SOURCE: "Inside Nazis: The Goebbels Diaries, 1924-1941," in Canadian Journal of History, Vol. XXV, No. 2, August, 1990, pp. 233-43.

In the following essay, Kater discusses the public and private aspects of Goebbels's life as reflected in his diaries.

Elke Fröhlich of the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte has done historians of National Socialism and the Third Reich an immense service by transcribing, editing, and publishing all hitherto known fragments of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels's surviving diary, which he kept from October 17, 1923, to the spring of 1945. The five volumes, including a register, are marketed by the K. G. Saur publishing company, with offices in Munich, New York, London, and Paris. In this case, Dr. Fröhlich has been able to publish hand-written diaries dating from July 1924 to July 1941. As Fröhlich explains in her introduction, because of the fullness of the events during the war Goebbels decided to dictate...