Joseph Goebbels spends his twenties failing to publish novels and plays before joining the Nazi party in 1924, and this film traces how that frustrated writer became the Third Reich's Minister of Propaganda by 1933. It draws heavily on his own diaries, read alongside archival footage and historian interviews, to track how he built the party's media machine and shaped public opinion around Hitler. The private side gets equal attention: a marriage strained by his affair with actress Lida Baarova, an entanglement serious enough that it nearly cost him his position and briefly damaged his standing with Hitler. The film does not separate the family man from the propagandist, showing how the same person capable of domestic devotion also drafted the messaging that prepared the German public for persecution and, later, genocide. Diary entries give a first-person account of his thinking at each stage, from party outsider to the regime's chief architect of image and language. The result is a portrait built from his own words rather than from summary, tracing a single career from provincial ambition to central responsibility for Nazi propaganda.