The man who created Hitler

Nazi Propaganda.

Constable, #19.95 (pp 472).

FOR Christmas 1942 Hitler presented Goebbels with a Mercedes.

Touchingly, for they remained devoted chums to the end, the vehicle came

complete with some thoughtful accessories. It had armour-plating and

bullet-proofed windows.

Both men had survived assassination attempts, and the war was turning.

Within two months the little propaganda minister would have to put a

heroic slant on the impending defeat at Stalingrad. So, when Goebbels

reciprocated it was with an even more practical Christmas gift under the

circumstances. He sent Hitler 18 Mickey Mouse films.

Since irony seems to have been outside of the vocabulary of Paul

Joseph Goebbels, and God knows his biography is short enough on laughs,

this gesture should be interpreted as reflecting a mutual interest.

Goebbels, after all, once declared himself ''a passionate fan of the

cinematic art'', and he took a personal involvement in the movie

industry of the Third Reich. It produced an output of 1094 films, and

47.8% of them were comedies. The statistic is only marginally funnier

than any of the contents. ''Laugh and be young -- that's us, that's our

motto!'' was the fetching jingle from the film Wir tanzen um die Welt.

It translates, and you can see the playfulness of the joke, ''We Dance

around the World.''

The side career as Reich movie mogul had infinite attractions for

Goebbels. If Goering had a fetish about uniforms and Himmler had a thing

about chickens, the club-footed Goebbels liked film actresses. The basis

of his fascination was ''revenge''. He used a system of blackmail to

lead a succession of them to his ministry casting couches.

His highly public affair with the star Lida Baarova became an

embarrassment. He sent her private signals from the podium when he was

supposed to be haranguing Bolshevism and Alljuda (universal Jewry) at

party rallies. When he tried to introduce Baarova into a menage a trois

with his wife Magda there were complaints to Hitler. The Fuhrer ordered

him to patch up his marriage or resign.

''Uncle Adolf', as the Goebbels children actually called him, had a

bachelor's sentimentality over other people's families. Besides, there

must have been something of a vested interest in five daughters, every

one of whose names began with ''H'' and used the same number of letters

as his own. Helga, Hilde, Holde, Hedda and little Heide. Adolfwas so

fond of them he allowed them to join him in the bunker as the Soviet

troops advanced on Berlin.

The Goebbels parents resisted offers to smuggle the children out to

the West. It was loyalty to the death. Magda administered their cyanide

capsules at the end. She and her husband followed a few days later. The

charred body of Goebbels was identified by the half-bent right leg in a

blackened prosthesis.

The disability is the too easy explanation for Goebbels as the fanatic

who was cheated by life and who found compensation in Nazi ideology. His

virulent anti-Semitism is attributed to rejection of applications, as an

unemployed Ph. D, by Jewish newspaper publishers. But these factors are

trite.

Reuth's biography, drawing for the first time on the full diaries

released after the fall of the Berlin Wall, reveal a man with an almost

total propensity for self-intoxication and a highly immature adulation

complex over Hitler, to whom he continued to cite historical examples of

snatching victory from the jaws of defeat long after the trembling

decrepit had retreated into suicidal gloom. Goebbels created, for

himself as much as for the masses, the psycho-mystic figure of Hitler,

showering him with pseudo-religious deification as the bearer of hope,

the genius with a mission, infallible and mythically elevated.

The depth of Goebbels's misanthropy was as profound as it was genuine.

''Now your little throats are being cut,'' were his final words to his

staff. He had the frenzy of a creature amply acquainted with the

experience of stigmatisation.

He was also a consummate actor who discovered in his own resonant

voice coming out of an emaciated frame his first instrument of power

over people. A gifted speaker with or without a script from the early

1920s onwards, he had an intuitive understanding of how to play on the

insecurities and latent emotions of his audiences. ''I speak. Many weep.

It's a great moment,'' he reported to his diary of a 1931 speech. He

also liked wearing big hats.

He approached propaganda like a theatre director, with tremendous

attention to stage and lighting effects. He planned Nazi rallies,

torchlit processions, demonstrations, and mass spectacles as

''masterpieces''. ''Berlin needs sensations like a fish needs water,''

he observed shortly after taking up his first major post as Nazi

district leader in a city he used as a backdrop for fomenting hatred.

His technical command of propaganda was brilliant. When he flew Hitler

to rallies during the election campaigns of the 1930s the innovation

caused a sensation even in America. He grasped the potential of radio

quickly. Cheap wireless sets were made available to the masses, and they

were nicknamed ''Goebbels Blasters''. He extended the network and

erected Reich loudspeaker columns on streets and squares. He handled the

world press urbanely in the years while Germany was preparing to go to

war, and there was constant surprise that this frothing demagogue could

make such a cultivated and quiet impression at League of Nations

sessions.

Perhaps that was the most frightening thing about Goebbels, because it

is always the most intelligent subscriber to an evil doctrine who

instils the greatest chill. Albert Speer was unnerved by the cool,

analytical manner in which Goebbels could review his own rabid

performances in front of the masses. Reuth's extensive quotations from

the diaries leave the reader searching for something that never

surfaces. There is never even a hint of it. You look for some

self-awareness of hubris, but it is never there. Not even bullet-proof

glass appears to have clouded his mad vision.