Sow & Reap - Goebbels children suffered for his crimes.

For those who are a touch rusty on their National Socialist high command structure, Joseph Goebbels was the ‘Reich minister of propaganda’.

He was a man who practiced speeches in mirrors, affecting mannerisms he deemed most adequately and effectively conveyed his meaning to the crowd. A man who would rehearse those same mannerisms as though positions in a play so as to perform them perfectly. He orchestrated events in such a controlled manner, considering everything from the accoutrement around the stage, to the loudspeakers, all in service of maximising the impact of what he said.

A man who understood not just the importance of the message being delivered but also the method of that delivery and its impact on the recipient. By all accounts this made him a fantastic public speaker, whose virulent beliefs were expressed readily and often to those around and ‘beneath’ him. He regularly took the stage time after time espousing ideals of increasingly evident hatred.

Yet perhaps far more importantly to the wider impact he’d have, is the fact he saw the huge potential in then new technology as a tool for propaganda. Seizing upon the arts and the use of news as media to devastating effect. He made martyrs oc fallen men through the big screen, he put the messages of power in peoples homes through the radio.

I know some of this seems obvious to us all now, but the overarching “branding” and the use of new technology amongst “The party” motivated by Goebbbels was at the time an evolution of the understanding and importance of image in modern politics and more importantly control of a populous. It is not that humans had never understood or used these things in part (any heraldry of a noble house or Catholic Church accoutrements will tell you that) but this is when it became industrialised, mass produced and codified as it were.

It is through this combination of overarching ideas and understanding on propagandas use, of the image of a man, alongside this extreme control across such a broad space, that he was able to help construct & propagate the ideas that would raise the Führer from man to something else, something so pervasive that it still exists today, a myth.

Yet he did not simply raise up one man, he made a whole swathe of people feel as though they had been raised up as well, but how? Simply by telling them others were “holding them down” by shaping a perceived enemy for them, and then of course attacking that enemy. He played on fears at the heart of people struggling, notions of “bread and work” of “mother and child”… he shaped shadow puppets to attack people’s sense of self, then handed them a flame to swing wildly at the darkness he cast, knowing full well what that fire would consume.

Throughout his life he would never directly pull a trigger, he was even exempt from war service in WW1 due disability. By all accounts he never even raised his hand against another, content to sit back and simply orchestrate, agitate and instil violence in the early street fighting days of “The Party”. Make no mistake he committed horrendous acts of violence, just with the pen, being as it was mightier than the sword

The first physically violent thing he would do was to poison his 6 children, followed by himself and his wife, in 1945, in a bunker that reverberated with the consequences of his actions.

I don’t weep for him, I’m sure his children wouldn’t either. - This writing was undertaken as reminder of the way in which art can and is bastardised and manipulated in the service of horror. It was written on a day when much was being made of the death of a propagandist who served a new regime.