. Capable of perceiving the endless possibilities of literature, he did not have the talent to contribute to it. In normal circumstances, he would almost certainly have sunk without a trace, and it might even have been possible to feel pity for him.
Reaching adulthood in the early 1920s, Goeb-bels began the routine of writing up a diary every single day, and he continued to do so right through the war when his job obliged him to
