Battle for Berlin

The Last Broadcasts of a Collapsing Regime

This volume collects the final speeches, radio addresses, and published articles of Joseph Goebbels from March and April 1945, the last weeks of the Third Reich. Berlin was under siege. The Soviet army was closing from the east. The propaganda ministry was operating from bunkers and basements. These are the words of a regime in its death throes, written by the man who had narrated its rise.

What the Book Contains

The texts range from public radio broadcasts aimed at the German civilian population to internal communications and newspaper editorials. Goebbels shifts between defiance and apocalyptic resignation, between calls for total resistance and acknowledgments that the war is lost. The tone is that of a man still performing his function, producing propaganda, long after the audience has stopped believing it, and perhaps long after he has stopped believing it himself.

As a primary source, this collection is valuable precisely because it does not editorialize from a safe historical distance. These are documents. They record what the head of Nazi Germany's propaganda apparatus said, in his own words, as the walls closed in. Historians, students of rhetoric, and readers interested in the psychology of totalitarian regimes will find material here that secondary sources cannot provide.

About This Edition

Author: Joseph Goebbels (ed. and trans. by Antelope Hill Publishing)
Publisher: Antelope Hill Publishing
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9798892520324