Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich

Description

HISTORIAN DAVID IRVING was the first to open and make use of the 80,000 pages of the Goebbels diaries – diaries on microfiches that lay boxed and unrecognized for fifty years in the Red Army’s “Trophy” archives in Moscow. From this extraordinary trove, to which Irving has added six years’ research into the archives of the Western World, he has written the first full-scale biography of Adolf Hitler’s confidant Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

The narrative accompanies Goebbels as an impoverished student to Heidelberg, where he wins the university’s most beautiful female student; belying the legends that he later nurtures, he remains sexually immature until his early thirties, as he throws himself into winning Berlin and then all of Germany for Hitler’s rising Nazi movement. In the late thirties, a Czech actress beguiles him, bringing him to the brink of suicide. In a frenzy bordering on delirium he tokes revenge on Germany’s Jews, igniting the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938; later, he hounds them out of Berlin.

Here for the first time are Goebbels’s secret, unpublished writings on the Reichstag Fire, the Night of the Long Knives, the Dollfuss murder, the Saar plebiscite, the invasion of Prague, Pearl Harbor, and scores of other turning points in modern history. Dr. Goebbels faithfully records Hitler’s innermost councils, documenting the hidden methods and strategies of Nazi leadership.