Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels

I started this book so long ago the pages have turned yellow, but it's so depressing I can't finish it. ( )

Being the third translation into English commercial publlishing of National Socialism's great propagandist's inner thoughts as recorded in his diary. If there is any controversy as to the authenticity of the diary, I am unaware of it, so I took this at face value. This is of course a first-magnitude historical source, and it is reasonably interesting reading as well. That these entries cover the war's dramatic endgame makes them all the more compelling. Yet I felt that the previously published excertpts were better-edited; for example, they did not include the daily Wehrmacht military briefing, which Goebbels did not write and rarely sheds much light on the entries. This editor did include several maps, but they're nearly illegible. As for the quality of Goebbels' reflections, to some extent they reflect the psychological and political insight one might expect from a celebrated propagandist, but in the final analysis he was pinning a lot of wishful thinking on factors such as Allied disagreements and domestic political problems which, though they did exist, were not about to scuttle the final military push. ( )