the future does not belong to the masses but ... to him who drives them; to him who organizes them. The new century belongs to the King of the Masses. The mass movements of our time will end in a dictatorship." This was the credo of Joseph Goebbels, the educated Nazi gangster, the man who created the strategy of terror.Out of the great mass of information he assembled on Goebbels, Curt Riess has constructed a knife-edged portrait of a particularly vicious man.Goebbels came from a small town in the Rhineland. Unlike his later associates in crime and punishment, he went to eight different universities. Shortly after World War I he had his first love affair, he started to read nihilistic philosophers, and had become a definite anti-Semite.In 1922 he heard Hitler speak and immediately joined the National Socialist Party and became its chief propagandist. He turned political rallies into pageants replete with music, flags, and parades championing Hitler as a god.He played an important part in planning the Reichstag fire and was responsible for the Jewish pogroms and later the gas-chamber deaths. And with Machiavellian adroitness he convinced the Germans that war with Poland and the pact with Russia were justifiable. During the war he kept the Germans working with fever pitch by feeding them fantastic stories of their invincibility.This story of a devil's advocate, his political machinations, his love affairs, and his ignominious end, makes exciting and significant reading.