For more than 10 years Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, has been remembered as a rabid anti-Semite and the main apologist for probably the worst regime in history. In May 1945, on the eve of the Nazi collapse, he committed suicide. By so doing, he escaped trial as a war criminal.
Goebbels was certainly an evil figure. But today - in the age of spin-doctors, image-makers and news managers - there is something else about the man which needs to be highlighted: Goebbels was, to the very end, not only a master manipulator but a true media professional. All of which - in the 100th year of his birth - gives his ideas an unexpected topicality.
Attempts by politicians to manipulate public opinion via the media are once again becoming a notorious fact of life in Britain, the US and many other countries, America's most famous spin-doctor, Dick Morris - a White House adviser until 1996, when he was forced to resign after an affair with a prostitute - is said to have played a key role in 're-inventing' President Clinton and getting him re-elected.
The spin-doctor's task is of course, not only to create a positive public image for his or her client, but to head off unfavourable publicity wherever possible. This was precisely the job which Goebbels set out to do for Hitler in a very professional way.
Goebbels did exercise an iron grip on the German media, but he never imagined that opinion could be shaped by force alone. He could not, in the end, prevent the Germans and many others under Nazi rule from listening to the BBC, even though this was illegal. Nor could he control the media in neutral countries, particularly the US, which joined the war only at the end of 1941. Keeping the US neutral was high on the Nazis' list of priorities.
Goebbels pioneered the techniques of 'news management' and public relations. Like any image-maker he attached importance to symbolic gestures, however empty. In 1940, just after the Nazis had seized Denmark in a bloodless invasion, Goebbels directed that "we should be generous towards the Danes in all matters which do not cost us anything".
At the beginning of the Second World War, he made determined (though ultimately futile) efforts to 'news manage' American correspondents in Germany. They were subject to fewer censorship restrictions than their colleagues in wartime Britain. The renowned American journalist William Shirer was given excellent facilities when, in June 1940, he reported from Paris just after it had fallen to the Nazis (He described this in his diary as "the saddest assignment of my life").
Goebbels tried, wherever possible, to use American reporters to contradict what he considered inaccurate Allied news stories (or, as he put it, "the neutralisation of enemy lies").
Shortly after the Germans had seized Poland, he arranged for an American journalist to visit the Polish Catholic shrine of Czestochowa in order to disprove a story that the Nazis had destroyed it. This was an early example of what we would now call the technique of rapid rebuttal. Where Nazi anti-semitism was concerned, it was impossible for Goebbels to rebut the story. Faced with what he called "the embarrassing subject of the Jews" (i.e. the Holocaust), he resorted to another spin-doctor device; 'If you can't deny bad news, find another story.'
At a secret briefing in December l942, Goebbels proposed distracting attention from the Holocaust by launching a Nazi media campaign against alleged British atrocities (in India, Palestine and elsewhere). His idea was that if both sides started accusing each other of atrocities, then the public would get bored and the subject would, as he put it; "end by disappearing from the agenda".
It may have looked unpromising. but within a few months, Goebbels had an unexpected stroke of luck. German troops on the Russian front uncovered a Soviet atrocity. In the forest of Katyn in Western Russia, they dug up the graves of more than fourteen thousand Polish officers captured by the Russians in 1939 when Stalin invaded Eastern Poland.
Goebbels correctly claimed that they had been shot on Moscow's orders. (The Kremlin angrily denied this and blamed the crime on the Nazis.) When Goebbels broke the story in April 1943. It caused an immediate rift between Stalin and the Polish government in exile in London. Goebbels captured the headlines at a particularly convenient time for the Nazis. The Katyn story deflected attention from the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, which happened in the same month.
Goebbels' core philosophy, based on a tabloid-style populist approach, was said to have been partly inspired by the ideas of the first Lord Northcliffe. "It was a mistake", Goebbels once said, "to conduct propaganda in such a way that it will stand up to critical examination of intellectuals".
He was not unduly worried about winning over his more thoughtful audience because he believed that "intellectuals always yield to strength, and this will be the ordinary man in the street". In dealing with mass audiences, said Goebbels, "tbe most primitive arguments are the most effective".
Goebbels was certainly not primitive. He was an evil but highly intelligent figure with a genuine interest in mass psychology and an undisguised contempt for the critical faculties of public opinion. He was not the inventor of censorship, lies and dirty tricks, but he was one of the first politicians in the age of mass media to make systematic use of psychology in the pursuit of power. In that sense, he was indeed a pioneer.
There are many differences between Goebbels and today's spin-doctors. Modern spin-doctors cannot give orders to the media. They sometimes promote good causes and they do cater for a demand; politicians naturally want to use the media in the most effective way. But this still leaves a serious problem. Political propaganda in modern society is becoming increasingly professional with a growing reliance on non-rational techniques of persuasion. At one time it was hoped that the findings of psychology would be used as an antidote, rather than an aid to mass manipulation. Until that happens, the lessons of Goebbels will not have been fully learned.