The Goebbels Diaries (1945)

Plot

As the wreckage of the thousand year Reich collapsed about him, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda continued to dictate his diary. Here, unrevised, uncorrected. authentic, are the reactions of Hitler's most consistently faithful lieutenant, set down as the lines buckled, as
Russian and Allied pressure bore in on the battered capital of the empire that was not to be. Here, in this absorbing document, are the reservations, the hopes, the plans, of a dedicated servant unable to comprehend the scale of the disaster that was upon him. Here, in the tones of a man racked by fatigue but unbreakably optimistic, are the comments of an observer closer to the throne than it was wise to be. Here Goebbels sets down, without qualification, his reactions to the horror that Europe had become, his revulsion at the attitudinizing of the 'criminals' and 'villains' who were destroying the Fuhrer's notion of Europe of the world. Here are his suspicions of the Yalta share-out, his sceptical predictions for the outcome of the 'San Fiasco' conference, the desperate rationalizations of a man who knew the military struggle was lost, but clutched at any delaying tactic that might promise a political solution.
Here is all Goebbels' loathing for Goring's mishandling of the Luftwaffe, and his parallel hatred of Churchill, whom he saw as a bolshevist conspirator and the arch advocate of unconditional surrender. Here are the political forecasts of an orator who used the term 'Iron Curtain' twelve months before Churchill's Fulton speech. Here with an often mordant with a perverse pride and more than a hint of gallows humour, is an unforgettable picture of the might of the Allied victors as seen from the wrong end of the gun. Never before have we had so impassioned a record of the last days of the Twilight of the Gods as this, the last key document to emerge from the Third Reich.