I'm at one with prominent Nazi scholar Joachim Fest and you in the fascination. Dr. Goebbels, the Marat of Red Berlin, was really the only member of the Nazi elite that was truly interesting. He was a working class born intellectual in a party dominated in large measure by petty bourgeois born philistines, cool and sarcastic in a party that valued bombastic passion. He was very much cut from different cloth than the stunningly banal, mediocre intellects and personalities that typically personified the National Socialist Bonzen. And as Speer noted in Inside the Third Reich, nobody in the party could hold a candle to him when it came to political instinct. But that came with a gigantic streak of megalomania and nihilism.

Peter Longerich has one, but to be honest, I think the Goebbels diaries are the best source, for all the caution that must be attached them. Friedrich Nietzsche once said that Dostoevsky's classic novel, Notes from the Underground, had the smell of blood about it. The same could be said of the Goebbels diaries, particularly the early entries-that man was even more misanthropic than I am. Joachim Fest's work on him also is really good, as it always was.

Great question. I recommend The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 by Goebbels himself. I would balance that with Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death by Heinrich Fraenkel and Roger Manvell (2010). A book that places him in context of the Nazi regime is Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Many good titles in German, too.