Goebbels Diaries - History

History

Goebbels began to keep a diary in October 1923, shortly before his 27th birthday, while unemployed and living in his parents' home at Rheydt in the Ruhr region. He had been given a diary as a present by Else Janke, a young woman (of part-Jewish background) with whom he had a turbulent but eventually unsuccessful relationship, and most of his early entries were about her. His biographer Toby Thacker writes: "Writing a diary quickly became a kind of therapy for this troubled young man, and several historians have commented on how extraordinarily candid and revealing Goebbels was, particularly in his early years as a diarist." From 1923 onwards he wrote his diary almost daily.

Goebbels's early entries show little interest in politics. There is no mention of Hitler or the Nazi movement until 13 March 1924 - strikingly, there is no mention of the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, which first made Hitler a national figure. After Goebbels first met Hitler in July 1925, however, the Nazi leader increasingly became the central figure in the diary. By July 1926 Goebbels was so enraptured by Hitler that he could write: "It is impossible to reproduce what he said. It must be experienced. He is a genius. The natural, creative instrument of a fate determined by God. I am deeply moved." when Hitler spoke of 'race problems'.

Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 and appointed Goebbels Propaganda Minister. Goebbels then published an edited version of his diaries for the period of Hitler's rise to power in book form, under the title From the Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery. Goebbels's book was later published in English as My Part in Germany's Fight. Although this book was of course propagandist in intent, it provides a valuable insight into the mentality of the Nazi leadership at the time of their accession to power.

By July 1941 the diaries had grown to fill twenty thick volumes, and Goebbels realised that they were too valuable a resource to risk their destruction in an air-raid. He therefore moved them from his study in his Berlin home to the underground vaults of the Reichsbank in central Berlin. From this time onwards, he no longer wrote the diaries by hand. Instead he dictated them to a stenographer, who later typed up corrected versions. He began each day's entry with a resume of the day's military and political news. Thacker notes: "Goebbels was already aware that his diary constituted a remarkable historical document, and entertained fond hopes of reworking it at some future stage for further publication, devoting hours to each day's entry." The involvement of a stenographer, however, meant that the diaries were no longer entirely secret, and they became less frank about personal matters such as his relationship with his wife or, later, his doubts about Hitler's leadership.

By November 1944 it was evident to Goebbels that Germany was going to lose the war. He wrote in his diary: "How distant and alien indeed this beautiful world appears. Inwardly I have already taken leave of it." Realising that he was unlikely to survive the fall of the Third Reich, he gave orders that his diaries were to be copied for safekeeping, using the new technique of microfilm (recently developed, in a strange coincidence, by Dr Joseph Goebel). A special darkroom was created in Goebbels's apartment in central Berlin, and Goebbels's stenographer, Richard Otte, supervised the work.

Goebbels made the last entry in his diary on 10 April 1945, less than a month before his death. The boxes of glass plates containing the microfilmed diaries were sent to Potsdam just west of Berlin, where they were buried. The original handwritten and typed diaries were packed and stored in the Reich Chancellery. Some of these survived, and formed the basis for the publication of sections of the diaries (mainly from the war years) after the war. The boxes of glass plates at Potsdam were discovered by the Soviets and shipped to Moscow, where they sat unopened until they were discovered by the German historian Elke Fröhlich in 1992. Only then did the publication of the full diaries become possible.