Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich

David Irving's much-sought 1996 biography of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief. Out of print until now. Now reprinted in better quality than ever with many new black and white and colour photographs.

Reviewing it in The Daily Telegraph on 20 April 1996, Sir John Keegan wrote that Irving "knows more than anyone alive about the German side of the Second World War"

Source: John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, 20 April 1996, reviewing Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Read the Focal Point Publications archive extract. The linked text is an abridged extract of the 1996 review, not the full newspaper article or a review of this current edition.

Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen says: "Irving's Goebbels -- No Need to Be Timid"

"Anyone who wants to learn about the political acts of one of this century's most able and most dangerous men, should remember that what they are reading is one brilliant propagandist writing about another." Gitta Sereny in The Observer, London

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 in the archives of the Western World, he has written the first full-scale biography of Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister, 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 takes revenge on Germany's Jews, igniting the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938; later, he hounds them out of Berlin and goads Hitler on toward the Final Solution.

Here, for this edition, are Goebbels's secret, unpublished writings on the Reichstag Fire, the Night of the Long Knives, the Dollfuss murder, the Saar plebiscite, the invasion of Prague, Pearl Harbor, and scores of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.

As his country is finally consumed by a rain of fire and slaughter from the air, it is Goebbels whose voice exhorts the people to hold out to the end. When that end comes in May 1945, he takes his wife and six children with him to the Nazi Valhalla with a callousness now revealed in full by the former Soviet archives.

At every turn, David Irving builds the narrative on the archival record while addressing long-running disputes about the Third Reich in the history books.

"Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich" is presented as an archival biography and a study of destructive political power.

"David Irving is a patient researcher of extensive industry and success." A. J. P. Taylor in The Observer

"Irving has an extraordinary talent for digging up otherwise obscure Nazi sources. He does have a real knack of penetrating the 'mind' of Nazism." Professor Norman Stone in New Statesman

"David Irving, a remarkable researcher, a brilliant discoverer of documents, and a skillful writer, tells the story well." Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Sunday Telegraph