MASTER PROPAGANDIST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 794, 8 October 1954, Page 14

MASTER PROPAGANDIST

EVIL GENIUS, the story of Joseph Goebbels, by Erich Ebermayer and Hans-Otto Meissner, translated by Louis Hagen; Allan Wingate, N.Z. price 15/-. HIS plausible reconstruction of Goebbels’s life should be read with reservations. Its authors are two Germans whose qualifications are nowhere stated, and, according to the title page, their work has been "translated and freely adapted" as a further stage of predigestion. The kindest interpretation one can give to "adapted" is that reports and interviews have been rewritten in direct speech as conversations, some of

which, by the way, sound unbelievably false; but why the adverb "freely" and why were such changes necessary? Goebbels was a master propagandist, his mastery unexcelled when that propaganda was destructive or subversive. As much as we must deplore his cynicism, his distortion of fact, his hatred and cruelty and craving for personal power, we must concede his knowledge of the psychology of the German people, his energy and clarity of thought. As Reich Director for Total War from July, 1944, his instinctive understanding of the morale of his people allowed him repeatedly to cover up the folly and neglect of Hitler and his colleagues in the agonies of the last months of the war in Germany. The book is based largely on Goebbels’s diaries-he kept one from the age of ten-and on his speeches and newspaper articles; and this material has been supplemented by interviews with his mother and sister and with Magda, Goebbels’s_ sister-in-law. The lies and deceits of his propaganda were repeated in the adulteries of his private life, emphasis on which classifies this book as journalism rather than biography, —

W.A.

G.