Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich - Hardcover

David Irving

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1872197132 ISBN 13: 9781872197135

Publisher: Focal Point, 1996

Synopsis

Height only five-foot four; a figure of Ghandi-like emaciation barely tipping the scales at one hundred pounds; a head too large for his body; a clubfoot for which he was taunted as both man and boy - all the cards seemed stacked against him. Goebbels blamed the world at large; he hated the human race, and he boasted of his hatred in his secret diaries.
Historian David Irving is the first to make use of the entire 80,000 pages of the Goebbels diaries - diaries that lay 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 into the archives of the Western World, he has written the first full-scale biography of Adolf Hitler's confidant and evil genius, Dr. Joseph Goebbels.
Here for the first time are Goebbels's secret, unpublished writings on the Reichstag Fire, the Night of the Long Knives, the Dollfuss murder, the Saar plebiscite, the invasion of Prague, Pearl Harbor, and scores of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.

About this title

About the Author:

A professional historian of noted distinction, David Irving has researched and written about the Third Reich with passionate insight for many years. His first book, "The Destruction of Dresden", was just one of several startling international bestsellers, which include "Churchhill's War" and "Hitler's War".

From Kirkus Reviews:

A ponderous, tedious, and scurrilously misleading biography of a major Nazi leader--by a fellow traveler, if not a card-carrying member, of the movement of Holocaust denial. With access to some 75,000 pages of Goebbels's diaries, which had long been spirited away in Soviet archives, British author Irving (G ring: A Biography, 1989; Hitler's War, 1977; etc.) had the unprecedented opportunity to gain insight into the mind of Hitler's minister of propaganda. Instead, Irving inundates the reader with the personal foibles (including amorous liaisons and a love for cars) of a rather mediocre intellect and with a blizzard of details that, along some selective omissions, obscure the truth rather than shed light on it. Some of the details insinuate that the Jews brought on themselves such events as Kristallnacht; others seek to rehabilitate Hitler's reputation. Whatever happened to the Jews in WW II (and Irving doesn't state clearly what did happen) was the doing of Goebbels and Hitler's other henchmen. ``Goebbels was the motor, goading his reluctant F hrer into ever more radical actions against the Jews.'' And: ``Neither the broad German public nor their F hrer shared his [Goebbels's] satanic antisemitism.'' (For a different view of the German people, see a genuinely revisionist piece of history, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, p. 195.) Irving lectures for the Institute for Historical Review, a center of Holocaust denial in this country, and has been banned from entering Germany and Canada, among other countries, because of his Holocaust denial. But here Irving is more cunning than to blatantly state that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. He simply says that the death camp was ``the most brutal of all Himmler's slave-labor camps and the one with the highest mortality rate''--glossing over the corpses and the memory of 6,000,000 dead. These twisted interpretations of the leader of the Third Reich and his crimes do not deserve to be called history. (Military History Book Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Focal Point
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1872197132
• ISBN 13: 9781872197135
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 722