Joseph Goebbels was the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, whose mastery of mass persuasion made him one of the most powerful and sinister figures of the Third Reich. Born in the Rhineland town of Rheydt and prevented by a clubfoot from military service, he earned a doctorate in literature before drifting, embittered and ambitious, into the young Nazi movement in the mid-1920s.
A gifted, cynical orator and writer with a genius for theater and slogan, Goebbels became Adolf Hitler's chief propagandist and one of his most fanatically devoted followers. As Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 1933, he seized control of the German press, radio, cinema, theater, and the arts, orchestrating the cult of the Führer, the great Nuremberg rallies, and the ceaseless dissemination of Nazi ideology and venomous antisemitism. He helped instigate the book burnings of 1933 and the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.
As the tide of war turned against Germany, Goebbels delivered his notorious 1943 speech demanding "total war" and was given sweeping authority over the home front, exhorting Germans to fight on amid ruin.
Loyal to Hitler to the very end, he joined him in the Berlin bunker during the final days of the war. After Hitler's suicide, Goebbels served as chancellor for a single day; then, on May 1, 1945, he and his wife Magda poisoned their six children and took their own lives.