The photo was taken in 1933 by LIFE magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. One of his most memorable pictures, the portrait still casts its evil spell more than 70 years later. “The fierce arrogance of power, normally covered with false grace of good humor, shone through miraculously into Eisenstaedt’s film,” later wrote LIFE magazine. A Jew, Eisenstaedt himself remembered [the meeting, and photographed the moment when Goebbels learned that fact about him]: “He looked at me with hateful eyes and waited for me to wither. But I didn’t wither. If I have a camera in my hand, I don’t know fear.”
People aren't evil. It's not as if there's a certain section of the world, a specific segment of the population that is simply born evil and full of hatred for someone, some group that is unliked. As much as we'd like to pretend that hatred exists elsewhere, across the globe or somewhere faded into the recesses of history, hatred is taught and learned every second. It spreads quickly and deforms everything it touches; no one that encounters this black-hearted coldness can ever really be the same when hatred gets finished with them.
Hatred is a poison, ravaging humanity and desecrating the graves of those who fought so hard to eradicate it from human existence. When we learn it, when we experience it, we lose something about ourselves forever - hatred steals our hope from us. Even if we spend our lives erasing as much of it as humanly possible, exhausting ourselves working to heal divisions and to build enough commonality to get rid of it for good, it can seem bleak and hopeless to see this face again, in our daily lives, among our friends, our family, our community.