Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels

Awful and fascinating. By the time these entries start, the war is lost. Massively destructive bombing raids on German cities are a nightly event, the Battle of the Bulge has failed, they're steadily losing territory in every direction, and Goebbels is engaged in denial, scapegoating, projection, and wishful thinking to an extraordinary degree. It's like a bad car crash you can't stop from looking at, but it's mildly nauseating.

It's hard to give a "rating" to a book by an evil person, and about evil. It's in a piece with The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire
by Andrew O'Shaughnessy, about the much less evil, and eventual American allies, the British. But Goebbels is unapologetic to the end. He talks about Britain, the U.S. and the USSR are destroying everything worthwhile in Germany and for that matter the world. He takes no responsibility for Germany's stirring the pot in such a manner as to make destroying Germany as he and Hitler made it a necessity.

He describes an inverted world where evil is greatness, and good is evil. He demonizes those that tried to surrender so as to gain peace

I give this a high rating not so much for the author -- who hardly needs any introduction -- but for the fact that this diary gives one an awful insight into just how delusional the leadership of the Third Reich was in its final weeks. It's also a rare chance to watch the collapse of a regime from the inside, from the point of view of a high insider. For these reasons, I recommend 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 show more 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. show less

I started this book so long ago the pages have turned yellow, but it's so depressing I couldn't finish it. Finally finished reading this book (4-2014). Absolutely amazing how an intelligent person can become completely delusional.

Joseph Goebbels's diaries, only now surfacing some thirty-two years after his violent death, are the most spectacular and probably the last great literary legacy of the Third Reich. Final Entries is a deeply personal account by the man second in power only to the Führer himself. It covers Nazi Germany's stupendous last days, from February through April 1945, as the American and Russian armies close in on Berlin. This is the greatest doomsday story of the twentieth century, the climactic days when the political structure of the world was being transformed