Nazi Goebbels Quotes

A lie once told remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth,” the infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels memorably claimed.

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

Goebbels famously remarked that “men organize life: women are their support and implement their decisions.

Many of the books tossed into the flames in Berlin that night by the joyous students under the approving eye of Dr. Goebbels had been written by authors of world reputation.

Let me explain how such a thing might occasionally happen,' Goebbels said. 'All during the twelve years of the Weimar Republic our people were virtually in jail. Now our party is in charge and they are free again. When a man has been in jail for twelve years and he is suddenly freed, in his joy he may do something irrational, perhaps even brutal. Is that not a possibility in your country also?' Ebbutt, his voice even, noted a fundamental difference in how England might approach such a scenario. 'If it should happen,' he said, 'we would throw the man right back in jail.

Your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.” He toasted his glass in Todd's direction. “Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.

Goebbels was unbelievably ignorant of the world outside Germany. He appeared to know absolutely nothing of the history, the literature and the people of any foreign land. He understood no modern foreign language. His ideas of America, for instance, were childish. This was a weakness shared by all the Nazi bigwigs, beginning with Hitler, and it began to occur to me that it might have ominous consequences for the Third Reich, and unfortunately, for much of the rest of the world. There is nothing more dangerous in the shaping of foreign policy than ignorance - of foreign lands and people.

In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings—Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however much they may have to be fabricated.

Nevertheless, disorderly violence within the Reich itself was revealed to be a dead end. Most of German public opinion was opposed to the chaos. Visible despair led to expressions of sympathy with Jews, rather than the spiritual distancing that Nazis expected. Of course, it was possible for Germans not to wish to see violence inflicted upon Jews while at the same time not wishing to see Jews at all. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich immediately drew the conclusion that inspiring pogroms inside Germany had been a mistake. Not long after they would organize pogroms in much the same way as Goebbels had, but beyond the borders of Germany, in time of war, in places where German force had destroyed the state.

The myth of Aryan dominance, initially an attempt to trace the lost language of the Aryas, began as a set of undemonstrable racial assumptions, and ended in a colossal, perfectly unscientific lie: “I decide who is Jewish and who is Aryan,” announced Goebbels. That is what the Nazis meant by natural selection.

In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise. Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.

It had to allow Strasser, Goebbels and the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that the National Socialists were truly “socialists” and against the money barons. On the other hand, money to keep the party going had to be wheedled out of those who had an ample supply of it.

Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics. “To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”9

Damning those he called “the money pigs of capitalist democracy,”[11] Goebbels in speeches and pamphlets regularly declaimed that “Money has made slaves of us.”[12] “Money,” he argued, “is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.

By early 1937, the Nazi state could be likened to an atomic structure. The nucleus was Hitler, surrounded by successive rings of henchmen. The innermost ring was Göring, Himmler and Goebbels, privy to his less secret ambitions and the means he was proposing to employ to realize them. In the outer rings were the ministers, commanders-in-chief and diplomats, each aware of only a small sector of the plans radiating from the nucleus. Beyond them was the German people. The whole structure was bound by the forces of the police state – by the fear of the wiretap, the letter censors, the Gestapo and ultimately the short, sharp corrective spells provided by Himmler's renowned establishments at Dachau and elsewhere.

Before the campaign was scarcely under way Hitler solved the problem of his citizenship. On February 25 it was announced that the Nazi Minister of the Interior of the state of Brunswick had named Herr Hitler an attaché of the legation of Brunswick in Berlin. Through this comic-opera maneuver the Nazi leader became automatically a citizen of Brunswick and hence of Germany and was therefore eligible to run for President of the German Reich. Having leaped over this little hurdle with ease, Hitler threw himself into the campaign with furious energy, crisscrossing the country, addressing large crowds at scores of mass meetings and whipping them up into a state of frenzy. Goebbels and Strasser, the other two spellbinders of the party, followed a similar schedule. But this was not all. They directed a propaganda campaign such as Germany had never seen. They plastered the walls of the cities and towns with a million screeching colored posters, distributed eight million pamphlets and twelve million extra copies of their party newspapers, staged three thousand meetings a day and, for the first time in a German election, made good use of films and gramophone records, the latter spouting forth from loudspeakers on trucks.

Joseph Goebbels had artfully accomplished what all good propagandists must, convincing the world that their version of reality was reasonable and their opponents’ version biased. In doing that, Goebbels had not only created a compelling vision of the new Germany but also undercut the Nazis’ opponents in the West—whether they were American Jews in New York City or members of Parliament in London or anxious Parisians—making all of them seem shrill, hysterical, and misinformed. As thousands of Americans returned home from the games that fall, many of them felt as one quoted in a German propaganda publication did: “As for this man Hitler. . . . Well I believe we should all like to take him back to America with us and have him organize there just as he has done in Germany.

Empowered by the Enabling Law, Hitler launched a political blitzkrieg, destroying what remained of German democracy. He began by abolishing local assemblies and replacing provincial governors with Nazis. He sent SA thugs to brutalize political opponents and, when necessary, cart them off to newly opened concentration camps. He disposed of the unions by declaring May 1, 1933, a paid national holiday, then occupying union offices throughout the country on May 2. He purged the civil service of disloyal elements and issued a decree banning Jews from the professions. He placed theater, music, and radio productions under the control of Joseph Goebbels and barred unsympathetic journalists from doing their jobs. To ensure order, he consolidated political, intelligence, and police functions in a new organization, the Gestapo.

The Führer was in need of some good news. In four months, Hitler had lost one eighth of his fighting men on the battlefields of North Africa and the eastern front. Fleets of bombers were tearing German cities and industries to shreds. Germany was now losing the underwater war: forty-seven U-boats were sunk in May, triple the number sunk in March, thanks to the code breakers’ pinpointing the “wolf pack.” Hitler blamed his military leaders. “He is absolutely sick of the generals,”24 Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary. “All generals lie. All generals are disloyal.

Autarky was central to the Nazis’ political campaigns, and the theme of freeing Germany from its dependence on a hostile world clearly struck a chord with voters. The canny party propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1932 that a nation that couldn’t manage to get control over the “necessary space, natural forces and natural resources for its material life” would inevitably “fall into dependence on foreign countries and lose its freedom.” The outcome of the First World War and the nature of the postwar world had proven this clearly, he claimed. “Thus a thick wall around Germany?” he asked. “Certainly we want to build a wall, a protective wall.

Believers are supposed to hold that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of the keys of Saint Peter. They are of course free to believe this, and to believe that god decides when to end the tenure of one pope or (more important) to inaugurate the tenure of another. This would involve believing in the death of an anti-Nazi pope, and the accession of a pro-Nazi one, as a matter of divine will, a few months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the opening of the Second World War. Studying that war, one can perhaps accept that 25 percent of the SS were practicing Catholics and that no Catholic was ever even threatened with excommunication for participating in war crimes. (Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated, but that was earlier on, and he had after all brought it on himself for the offense of marrying a Protestant.) Human beings and institutions are imperfect, to be sure. But there could be no clearer or more vivid proof that holy institutions are man-made.

And yet some Germans at least, especially in the art center of Germany which Munich was, preferred to be artistically polluted. In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings—Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

In a most literal sense, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading Nazis were ‘working towards the Führer’, whose authority allowed the realization of their own fantasies. The same was true of countless lesser figures in the racial experiment under way in the occupied territories. Academics – historians at the forefront – excelled themselves in justifying German hegemony in the east. Racial ‘experts’ in the party set to work to construct the ‘scientific’ basis for the inferiority of the Poles. Armies of planners, moved to the east, started to let their imagination run riot in devising megalomaniac schemes for ethnic resettlement and social restructuring. Hitler had to do no more than provide the general licence for barbarism. There was no shortage of ready hands to put it into practice.

Rather than suffering from any individual mental pathology, Goebbels held to a view of the world that he shared with much of the population. In the economic chaos after the humiliating Versailles treaty that concluded the First World War, there were millions like him in Germany. He welcomed the Nazi regime not only because it offered material benefits of various kinds but because it validated impulses that were curbed in the civilisation the Nazis set out to overthrow and destroy. The joy of a type of communal solidarity that was based on hatred of minorities; the pleasure of having these minorities in one’s power and subjecting them to persecution; the delirious sense of release that comes from surrendering personal judgement and serving an autocratic leader – these were satisfactions that Nazism, at its peak, provided not only for Goebbels but for a majority of Germans.

Every evening they announce that they want punch our nose, us and all the other Nazi pigs. Sure, you want to, but doing it is something rather different, gentlemen! The whole affair has a certain tragicomic tone. The Jews talk as if they were really strong, but soon they have to move their tents and run like rabbits from the approaching German soldiers. Qui mange du juif, en meurt! One could almost say that anyone with the Jews on his side has already lost. They are the best pillar of the coming defeat. They carry the seed of destruction. They hoped this war would bring the last desperate blow against National Socialist Germany and an awakening Europe. They will collapse. Already today we begin to hear the cries of the desperate and seduced peoples throughout the world: “The Jews are guilty! The Jews are guilty!” The court that will pronounce judgment on them will be fearful. We do not need to do anything ourselves. It will come because it must come. Just as the fist of an awakened Germany has struck this racial filth, the fist of an awakened Europe will surely follow. Mimicry will not help the Jews then. They will have to face their accusers. The court of the nations will judge their oppressor. Without pity or forgiveness, the blow will strike. The world enemy will fall, and Europe will have peace. "Mimicry", Das Reich, 20 July 1941

Apropos of Mein Kampf, I remember an amusing incident which Ishall relate here, though it is anticipating my story by several years. It took place at the Nazi Party Congress at Nurnberg in 1927. I had been a member of the Party for two-and-a-half years, and presented the annual report. In the course of it I quoted a few phrases from Mein Kampf and this caused a certain sensation. That evening, at dinner with several colleagues Feder Kaufmann Koch and others, they asked me if I had really read the book, with which not one of them seemed to be familiar I admitted having quoted some significant passages from it without bothering my head about the context. This caused general amusement and it was agreed that the first person who joined us who had read Mein Kampf should pay the bill for us all. Gregor answer when he arrived was a resounding no. Goebbels shook his head guiltily, Goering burst into loud laughter and Count Reventlow excused himself on the ground that he had no time. No body had read Mein Kampf, so everybody had to pay his own bill.

The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve. The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries. Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks. *FCC - Federal Communications Commission

By the same token, the failure to control Hitler after he was released from prison looks unreasonable only with the certainty of hindsight. Through the mid-1920s, he was banned from speaking in most German states, but as time passed and memories of the putsch receded, the bans began to be lifted. After all, Hitler was now pledging to abide by the rules of legality, and how, in a democracy, could a politician be denied the right to be heard, no matter how insidious his message, if he stayed within the bounds of the law? Who—and by what authority—had the right to silence him? Saxony, at the start of 1927, was the first large state to lift the speaking prohibition and was followed by Bavaria and others. The last to do so was the all-important state of Prussia, by far the largest in the federation (“whoever possesses Prussia possesses the Reich,” Goebbels said). It held out until after the September 1928 elections, when the Nazis won a paltry 2.6 percent of the vote, but after that dismal showing its prohibition looked untenable, a restriction based on bad faith and sheer partisan politics. Such a feeble electoral result brought the question of free speech in a democratic system into clear focus. In 1928, the Nazis seemed less a threat to democracy than a spent force, while the Weimar Republic seemed to have put down genuine roots. Real wages were rising. Unemployment had dropped dramatically. Industrial production had climbed 25 percent since 1925. “For the first time since the war, the German people were happy,” one journalist wrote. The astute political economist Joseph Schumpeter said in early 1929 that Weimar had achieved an “impressive stability” and that “in no sense, in no area, in no direction, are eruptions, upheavals or disasters probable.” The real threat to democracy during these good times appeared to be not Hitler or his party but any bans on the leaders of political organizations. Of course, two years later, after the Nazis had grown to become the second largest party in the Reichstag, it was too late to outlaw them.