A Nazi leader, in his own words
The Man Behind Hitler
On: WGBH, Channel 2
Tonight, 9-10:30 p.m.
Was there a better propagandist in the 20th century than Joseph Goebbels? Was there anyone who could touch what he did for Adolf Hitler?
Lenin and Stalin went global, to be sure, but the marketing savvy of Goebbels, combined with his acute appreciation of new technology and a ruthless pursuit of his goals, put him in a class by himself. He confected a weird, fake world like an evil Wizard of Oz.
Small, dark, and feral, he orchestrated the Nazi story. His title was Minister of Propaganda, and he wielded total control over all German media. Which meant pretty much all of German life.
Goebbels gave propaganda a bad name. The word used to carry less baggage. Pope Urban VIII, for example, created a College of Propaganda in 1627 simply to train Catholic priests for service in foreign missions. But one need only glance at the menacing scowl of Goebbels in Alfred Eisenstadt's photo of him in 1933 to know this man had other things in mind.
Based on Goebbels's diaries, filmmakers Lutz Hachmeister and Michael Kloft have made a strong documentary called ''The Man Behind Hitler." They let his words speak for themselves to great effect. We meet a man riddled with insecurities, a paranoiac whose vertiginous mood swings from ecstasy to black depression. As a youth, he was lonely, hobbled by a deformed foot, starved for affection. He raged against his early poverty and German society. He eventually married, only to have affairs with actresses whose careers he controlled.
But we also see one smart cookie who envisions possibilities others don't. He was an early and effective exploiter of radio and television to transmit the Nazi message. His stagecraft of giant party rallies was brilliant -- there's no other word for it. His mythologizing of Hitler was, at once, masterful and sick.
Chronically bitter and hypersensitive to slights, he ridiculed rivals such as Goering (''bemedalled fools and vain, perfumed fops have no place in our war leadership") and Himmler (''an unscrupulous bastard") while fawning over Hitler's ''stupendous mind." Like others among the Nazi elite, he could be sappy about his loving wife and children while spewing torrents of anti-Semitic cant.
There is, blissfully, not a single talking head in ''The Man Behind Hitler," not one reenactment. Instead, we hear the British actor Kenneth Branagh read with notable restraint from the diaries, beginning in 1924 when Goebbels joined the Nazi party to his suicide in 1945 as Russian troops overran Berlin. We also hear Goebbels thunder before large crowds in film clips -- he prized his own oratory.
That's it. We are left to make our own judgments, free of a flood of opinion from experts. What we may lose in commentary is trumped by the clean simplicity of this approach. We are treated like grown-ups, and we could use more documentaries like this.
The words of Goebbels are grounded from start to finish by haunting footage of Germany's descent into hell. We witness the collapse of the Weimar Republic in the early '20s, the hyperinflation that forced people to push wheelbarrows of worthless paper money to buy necessities. We see the street fights between communists and Nazis ignite as the country enters into chaos.
Hitler assumes power and then it's on to Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda classic ''Triumph of the Will" (Goebbels calls her a lunatic) and the Berlin Olympics, followed by Kristallnacht and the German invasions of Poland and later the Soviet Union. Goebbels marketed all of it and frantically put the best light on impending defeat. Nothing happened in radio, print, film, overt propaganda, or theater without his approval.
He was, quite simply, Hitler's truest believer. His end came in the Berlin bunker with the Fuhrer. His wife, Magda, poisoned their six children, and they then died together with instructions for their bodies to be burned.
In Russian footage I'd never seen before, we see his charred remains, a tiny figure, caught in a rictus of rage.
