Joseph Goebbels read the book avidly, and is recorded as having read passages from it to Adolf Hitler on two occasions in the early months of 1945, as defeat loomed. Goebbels told Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk that after the second reading a few days before the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April, "The Führer . . . had tears in his eyes."[19]