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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Goebbels was sure of one thing, though: “Once we have the power we will never give it up. They will have to carry our dead bodies out of the ministries.

My camp counselor won’t even let me read during lunch. She says it’s because reading is antisocial, but I think it’s because she’s actually Joseph Goebbels.” “Who’s that?” “Nazi. Burned books.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro and perhaps the most accomplished media-wizard of the modern age, allegedly explained his method succinctly: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.

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.

A few weeks ago, a pimp had fired a bullet into the mouth of a young SA Führer who had liberated one of his ‘girls’. On Sunday the Stormtrooper had died, and Goebbels’s newspaper Der Angriff had made a saint of the youth who had fallen in love with a whore and paid for it with his life, a martyr for the movement, or Blutzeuge as the Nazis called it.

Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day. In

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.

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

For the first time—in the last relatively free election Germany was to have—the Nazi Party now could employ all the vast resources of the government to win votes. Goebbels was jubilant. “Now it will be easy,” he wrote in his diary on February 3, “to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.”2

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.

Himmler was himself ‘more normal,’ that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement. He was not a bohemian like Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Göring. He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.

The bullet had made Wessel a martyr for the Nazi movement, but he was an unlikely saint: a young priest’s son who had jolted the SA in Friedrichshain into action, only to fall in love with a prostitute and start shamefully neglecting his SA. Goebbels didn’t care. For Berlin’s top Nazi, the Sturmführer made the perfect martyr. Nevertheless, it was fortunate that Wessel had finally succumbed to his injuries, otherwise the model Nazi might yet have resigned from the NSDAP. In the last few months, he seemed to have lost all interest in politics.

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.

   Hitler had now, by the start of 1931, gathered around him in the party the little band of fanatical, ruthless men who would help him in his final drive to power and who, with one exception, would be at his side to help him sustain that power during the years of the Third Reich, though another of them, who was closest of all to him and perhaps the ablest and most brutish of the lot, would not survive, even with his life, the second year of Nazi government. There were five who stood above the other followers at this time. These were Gregor Strasser, Roehm, Goering, Goebbels and Frick.

In our new world there are many emergent states and many longer established nations without the natural self-discipline to resist men similar in nature to the Nazi leaders should they emerge and either stride or slip to power. Such men are not always easy to recognize for what they are until it is too late. This certainly was the case with Himmler. Hitler at first appeared an absurd fanatic, Goebbels a posturing mob-orator, Göring a good-natured ass, Himmler a nonentity. Yet none of them proved to be what they had seemed, or they would never have won by their wits alone the supreme power in a great nation.

No previous games had seen such a spectacular organization nor such a lavish display of entertainment. Goering, Ribbentrop and Goebbels gave dazzling parties for the foreign visitors—the Propaganda Minister’s “Italian Night” on the Pfaueninsel near Wannsee gathered more than a thousand guests at dinner in a scene that resembled the Arabian Nights. The visitors, especially those from England and America, were greatly impressed by what they saw: apparently a happy, healthy, friendly people united under Hitler—a far different picture, they said, than they had got from reading the newspaper dispatches from Berlin.

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.

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.

There was a new president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution. They were Republican, they were isolationist, and among them, yes, there were anti-Semites—as indeed there were among the southerners in FDR’s own party—but that was a long way from their being Nazis. Besides, one had only to listen on Sunday nights to Winchell lashing out at the new president and “his friend Joe Goebbels” or hear him listing the sites under consideration by the Department of the Interior for building concentration camps—sites mainly located in Montana, the home state of Lindbergh’s “national unity” vice president, the isolationist Democrat Burton K. Wheeler—to be assured of the fervor with which the new administration was being scrutinized by favorite reporters of my father’s, like Winchell and Dorothy Thompson and Quentin Reynolds and William L. Shirer, and, of course, by the staff of PM. Even I now took my turn with PM when my father brought it home at night, and not just to read the comic strip Barnaby

In the summer of 1931,” Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief first for the party and later for the Reich, relates, “the Fuehrer suddenly decided to concentrate systematically on cultivating the influential industrial magnates.”14 What magnates were they? Their identity was a secret which was kept from all but the inner circle around the Leader. The party had to play both sides of the tracks. 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. Throughout the latter half of 1931, says Dietrich, Hitler “traversed Germany from end to end, holding private interviews with prominent [business] personalities.” So hush-hush were some of these meetings that they had to be held “in some lonely forest glade. Privacy,” explains Dietrich, “was absolutely imperative; the press must have no chance of doing mischief. Success was the consequence.

But it makes no sense," she said, "Why would this one death in Paris spark riots throughout the Reich?" "That's what I'm saying, Truus. It isn't the cause of the riots. It's the excuse. When Goebbels said they wouldn't hamper demonstrations, he was inviting this violence. It's what the Nazis do so well. They create a crisis--like they did with the Reichstag fire in '33--which they then use to increase their military control. They want every German to see the havoc they can wreak at the snap of a finger. They want every German to know the violence they can bring to bear on any single person for the slightest perceived offense, What better way to silence citizens opposing the regime than with the prospect that their resistance will jeopardize their families and their lives?" "It isn't just the Nazis now, though. They're saying crowds of ordinary Germans have been flocking into the streets to gape at the wreckage and to cheer. 'Like holiday makers at a fairground,' Joop. Where are the decent German people? Why aren't they standing against this? Where are the leaders of the world?" Joop said, "You put more faith in politicians than they warrant. They cower at the slightest threat to their power, although of course no one but Hitler has any real power in Germany now.

He authorized Goebbels to deliver a powerful and provocative speech in Danzig on June 17, denouncing Polish ‘ill treatment’ and demanding the city's return to the Reich. Nazi editors were confidentially briefed: ‘This is to be a first trial balloon to test the international atmosphere on the settlement of the Danzig question.

Jews and Marxists were forbidden in any case to practise journalism in Nazi Germany. In October 1933, Hitler enacted an editors’ law modelled on the regimentation of journalists in fascist Italy. From mid-1935 the Catholic-owned press was also purged of all divisive religious trends. Sinning newspapers were sniffed out and closed down. As Goebbels publicly emphasized: ‘I reject the standpoint that there is in Germany a Catholic and a Protestant press; or a workers’ press; or a farmers’ press; or a city press or a proletariat press. There exists only a German press.’ To Goebbels's new monolithic organization Hitler assigned three tasks: to illuminate to the world the urgency of the problems he was about to tackle; to warn that he would not be trifled with; and to show the world the solidarity of the German people.

Nazi diplomacy rules the world, without love or poetry.

Roy Welker allowed his version of the Hitler Myth, augmented with a brimming tablespoon of Goebbels’s propaganda, to narcotize his view of Nazi Germany.

The attempt, then, was to explain Nazism in the light of something, for liberals, readily identifiable, rational and precedented, be it in economic or political terms. That such explanations contained and imparted a measure oftruth is undeniable. But the peculiar admixture ofknown and unprecedented elements which constituted Nazism produced something novel and alien which was not explicable in the light of each ofits parts. Nor was the thrust of Nazi internal and foreign policies intelligible without attending to the ideology's racial core. The failure to understand the ideology resulted in the emergence of secondary misconceptions concerning the workings and policies of the Third Reich. For many years, Nazi excesses were attributed to the first flush of revolutionary zeal or to 'evil counsellors', such as Streicher and Goebbels, with whom the Führer surrounded himself. That the evils and excesses were inherent in the ideology and in the system of government in which it was embodied was thus lost upon many observers. Thus liberalism's values and preconceptions served as a necessary backdrop to the emergence and adoption of a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. Attitudes to war, attitudes to Versailles and perceptions of Nazism constituted the fabric of the backdrop. But while a necessary pre-condition, they were not the sole or indeed main 'cause' of appeasement. Liberalism was responsible for a mood, anti-war and anti-Versailles, and afforded, when necessary, pretexts for that policy.

By 1977, Institutional Investor declared that “indexing is likely to be an idea whose time will pass.”38 At any rate, there was widespread skepticism that ordinary investors would ever adopt index funds. After all, they were completely unaware of the research being pumped out by academia on the poor average performance of their mutual fund managers, and anyway, who would want to just settle for mediocrity? “It seems unlikely that the public will ever embrace buying the averages in this way, since individuals usually seek dramatic gains, not a market-linked performance many equate with mediocrity,” the industry magazine wrote.39 Fouse later jokingly quoted the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to explain why the general public was slow to cotton on: “Only small secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by the public’s incredulity.

We haven’t heard from you yet, Frau Vetter,” said the commandant. “Oh yes … yes … I was supposed to call you, that number …” I fumbled in my bag. “I wonder if I still have it …” Did I really imagine that I could convince him I had misplaced his number the way I had “lost” my Nazi Red Cross pin? “The number is on your desk,” he said with a smile. “Ah. Yes. In my office.” “No. Not that desk. The antique desk with the brass fittings and feet like the claws of a lion, the desk you have in your apartment.” In my mind’s ear, I heard the fiend Goebbels laughing.

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

Propaganda vs. Truth "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." ~ Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, Nazi Germany "If you tell a big enough truth that people would prefer not to hear and keep repeating it, people will despise you, think you're fucking crazy and try and hang you by your balls." ~ Beryl Dov, Hated Minister of Truth, Hello Poetry

The novel’s audience was not restricted to the literati; it had prominent fans in other sectors too. In 1943, Hamsun gave his Nobel medal to one of those fans: Josef Goebbels. Hamsun wanted to thank the Nazi propaganda minister for the hospitality he had enjoyed during a recent trip to Germany. Ten years earlier, a 74-year-old Hamsun had taken to supporting the Nazis in Norwegian newspapers. When the Nazis invaded Norway in April 1940, Hamsun urged his countrymen to surrender. Not long after his meeting with Goebbels, Hamsun paid a visit to Hitler himself. Two years later, when Hitler committed suicide, Hamsun took the opportunity to compose an unsolicited obituary, which was published in Norway’s most prominent broadsheet, Aftenposten. In the obituary, Hamsun mourned the loss of the Führer and praised him as “a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations.” The Allies liberated Norway the next day.

During these last few years when I was immersed in postmodern academic texts, I was repeatedly reminded of a certain diary entry by a young Ph.D., a novelist and playwright, in 1924. “I believe that The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion are a forgery,” he wrote. “I believe in the intrinsic but not the factual truth of the Protocols.” That was Joseph Goebbels, a decade before he became the Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda.

OW: Sam Fuller. Peter gets furious with me for not expressing enthusiasm for Fuller. Fritz Lang, you know? He thinks is great. Lang, whose mother was Jewish, told me that Goebbels, who was trying to get him to head up the Nazi movie industry, offered to make him an honorary Aryan, of which there were only a handful. Lang said, “But I’m Jewish,” and Goebbels replied, “I decide who is Jewish!

Would it?” Sharon asks. “One man does not a nation make. There were plenty of people trying to kill Hitler, but they failed to see the broader problem. “There were worse leaders among the Nazis. Take out Hitler, and Goering, Goebbels, Eichmann, Mengele, Himmler, or even Bormann would have stepped into his shoes. There was no shortage of fascists ready to take power, and the outcome would have been largely the same. No, as tragic as it was, Germany needed to be defeated. If anything, Hitler’s pigheaded stupidity hastened that fall. He made all kinds of stupid decisions that went unquestioned and shortened the war.

Fascists have been particularly enamored of traditional gender roles. Vichy France made Mother’s Day a major festival and awarded medals to good mothers. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, argued that “Man should be trained as a warrior and woman as recreation for the warrior,” a precept he put into practice in his own life as far as the recreation was concerned.

The Shrine of the Little Flower and its adjoining offices were swarming like a hive of bees, and some editor employed by the fervent Father was taking the mental poison of Josef Goebbels in Berlin, paraphrasing it in the American idiom, and sending it out every week to the half-million readers of Social Justice. When his enemies pointed that out, it didn’t worry the man of God in the least. A strange kaleidoscopic moment of history, when the Nazis had stopped fighting the Communists and the Communists had stopped fighting the Nazis! But Charles Edward Coughlin, whose forefathers had come from Ireland, had one pillar of fire to guide him, one principle which could never fail—whatever hurt the British Empire must be pleasing to God.

Yet Götterdämmerung is no apocalypse: it envisions a transfer of power, from gods to people. It is also the redress of a wrong, restoring the Ring from the illusory heights to the truthful depths. Wotan, very unlike Hitler, has repented of his megalomania: "I longed in my heart for power ... I acted unfairly… I did not return the ring to the Rhine... The curse that I fed will not flee from me now." The conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, whose father, Hans, was part of the anti-Nazi resistance, once told me: "When I really think about Wagner, I don't discover anything that had to lead to Hitler. And what happens here"—we were looking at the score of Walkure, at Wotan's cries of shame—"is not something that any fascist could have written. Because it is not simplifying. It is a 'giving up' thing. Wagner abused power but hated the state." "Götterdämmerung" is the wrong word for the scenes that unfolded in Berlin during the war's last days: the double suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, the suicides of Josef and Magda Goebbels, the murder of the Goebbels children, the killing of Hitler's dogs.

Hitler, seeing an opportunity, not a disaster, and always comfortable with a lie that he could sell to his adoring public, blamed the civilian bombing on the British. The English had done it intentionally, he told the German people. He pledged revenge against “the English murderers” and started to bomb English civilians. So began the Battle of Britain, the bombing campaign aimed at London. Eventually, the citizens of Berlin would have to pay the price. But the Nazi high command remained undeterred. "Do you want total war?" Goebbels shouted to a large crowd just hours after the January 30 bombing of Berlin. “Isn’t that what you asked for?” “Ja! Ja!” the crowd roared in response. Total war was what they had asked for and total war was what they were now getting. And so the war of terror from above was underway. The unwritten rules of war from World War One seemed forgotten: in the past civilians were not bombed. The unarmed “warriors” were now delivered up to the bombs, as required by the new rules of conflict. The bombs shredded, entombed, suffocated, and incinerated women and children, old people and infants, prisoners and hospital patients, friend and foe, National Socialists and

Did you know," he said, "that until almost this very moment nothing would have delighted me more than to prove that you were a spy, to see you shot?" "No," I said. "And do you know why I don't care now if you were a spy or not?" he said. "You could tell me now that you were a spy, and we would go on talking calmly, just as we're talking now. I would let you wander off to wherever spies go when a war is over. You know why?" he said. "No," I said. "Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us," he said. "I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler--but from you." He took my hand. "You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.

Enemies were central to the anxieties that helped inflame the fascist imagination. Fascists saw enemies within the nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies, though their danger seemed to intensify with the advance of Bolshevism and with the exacerbated border conflicts and unfulfilled national claims that followed World War I. Internal enemies grew luxuriantly in number and variety in the mental landscape as the ideal of the homogeneous national state made difference more suspect. Ethnic minorities had been swollen in western Europe after the 1880s by an increased number of refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. Political and cultural subversives—socialists of various hues, avant-garde artists and intellectuals—discovered new ways to challenge community conformism. The national culture would have to be defended against them. Joseph Goebbels declared at a book-burning ceremony in Berlin on May 10, 1933, that “the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit.” Though Mussolini and his avant-garde artist friends worried less than the Nazis about cultural modernism, Fascist squads made bonfires of socialist books in Italy. The discovery of the role of bacteria in contagion by the French biologist Louis Pasteur and the mechanisms of heredity by the Austrian monk-botanist Gregor Mendel in the 1880s made it possible to imagine whole new categories of internal enemy: carriers of disease, the unclean, and the hereditarily ill, insane, or criminal. The urge to purify the community medically became far stronger in Protestant northern Europe than in Catholic southern Europe. This agenda influenced liberal states, too. The United States and Sweden led the way in the forcible sterilization of habitual offenders (in the American case, especially African Americans), but Nazi Germany went beyond them in the most massive program of medical euthanasia yet known.

NATURE OF THE ENEMY, wartime propaganda. BROADCAST HISTORY: June 16–July 14, 1942, CBS. 30m, Tuesdays at 8:30. PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Charles Vanda. Nature of the Enemy, though it ran for only a month, was a staunch example of the nature of wartime broadcasting. It spotlighted each week a different Axis leader, dramatizing the record of his “cruelty and treachery.” Among the subjects: Joseph Goebbels, “father of German lies,” and Alfred Rosenberg, “Nazi philosopher” and proponent of “racial purity” as a German right of conquest.

But they followed the Nazi leaders on the radio, waited to hear the latest from Hitler and Goebbels, the Nazis having seized the advantage of this new technology, the chance to reach Germans live and direct in their homes anytime they chose, an intravenous drip to the mind.

one of the few possibilities that encouraged the British government to continue the fight was the hope that Hitler might be overthrown by an anti-Nazi revolution as the economic strain of the war began to tell on ordinary German civilians.33 Punitive war aims stood in the way of such a scenario, playing into Goebbels’s hands by suggesting that the British sought not an end to Nazism but the destruction of the German nation.

in this final hour of the war, we were not being troubled again by my awful Mitford cousins, some of whom had been pro-Nazi during the war and one of whom had actually married her husband at the home of Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler in attendance no less.

Newcomers from Paris transmitted to us Goebbels’ ironic congratulations on our cordial reception in the Land of Freedom. Voelkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi organ, published a list of anti-Nazi authors interned in France, asking them whether they still clung to the blessings of democracy. It was cheap irony, but it cut to the quick; it hurt and stung and burnt.

The loudest voices to be heard were those of the increasingly popular far right. In March 1927, the rising National Socialist (Nazi) party, under its local leader Joseph Goebbels, sent 600 men to the Ku’damm in a show of strength. The Romanisches Café was attacked and ransacked, and guests and passers-by were beaten. Another attack, in 1931, saw 1,500 Nazi party supporters take to the Ku’damm at Jewish New Year, shouting anti-semitic slogans and attacking people as they left a synagogue. Jewish-run businesses were targeted and their customers assaulted.

What does the ideal Aryan look like? As tall as Goebbels, as slim as Göring, as blond as Hitler.

Not unlike Mussolini in his early laissez-faire period with Alberto De Stefani, Hitler named as his first minister of finance the conservative Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk. For a time, the Führer left foreign policy in the hands of professional diplomats (with the aristocratic Constantin von Neurath as foreign minister) and the army in the hands of professional soldiers. But Hitler’s drive to shrink the normative state and expand the prerogative state was much more sustained than Mussolini’s. Total master of his party, Hitler exploited its radical impulses for his own aggrandizement against the old elites and rarely (after the exemplary bloodbath of June 1934) needed to rein it in. Another suggested key to radicalization is the chaotic nature of fascist rule. Contrary to wartime propaganda and to an enduring popular image, Nazi Germany was not a purring, well-oiled machine. Hitler allowed party agencies to compete with more traditional state offices, and he named loyal lieutenants to overlapping jobs that pitted them against each other. The ensuing “feudal” struggles for supremacy within and between party and state shocked those Germans proud of their country’s traditional superbly trained and independent civil service. Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg, a young Prussian official initially attracted to Nazism, lamented in 1937 that “the formerly unified State power has been split into a number of separate authorities; Party and professional organizations work in the same areas and overlap with no clear divisions of responsibility.” He feared “the end of a true Civil Service and the emergence of a subservient bureaucracy.” We saw in the previous chapter how the self-indulgently bohemian Hitler spent as little time as possible on the labors of government, at least until the war. He proclaimed his visions and hatreds in speeches and ceremonies, and allowed his ambitious underlings to search for the most radical way to fulfill them in a Darwinian competition for attention and reward. His lieutenants, fully aware of his fanatical views, “worked toward the Führer,” who needed mainly to arbitrate among them. Mussolini, quite unlike Hitler in his commitment to the drudgery of government, refused to delegate and remained suspicious of competent associates—a governing style that produced more inertia than radicalization. War provided fascism’s clearest radicalizing impulse. It would be more accurate to say that war played a circular role in fascist regimes. Early fascist movements were rooted in an exaltation of violence sharpened by World War I, and war making proved essential to the cohesion, discipline, and explosive energy of fascist regimes. Once undertaken, war generated both the need for more extreme measures, and popular acceptance of them. It seems a general rule that war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone (and, in the cases we know, the occasion for its demise). It seems clear that both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes. They wanted to use war to harden internal society as well as to conquer vital space. Hitler told Goebbels, “the war . . . made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.

Muller (General Muller)

he had announced, to practice journalism in Germany one would henceforth have to do so as a licensed member of his press organization, the Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse, and no one would be licensed who had, or was married to someone who had, so much as one Jewish grandparent. As for editorial content, no one was to publish anything that was not consecrated by the party. Specifically, nothing was to be published that was “calculated to weaken the power of the Reich at home or abroad, the community will of the German people, its military spirit, or its culture and economy.” None of this should be any problem, Goebbels had calmly assured his audience of dumbstruck journalists that day: “I don’t see why you should have the slightest difficulty in adjusting the trend of what you write to the interests of the State. It is possible that the Government may sometimes be mistaken—as to individual measures—but it is absurd to suggest that anything superior to the Government might take its place. What is the use, therefore, of editorial skepticism? It can only make people uneasy.” But just to make sure, the same week, the new Nazi government had enacted a separate measure imposing the death penalty on those who published “treasonable articles.

Ahnenpass?” he asked. Franka nodded and reached into her pocket for her Ahnenpass, a certificate of her Aryan ancestry. The sentry took a glance at it and handed it back with a nod. She hid her shame with a smile. The old joke Hans used to tell about the Aryan lies came back to her. “What is an Aryan?” he would ask the group. “Blond like Hitler!”—who had dark hair. “Tall like Goebbels!” someone else would say—Goebbels was five feet five. “A perfect athletic specimen like Goering!”—who was a disgusting, fat slug. Jokes had landed many people in jail. The Nazis displayed little good humor. Everything derogatory was censured and carried the threat of jail or worse, no matter how funny the joke was.

Joseph Goebbels' childhood offers a revealing portrait of the dynamics of exclusion and resentment that would mark his later life.