Page "Joseph Goebbels" Paragraph 5

Goebbels was born in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach on the edge of the Ruhr district.

His family were Catholics ; his father was a factory clerk, his mother originally a farmhand.

Goebbels had four siblings: Hans ( 1893 – 1947 ), Konrad ( 1895 – 1949 ), Elisabeth ( 1901 – 1915 ) and Maria ( 1910 – 1949 ; married to the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich ).

He was educated at a Christian Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur ( university entrance examination ) in 1916.

He had a deformed right leg, the result either of club foot or osteomyelitis.

William L. Shirer, who worked in Berlin as a journalist in the 1930s and was acquainted with Goebbels, wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ( 1960 ) that the deformity was from a childhood attack of osteomyelitis and a failed operation to correct it.

Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg, but nevertheless walked with a limp.

He was rejected for military service in World War I, which he bitterly resented.

He later sometimes misrepresented himself as a war veteran and his disability as a war wound.

He acted as an " office soldier " from June to October 1917 in Rheydt's " Patriotic Help Unit ".