Joseph Goebbels built the lie that the rest of this collection depicts. As Reich Minister of Propaganda he controlled everything Germans read, heard and saw, and he was ruthlessly good at it — bending press, radio and film to manufacture the cult of Hitler, the theatre of the Nuremberg rallies, and the hatreds the regime ran on. A gifted, cynical orator, he gave his most infamous speech at the Berlin Sportpalast in February 1943, days after the disaster at Stalingrad, whipping a hand-picked crowd into roaring for "total war." He stayed loyal to the end. In the Berlin bunker on 1 May 1945, he and his wife murdered their six young children and then killed themselves — a final act as monstrous as anything in his career.

The figure catches him in full flow, gesturing from a swastika-draped podium bristling with microphones — the setting of his power, the stage where words did the regime's work. It belongs with the leader whose image he built, the saluting Hitler, the mass spectacle he choreographed at the Nuremberg rally stand, and the rival for Hitler's favour, Hermann Göring. In a display of the Nazi leadership, Goebbels at his podium is the figure who explains how the whole terrible apparatus held a nation in its grip.

Model: LAH202 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set (figure with podium)