SOURCE: Review of Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Samtliche Fragmente, Part 1, in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 63, No. 4, December, 1991, pp. 819-21.

In the following essay, Smelser examines the scholarly importance of the 1987 German edition of Goebbels's diaries.

The editor offers us here [in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, Part 1] the definitive edition of Goebbels's diaries—exhaustive, authoritative, well-edited, and user friendly. When the project is completed—six additional volumes are scheduled to complete the wartime period—it will replace all the various previously published fragments, including those edited by Lochner (entries from 1942-43), Heiber (1925-26), Hamilton (1939-41), and Trevor-Roper (1945), all of which contained many incomplete or inaccurate entries.

This first stage of the project, comprising four volumes plus a provisional index with 3, 400 names, covers the period from Goebbels's earliest recollections, which he began to put on paper in 1924, to 1941, when, in the...