SOURCE: "Joseph Goebbels: Man the Beast," in The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, translated by Michael Bullock, Pantheon Books, 1970, pp. 93-7.

In the following essay, Fest analyzes Goebbels's effectiveness as a propagandist for the Third Reich.

Propaganda was the genius of National Socialism. Not only did it owe to propaganda its most important successes; propaganda was also its one and only original contribution to the conditions for its rise and was always more than a mere instrument of power: propaganda was part of its essence. What National Socialism meant is far less easily grasped from the contradictory and nebulous conglomerate of its philosophy than from the nature of its propagandist stage management. Carrying it to an extreme, one might say that National Socialism was propaganda masquerading as ideology, that is to say, a will to power which formed its ideological theorems according to...