Joseph Goebbels Joseph Goebbels Paul Joseph Goebbels (; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's close associates and most devoted followers, and was known for his skills in public speaking and his deep, virulent antisemitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust. Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined
Doctor of Philosophy and in Germany and elsewhere in Europe the basic faculty of liberal arts was known as the "faculty of philosophy". The degree is abbreviated PhD (sometimes Ph.D. in North America), from the Latin "Philosophiae Doctor", pronounced as three separate letters (). The abbreviation DPhil, from the English 'Doctor of Philosophy', is used by a small number of British and Commonwealth universities, including Oxford and formerly York and Sussex, as the abbreviation for degrees from those institutions. In the universities of Medieval Europe, study was organized in four faculties: the basic faculty of arts, and the three higher faculties of theology,