Читать книгу Propaganda Goebbels. Paul Joseph Goebbels. Biography, photo, personal life - Max Klim - Страница 4

The biography of all the members of the Nazi Party on closer examination was not so clean with regard to the Aryan blood, as we would like. Hitler concealed his Jewish roots all his life from grandmother and grandfather, and his fellow Hess, Heydrich, Himmler and Canaris in their “blue blood” had obvious Jewish admixtures. In Goebbels, born in the family of the clerk and later the accountant of the factory of Fritz Goebbels and Maria Katarina Odenhausen, in his youth there were Jewish teachers (for example, literary critic Max Freiherr von Waldberg), and the bride and first love of Elsa Janke was Jewish by mother.

Born on a traditional Catholic family on October 29, 1897, Paul Jozef Goebbels had two elder brothers in the industrial city of Mönchengladbach, Paul Konrad and Hans, and two younger sisters: Elizabeth and Maria (another sister of Goebbels, also called Maria, died in 1896 in infancy). The ancestors of the future minister of propaganda were from the peasants, the roots of his grandmother’s grandmother on the maternal line of Maria Gervers sent any researcher to Luxembourg, but it was her origin that reproached Goebbels with blood purists, hinting at the Jewish kinship of the minister on the Dutch line. Goebbels, in order to dispel all the rumors, was forced to release in 1932 in print material with a detailed description of his family tree.

In his early childhood Joseph Goebbels suffered poliomyelitis, which determined his lameness for life (one of his legs was shorter than the second by 10 centimeters). This defect did not allow him to join the army during the First World War, but later the master of myths and propaganda Goebbels will explain to everyone around his limp injuries received on the battlefields. Josef was ugly and frail since childhood, for which he received from peers the offensive nicknames of Mephistopheles and the Rhine mummy.

Goebbels was forced to compensate for the shortcomings of his appearance with wit of mind and diligence: in the urban real school he was one of the best in the class, graduating with excellent marks in 1917, enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, where, to spite all the mockers, he received a dissertation on creativity little-known abroad, Germany’s playwright Wilhelm Schütze, Ph. D. Goebbels, who did not yet have a bacillus of anti-Semitism, dreamed of having a Jewish Friedrich Gundolf in the scientific leaders. But the supervisor of the thesis was Max Freiherr von Waldberg, who assessed the work of the ward as “satisfactory”.

In his memoirs Goebbels repeatedly stressed the poverty of his family, which in part corresponded to reality. And if the colorful stories of the propaganda minister about manufacturing as a child together with his parents for the sale of lamps for lanterns can still be considered a myth, the fact that there was nothing to pay for the education of Joseph to the Goebbels family can not be doubted. Therefore, they received a credit of 960 marks for study in the Society of Albert the Great, founded in honor of a medieval German scientist and theologian.

That’s why the parents hoped that Goebbels would go further along the theological path, as the cost of his training, giving an interest-free loan, took over the church. However, when he studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn, Munich, Würzburg and Freiburg, young Jozef Goebbels set himself another course in demonstrating his abilities.