The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

Goebbels held a ‘ministerial conference’ every morning at the
Propaganda Ministry just off Wilhelmstrasse – a stone’s throw from the
Reich Chancellery. His closest collaborators would attend, and the minister
would brief his team and issue instructions for the forthcoming day. It was
here, above all, that the image of the mighty Third Reich was created. In
Goebbels, Hitler had found one of his most effective and loyal acolytes.
Despite the jokes that went around about Hitler and the Nazi leadership,
Hitler remained phenomenally popular. Much of this was due to the
enormously effective Nazi propaganda machine. Propaganda had been an
integral part of Nazi politics from the outset, and was to a large degree the
responsibility of the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and
Propaganda, under its chief, Josef Goebbels. The son of a shop assistant and
clerk, Goebbels had proved himself an intelligent pupil at school and
despite his humble upbringing had attended the universities of Bonn,
Freiburg and Heidelberg. At first he had had thoughts of becoming a
teacher, but then turned to journalism; however, it was a career path that led
nowhere. Instead, he turned to politics, joining the Nazis in 1922. Rising
steadily up Hitler’s party hierarchy, by 1928 he had been elected to the
Reichstag. Marriage in 1931 to Magda Quant, a society divorcee, gave him
the kind of money and status he had always yearned for but never attained.
Doors now opened, with his elegant home in Berlin’s west end becoming a
regular Nazi meeting place before their ascendency to power. When that
happened in 1933, Goebbels was given the post of Propaganda Minister, a
position he had held ever since. Almost immediately, he announced that his
prime goal was to achieve a ‘mobilization of mind and spirit’ in Germany.
The traumatic end in 1918 could never be repeated; the Germans of the
future had to be mentally tougher, which was where propaganda could play
a large part. ‘We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out,’ he said
in a speech in 1933, ‘but because the weapons of our minds did not fire.’
Goebbels faced several challenges. The first was to mobilize the
German people towards military expansion and war and to maintain morale.
This had been achieved, although most Germans had needed little
convincing that those lands lost by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles
should quite rightly be part of Germany once more. However, they had all
been achieved peaceably; war was a different matter. More thorny was the
sudden volte face over the Soviet Union. Having spent the pre-war years
ratcheting up anti-Bolshevism to fever pitch levels he had been faced with a