Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister for Propaganda & Enlightenment & one of the few party leaders with an original mind, kept a diary of daffy events & impressions until the very end of the 3rd Reich. Only now have the last entries come to light, a record of the 39 days of 2/27-4/9/45. (Hitler committed suicide on 4/30, Goebbels on 5/1.) Reproduced exactly as he dictated them, these pages represent an unrevised rough draft &, as a result, while often clumsy, repetitive & unpolished, they portray with striking immediacy the unreality & wishful thinking that surrounded the doomed Hitler. Even as the Military Situation summaries that open each entry describe Allied advances, Goebbels predicts a collapse of the democracies, whose war efforts, he claims, have led to domestic dissension & labor unrest. Aware that military victory is impossible, he clings to the possibility of a political accommodation with the USSR, & looks to the history of the Punic Wars & Frederick the Great to bolster his futile hope for a political miracle. Typically, his analysis of Soviet military superiority--while German generals are too old & "aliens to our National-Socialist ways," Soviet generals "are fanatical adherents of bolshevism & so they fight fanatically"--leads to the fantastic decision to restructure an army that no longer exists. But more chilling by far is the realization that Goebbels the propagandist was still at work, propagating the Hitler Myth. The Fuehrer is the "eternal revolutionary surrounded by mediocre people," who "perceives everything correctly" in a vision "unimaginable to simpler military minds." Gradually, by dint of repetition, these stock phrases gain an eerie validity, & when he speaks of Hitler's physical, mental & moral resilience the words, however false, ring true in the context of the myth. There's much more of interest in the book, but this palpable contact with Nazi mythology alone makes it required reading for the historian or reader concerned with understanding Nazism.--Kirkus (edited)