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Joseph Goebbels

Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister (1897–1945)

Paul Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was Adolf Hitler's Propaganda Minister in Nazi Germany. was a German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi German from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted associates, and was known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.

A child laughs when it feels joy and cries when it feels pain. Both things, laughing and crying it does with its whole heart. We all became so tall and so clever. We know so much and we have read so much. But one thing we forgot: to laugh and cry like the children do.

Goebbels joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in its northern branch. He was appointed Gauleiter (district leader) for Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933, Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Germany.

In 1945, after the defeat of Germany in World War II became inevitable, he killed himself in the Führerbunker, shortly after Adolf Hitler.

Quotes

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1920s

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  • It is rotten and dismal that a world of so many hundred million people should be ruled by a single caste that has the power to lead millions to life or to death, indeed on a whim...This caste has spun its web over the entire earth; capitalism recognizes no national boundaries...Capitalism has learned nothing from recent events and wants to learn nothing, because it places its own interests ahead of those of the other millions. Can one blame those millions for standing up for their own interests, and only for those interests? Can one blame them for striving to forge an international community whose purpose is the struggle against corrupt capitalism? Can one condemn a large segment of the educated Stürmer youth for protesting against the greatest ability? Is it not an abomination that people with the most brilliant intellectual gifts should sink into poverty and disintegrate, while others dissipate, squander, and waste the money that could help them? … You say the old propertied class also worked hard for what it has. Granted, that may be true in many cases. But do you also know about the conditions under which workers were living during the period when capitalism “earned” its fortune?
    • Letter to Anka Stalherm (14 April 1920), quoted in Ralph Georg Reuth, Goebbels (Harvest, 1994), pp. 33-34
  • Communism. Jewry. I am a German Communist.
    • Peter Longerich, Goebbels: A Biography, New York, NY, Random House (2015) p. 26, “Erinnerungsblätter,” 27, Part 1, Volume 1, page 27, (diary entry: 1924)
  • The social is a stopgap. Socialism is the ideology of the future.
    • Open Letter to Ernst Graf zu Reventlow in the Völkische Freiheit, 1925, as quoted in Goebbels: A Biography, Peter Longerich, Random House, 2015, p. 55
  • You and I, we are fighting each other but we are not really enemies. By doing so we are dividing our strength, and we shall never reach our goal. Maybe the final extremity will bring us together. Maybe.
    • Nationalsozialismus oder Bolschewismus? (National Socialism or Bolshevism), open letter to “My Friends on the Left,” Nationalsozialistische Briefe (National Socialist Letters), (Oct. 15, 1925); Joseph Gobbles, Quoted in The Devil’s Disciples, Anthony Read, W. W. Norton & Company, 2005, p. 142
  • Yesterday you beat about the bush on the Jewish question. I know why. Please don’t object. We don’t want to deceive each other. You are an anti-Semite as I am. You don’t yet want to admit this to yourself. The Jew can at best exist in Communism. The Jew in a national-Bolshevist state is an absurdity.
    • Nationalsozialismus oder Bolschewismus? (National Socialism or Bolshevism), open letter to “My Friends on the Left,” Nationalsozialistische Briefe (National Socialist Letters), (Oct. 15, 1925); Nazi Ideology before 1933: A Documentation, trans. Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp, University of Texas Press, 1978, p. 76
  • You praise Russia as the country of international solidarity and admit yourself that today Russia is more Russian than ever. What you call Bolshevist internationalism of Moscow is Pan-Slavism in its clearest and most pronounced form… Russia, Russian Bolshevism, are not about to collapse. But the Russian soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevist, because it is Marxist, because it is international, but because it is national, because it is Russia. No Tsar ever grasped the Russian people in its depths, in its passion, in its national instincts as Lenin has. He gave the Russian peasants what Bolshevism always meant to the peasants: freedom and property. In this way he made the most indigenous group, the peasants, into the real supporters of the new system. The more the Russian peasants hates the Jew, especially the Soviet Jew, the more passionately is he a follower of agrarian reform, the more ardently does he love his country, his land and his soil. ‘Down with the Jewish Soviets, long live the Leninist agrarian reform!’
    • Nationalsozialismus oder Bolschewismus? (National Socialism or Bolshevism), open letter to “My Friends on the Left,” Nationalsozialistische Briefe (National Socialist Letters), (Oct. 15, 1925); Nazi Ideology before 1933: A Documentation, trans. Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp, University of Texas Press, 1978, p. 76.
  • Lenin sacrificed Marx and instead gave Russia freedom. You want to sacrifice German freedom for Marx. Even the Bolshevik Jew has clearly recognized the compelling necessity of the Russian national state and has early and wisely adjusted himself to it.
    • Rebuke to German communists. National Socialism or Bolshevism? (Nationalsozialismus oder Bolschewismus?) NS-Briefe (October 25, 1925)
  • Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight.
    • The New York Times, “HITLERITE RIOT IN BERLIN: Beer Glasses Fly When Speaker Compares Hitler and Lenin,” (Nov. 28, 1925) p. 4.
    • Note: according to Curt Riess, journalist, author, and Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany, Goebbels was “praising Lenin” and drawing “parallels between Bolshevists and the Nazis.” By April of 1926, Hitler told him to stop. (Joseph Goebbels: A Biography, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York (1948) p. 31
  • Rußland ... einst im Geiste seines größten Denkers, im Geiste Dostojewskis erwachen wird.
    • Russia [...] will awaken in the spirit of its greatest thinker, in the spirit of Dostoevsky.
      • National Socialism or Bolshevism (November 15, 1925), National Socialist Letters (Nationalsozialistische Briefe), co-written with Gregor Strasser for the Völkisch Work Community. Quoted in Dr. Joseph Goebbels: (1. Aufl.) by Viktor Reimann, Molden, 1971. Translated to English in Goebbels by Ralph Georg Reuth, Piper, 2nd ed., Munich, 1991, p. 96. ISBN 3-492-03183-8.
  • Der uns von Natur gegebene Bundesgenosse gegen die teuflische Versuchung und Korruption des Westens ist.
    • Our natural ally against the fiendish temptation and corruption from the West.
      • About Russia, National Socialism or Bolshevism (November 15, 1925), National Socialist Letters (Nationalsozialistische Briefe), co-written with Gregor Strasser for the Völkisch Work Community. Quoted in Dr. Joseph Goebbels: (1. Aufl.) by Viktor Reimann, Molden, 1971. Translated to English in Goebbels by Ralph Georg Reuth, Piper, 2nd ed., Munich, 1991, p. 96. ISBN 3-492-03183-8.
  • Therefore, Russia is our natural ally against the devilish temptation and corruption of the west.
    • “Das russische Problem“, (“The Russian Problem”), Nationalsozialistische Briefe (15 November 1925), Manfred Weißbecker, ‘“Wenn hier Deutsche wohnten…”. Beharrung und Veränderung im Rußlandbild Hitlers und der NSDAP, in: Volkmann H. (Hrsg.): Das Rußlandbild im Dritten Reich. Stuttgart (1994), p. 19-20. Quoted in Nazi Germany and the European East in the Twentieth Century, ed. Eduard Mühle, Chap. 4, “Nazi Germany and the European East,” Gerhand Hirschfeld, Berg Publishers, Oxford, UK (2003) p. 71.
  • Stock-exchange capital is not productive but parasitically hoarded capital. It is no longer tied to the soil but rootless and internationalist; it does not produce but has infiltrated the normal production process in order to drain profits from it. It consist of movable assets, i.e. raw cash; its chief carrier is Jewish high finance, whose goal is to put the producing populace to work, then pocket the proceeds from their labor.
    • Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993, p. 68, “Little National Socialist’s ABC,” Goebbels’ draft presented on January, 24, 1926 meeting in Hanover
  • Communism is nothing but a grotesque distortion of true Socialist thought. We and we alone could become the genuine Socialists in Germany, or for that matter, in Europe.
  • We will never get anywhere, if we lean on the interests of the cultured and propertied classes. Everything will come to us if we appeal to the hunger and despair of the masses.
    • Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: A Biography, Abridged, Ballatine Books, New York (1960) p. 21 (mid-1920s)
  • That is why we place ourselves alongside Russia as equal partners in the struggle for this freedom which means everything to us.
    • “Orientation: West or East,” Nationalsozialistische Briefe, (National Socialist Letters) (15 January 1926), as quoted in Goebbels: A Biography, Peter Longerich , Random House, 2015, p. 65
  • The money pigs of capitalist democracy… Money has made slaves of us… Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.
    • Quoted in The Nazi Party 1919-1945: A Complete History, Dietrich Orlow, New York: NY, Enigma Books, 2012, p 61. Goebbels’ article, “Nationalsozialisten aus Berlin und aus dem Reich”, Voelkischer Beobachter, February 4, 1927
  • One class has fulfilled its historical mission and is about to yield to another. The bourgeoisie has to yield to the working class ... Whatever is about to fall should be pushed. We are all soldiers of the revolution. We want the workers' victory over filthy lucre. That is socialism.
    • Quoted in Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death, Roger Manvell, Heinrich Fraenkel, New York, NY, Skyhorse Publishing, 2010 p. 25, conversation with Hertha Holk
  • You talk of socialism! Is it not right for the German worker, after the past 60 years have proven the complete bankruptcy of his political ideal, to feel despair about socialism and the future of his class?”
    “Never! Because:
    1. He fought for 60 years not for socialism, but for Marxism. Marxism, whose theories are fatal to peoples and races, is the exact opposite of living socialism.
    2. Marxism was never the political idea of a German worker. He only accepted this jumble of Jewish ideas because he had no other choice in his struggle for the freedom of his class.
    3. Marxism is the death not only of nationally-minded peoples, but above all of the class that fights with total devotion for its realization: the working class.
    The worker has no right to doubt socialism, but rather the duty to doubt Marxism. The sooner he does that, the better. The clock has almost struck midnight.
    • Der Nazi-Sozi, Elberfeld: Verlag der Nationalsozialistischen Briefe, (1927)
  • You make a lot of noise about the fact that you oppose the Jews. Isn’t anti-Semitism outdated in the twentieth century? Isn’t the Jew a human being like everyone else? Aren’t there decent Jews? Isn’t it bad that we 60 million fear 2 million Jews?”
    “You miss the point. Try to think logically:
    1. If we were only anti-Semites, we would be out-of-place in the twentieth century. However, we are also socialists. For us, the two go together. Socialism, the freedom of the German proletariat and thereby of the German nation, can only be achieved against the Jews. Since we want Germany’s freedom, or socialism, we are anti-Semites.
    2. Sure, the Jew is also a human being. None of us has every doubted that. But a flea is also an animal, — albeit an unpleasant one. Since a flea is not a pleasant animal, we have no duty to defend and protect it, to be of service to it so that it can bite and torment and torture us. Rather, our duty is to make it harmless.
    The same is true of the Jew.
    3. Sure, there are decent (weiße) Jews. More of them very day. That however, is not evidence for the Jews, but rather it is evidence against them. The fact that one calls scoundrels among us decent ‘Jews’ is proof that to be Jewish carries a stigma, else one would call deceitful Jews ‘decent (gelbe) Christians.’ The fact that there are so many decent Jews proves that the destructive Jewish spirit has already infected wide circles of our people. It is encouragement for us to carry on the battle against the Jewish world plague wherever possible.
    4. It is a bad sign for you, not for us, that 60 million fear 2 million Jews. We do not fear these 2 million Jews, but rather we fight against them. You, however, are too much of a coward to join this battle, and behave like a cat on a hot stove.
    If these 60 million fought the Jews as we do, they would have nothing more to fear. It would be the Jews’ turn to fear.”
    • Der Nazi-Sozi, Elberfeld: Verlag der Nationalsozialistischen Briefe, (1927)
  • To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.
    • Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
  • We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem... We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.
    • Why Do We Want to Join the Reichstag? Der Angriff, 30 April 1928
  • The political bourgeoisie is about to leave the stage of history. In its place advance the oppressed producers of the head and hand, the forces of Labor (Arbeitertum), to being their historical mission.
    • “Warum sind wir Sozialisten,” Der Angriff editorial, July 16, 1928, reprinted in Der Angriff, Munich 1935, p. 223. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, W.W. Norton & Company (1997) p. 25
    • As quoted in "Erkenntnis und Propaganda," Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1934), pp. 28-52
    • The Pharus Hall was a meeting hall the Nazis often used in Berlin.
  • We are socialists, because we see in socialism, that means, in the fateful dependence of all folk comrades upon each other, the sole possibility for the preservation of our racial genetics and thus the re-conquest of our political freedom and for the rejuvenation of the German state.
    • “Why We Are Socialists?” Der Angriff (The Attack ) (16 July 1928) as quoted in English translation Attack: Essays from the Time of Struggle, RJG Enterprises (2010) p. 262
  • Socialism is only achievable in a state that is internally united and externally free. Both goals, internal unity and external freedom, have been lost to us through the fault of bourgeoisie and Marxism. Both these groups, as national and social as they may deport themselves, are the mortal enemies of a socialist national state… Against the political bourgeoisie: for genuine nationalism! Against Marxism: for genuine socialism!
    • “Why We Are Socialists?” Der Angriff (The Attack ) (16 July 1928) as quoted in English translation Attack: Essays from the Time of Struggle, RJG Enterprises (2010) pp. 263-264
  • The eight hour work day is one of the most justified demands of the workers… Nobody who feels even just a trace of social feeling within himself will be able to stand aloof from the moral as well as the social-political justification for this demand. Well, work, as is known, is not an end in itself, rather only a means to an end.
    • “Who Sabotages the Eight Hour Work Day?” Der Angriff (The Attack ) (17 September 1928) as quoted in English translation Attack: Essays from the Time of Struggle, RJG Enterprises (2010) p. 282
  • We are not a charitable institution but a Party of revolutionary socialists.
    • “Einheitsfront,” Der Angriff editorial, May 27, 1929. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, W.W. Norton & Company (1997) p. 25
  • The firmer the republic takes its subjects in tax forced labor and tribute duty, the louder it talks about the rights of the republicans. National Socialism puts an end to that: for it, each state citizen must assume duties toward the state corresponding to his abilities, but every assumed duty conditions a right. The more duties, the more rights.
    • “Folk Comradeship,” Der Angriff (The Attack) (11 February 1929) as quoted in English translation Attack: Essays from the Time of Struggle, RJG Enterprises (2010) p. 214
  • Capitalism assumes unbearable forms at the moment when the personal purposes that it serves run contrary to the interest of the overall folk. It then proceeds from things and not from people. Money is then the axis around which everything revolves. It is the reverse with socialism. The socialist worldview begins with the folk and then goes over to things. Things are made subservient to the folk; the socialist puts the folk above everything, and things are only means to an end.
    • “Capitalism,” Der Angriff (The Attack) (15 July 1929) as quoted in English translation Attack: Essays from the Time of Struggle, RJG Enterprises (2010) p. 220
  • Never in world history has a new worldview—and socialism is such a thing—triumphed in capitulation, always only in resistance, in attack. In 1918 there was only one task for the German socialist: to keep the weapons and defend German socialism. One did not do that. One talked and made resolutions, and the German worker did not notice at all that in the process he just held the stirrups of his bitterest enemy, world money.
    • “Capitalism,” Der Angriff (The Attack) (15 July 1929) as quoted in English translation Attack: Essays from the Time of Struggle, RJG Enterprises (2010) p. 221

"Lenin or Hitler", Joseph Goebbels’s speech (19 February 1926)

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Opera House in Königsberg (Prussia), book published in 1926, Zwickau: Streiter-Verlag, 1926 https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/lenin-hitler.htm
  • The system of liberal capitalist democracy is already so rotten inside that there is nothing left to mend or reform. It must be fundamentally destroyed, shattered spiritually and in terms of power politics, so that a young, new generation can build a future on the ruins of the past.
    • p. 3
  • Nationally, the ruling class is failing. They sit in their mouse holes and let the storm roar over them. Socialism chases Marxism away. It gladly and willingly allows itself to be taken in tow by international Jewish capitalist interests. That was not a revolution! It was mutiny, it was a miserable, pathetic, cowardly stock market revolt!
    • p. 6
  • The will to freedom rises up from the collapsing system. It finds its form in fundamentally new ideas: in Bolshevism and National Socialism. Both emerge with the ultimate belief that they will bring freedom to an entire world by overthrowing it. Bolshevism and National Socialism are embodied in two people who lead a purposeful minority in the will to the future: Lenin and Hitler.
    • p. 14
  • How does Lenin tackle the agrarian problem? He expropriates all land and gives it to the Russian peasant as property. Not directly. He leases the land to him for 99 years. But the Russian peasant today regards land as his property. In doing so, Lenin slaps the Marxist doctrine in the face. It calls for the socialization of the means of production. Lenin sacrifices Marx and gives in to the Russian peasant’s insistence on his own soil.
    • p. 15
  • Industrial reform in Russia took place as Karl Marx had suggested. They actually tried to merge industry and the state. It failed. The Russian worker got rid of his Russian bloodsuckers — to leave the field to the Jew. Today the Jew is the master of Russia, Jewish capital rules, the Russian is a slave to stock market dictatorship.
    • p. 17
  • Simply stated: capital and capitalism are two different things. The struggle is against capitalism, not capital. It is not the fact that there are factories, that there are mining assets, that is to blame for our misery, but rather the way in which they are managed and exploited contrary to the people’s welfare. Capitalism is the immoral distribution of capital. Marxism is Jewish there, too; it fights national capital in order to make it capitalism. Its theory is demagogic. Its practice is devastating.
    • p. 17
  • Thus, we see from Lenin and his industrial reform that no salvation can come to the German people from this side, because communism, Marxism, as an ally of the Jewish stock market swindlers, never wants real freedom. It needs compliant slaves for its system of exploitation, but no free people for its plans for world domination. Real freedom means its end.
    • p. 21
  • Marxism did not want socialism at all because the men stood and stand behind it preached phases of freedom, peace, and prosperity, but did not want social liberation at all, only using the workers as willing slaves for their purposes!... What we call National Socialism is the result of bourgeois betrayal of the national idea and Marxist betrayal of the socialist idea.
    • p. 22
  • We do not want a bourgeois state. We do not want a proletarian state. We want Germany! The nation is the last and the greatest thing, the individual is nothing before it. But this nation is only completely united when every individual has his place in it. It is only a community of destiny when the 30 million from the left are part of it as a German working community rooted in its land… We are socialist because we do not want to fight for the rights of our enslaved comrades as gifts given voluntarily or even involuntarily. We are socialist because we see those rights as a state necessity and as national justice.
    • p. 25
  • The socialism we want has nothing to do with international Marxist-Jewish egalitarianism. We want socialism as a doctrine of the community.
    • p. 26

Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

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Michael: ein Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern, Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf., Munich, 7th edition, 1935
  • I dedicate this book to the memory of my friend Richard Flisges, who died as a brave soldier of work in a mine at Schliersee on the 19th of July 1923.
    • Dieses Buch widme ich dem Andenken meines Freundes Richard Flisges, der am 19. Juli 1923 in einem Bergwerk bei Schliersee als tapferer Soldat der Arbeit in den schweren Tod ging.
  • 1920. Both of us were about to capitulate facing spiritual breakdown. Then we helped each other to stand tall and did not falter.
    My answer was: Resistance!
    • 1920. Wir standen beide im Begriff, vor seelischem Zusammenbruch zu kapitulieren. Da richteten wir uns aneinander auf und strauchelten kaum.
      Meine Antwort war: Trotz!
  • 1923. You challenged your fate. To surmount or to die! It was not yet time. Therefore you became a victim.
    Your answer was: Death!
    • 1923. Du fordertest dein Schicksal in die Schranken. Biegen oder brechen! Noch war es zu früh. Deshalb wurdest du Opfer.
      Deine Antwort war: Tod!
  • 1927. I stood in front of your grave; in radiating sunshine there was a still, green mound. And it was preaching about mortality.
    My answer was: resurrection.
    • 1927. Ich stand an deinem Grab; im glastenden Sonnenschein lag ein stiller, grüner Hügel. Und predigte Vergänglichkeit.
      Meine Antwort war: Auferstehung.
  • A mother who is not everything for her children: a friend, a teacher, a confidant, a source of joy and founded pride, inducement and soothing, reconciliator, judge and forgiver, that mother obviously chose the wrong job.
    • Eine Mutter, die ihren Kindern nicht alles: Freund, Lehrer, Vertraute, Quell der Freude und des gefestigten Stolzes, Ansporn, Dämpfer, Ankläger, Versöhner, Richter und Vergeber ist, die Mutter hat offenbar ihren Beruf verfehlt.
 
Subhumans exist in every people as a leavening agent.
  • I'm looking for the teacher who is simple enough to be great, and great enough to be simple.
    • Ich suche den Lehrer, der einfach genug ist, um groß zu sein und groß genug, um einfach zu sein.
  • Everything is what you make of it, even yourself.
    • Alles ist das, was du daraus machst, auch du selbst.
  • One only honours what one conquers or defends.
    • Man schätzt überhaupt nur das, was man erobert oder verteidigt.
  • When I sit near the ocean in the morning and write my verses and breathe the salty wind which is coming from the water, I rejoice in God and I am blissful, as I was as a child.
    • Wenn ich morgens am Meere sitze und Verse dichte und atme dabei den salzigen Wind, der vom Wasser herüberspringt, dann gehe ich auf in Gott und bin glücklich, wie ich es nur noch in der Kinderzeit war.
  • A nation without a religion - that is like a man without breath.
    • Volk ohne Religion, das ist so wie Mensch ohne Atem.
  • Today there seems to be only one absolute thing: relativism.
    • Für die Zeitgenossen gibt es anscheinend nur ein Absolutes: die Relativität.
  • The modern man is necessarily a seeker of God, maybe a Man of Christ.
    • Der moderne Mensch ist notwendigerweise ein Gottsucher, vielleicht ein Christusmensch.
  • Christianity is not a religion for the masses, let alone for all. Cultivated by few and translated into deeds, it is one of the most splendid blossoms that can grow in the soul of a good man."
    • Das Christentum ist keine Religion für viele, geschweige denn für alle. Von wenigen gepflegt und in die Tat umgesetzt, ist es eine der köstlichsten Blüten, die eine Kulturseele je getrieben hat.
  • If Christ came back he would drive his treacherous servants out of the temple with a whip.
    • Käme Christus wieder, wie würde er seine falschen Bediensteten mit der Peitsche aus seinem Tempel jagen!
 
Man only honors what he conquers or defends.
  • Mozart didn't need a scheme for his music. He played and sang with the heavenly lightness of a child.
    • Mozart brauchte kein Programm für seine Musik. Er musizierte und sang mit der göttlichen Leichtigkeit eines Kindes.
  • I should like to be a parson on this island. Explain the Sermon on the Mount to ordinary people and let the world be the world.
    • Ich möchte Pastor auf dieser Insel sein. Einfachen Menschen die Bergpredigt erklären und die Welt Welt sein lassen.
  • My God is a God of strength. HE does not like the smell of frankincense and the dishonoring crawl of the crowd. I stand before HIM proudly, with the head held high, as HE created me, and I profess gladly and freely before HIM. The true German seeks God for all of his life.
    • Mein Gott ist ein Gott der Stärke. Er mag nicht den Weihrauchdampf und das entehrende Kriechen der Menge. Ich stehe vor ihm stolz erhobenen Hauptes, wie er mich erschaffen hat, und bekenne mich freudig und frei vor ihm. Der wahre Deutsche bleibt Zeit seines Lebens ein Gottsucher.
  • To be modern only means to fill new forms with eternal truths.
    • Modern sein heißt nichts anderes als ewige Inhalte in wechselnde neue Formen zu füllen.
  • I feel how inside of me word follows word and thought follows thought, growing to the last act of creation. Holy hour of bringing forth, you are pain and pleasure, and a longing for form, image and essence. I am only the instrument that God uses to sing his song. I am only the vessel that nature smilingly fills with new wine.
    • Ich fühle, wie in mir sich wachsend Wort an Wort, Gedanke an Gedanke reiht zum letzten Akt der Schöpfung. Heilige Stunde des Gebärens, Schmerz bist du und Lust und eine Sehnsucht nach Form, Gestalt und Wesen. Ich bin nur Instrument, darauf der alte Gott sein Lied singt. Ich bin nur harrendes Gefäß, in das Natur den neuen Wein mit Lächeln füllt.
  • At night I sit in my chamber and read the Bible. Far in the distance roars the sea. Then I lie down and think for a long time about the calm and pale man from Nazareth.
    • Abends sitze ich auf meinem Zimmer und lese die Bibel. In der Ferne braust das Meer. Dann liege ich noch lange wach und denke an den stillen, bleichen Mann von Nazareth.
 
I am only the instrument that God uses to sing his song. I am only the vessel that nature smilingly fills with new wine.
  • We shall be quiet and wait till a star falls from heaven. Can you see, how above one light appears after the other and they together form a dome! We sit in silence and fold our hands in prayer. We shall be quiet and wait until a star falls from heaven.
    • Wir wollen stille sein und warten, bis ein Stern vom Himmel fällt. Siehst du, wie oben Licht an Licht sich zündet zu einem Dom! Wir sitzen im Schweigen und falten die Hände zum Gebet. Wir wollen stille sein und warten bis ein Stern vom Himmel fällt.
  • A child laughs when it feels joy and cries when it feels pain. Both things, laughing and crying, it does with its whole heart. We have all become so tall and so clever. We know so much and we have read so much. But one thing we have forgot: to laugh and cry like the children do.
    • Das Kind lacht, wenn es Freude hat, und weint, wenn es Schmerz empfindet. Bei beidem, bei Lachen und Weinen ist sein ganzes Herz dabei. Wir sind alle so groß und klug geworden. Wir wissen so viel und haben so viel gelesen. Aber eines haben wir vergessen: zu lachen und zu weinen wie die Kinder.
  • Devotion, fervor, longing! Those are my pillars. We have to be the bridge to the future.
    • Hingabe, Inbrunst, Sehnsucht! Das sind meine Pfeiler. Brücke zur Zukunft müssen wir sein.
  • Dostoyevsky is ahead of his time - a few daring steps. You follow him, dizzying, fearful, incredulous; but you follow. He won't let loose, you have to follow. … You simply have to call him unique. He comes from nowhere and belongs nowhere. And yet he is always a Russian.
    • Dostojewski ist seiner Zeit noch um ein paar gewagte Schritte voraus. Man folgt ihm schwindelnd, bange, ungläubig; aber man folgt. Er lässt nicht locker, man muss folgen. … Man muss ihn einfach als Unikum nehmen. Er kommt von nirgendwo und gehört nirgendwo hin. Und dabei bleibt er doch stets Russe.
  • The night is my best friend. It calms the storm in my soul and it lets the guiding stars rise.
    • Die Nacht ist meine beste Freundin. Sie glättet den Sturm in der Seele und lässt die weisenden Sterne aufgehen.
  • I put down the oars and float endlessly as if to the eternal shore. Blue light of the moon shines on my sail. My boat is gliding to a secure haven. Only silent waves break against it. Deepest silence surrounds me and my soul builds a golden bridge to a star.
    • Ich lege die Ruder ein und fahre endlos, wie einem ewigen Gestade zu. Mondlicht spielt blau auf meinem Segel. Mein Nachen gleitet in einen sicheren Hafen. Nur leise schlagen die Wellen an meinen Kahn. Die tiefste Stille ist um mich, und meine Seele spannt eine goldene Brücke zu einem Stern.
  • We have had much to bear already. And still more will we have to bear. Let us thank God for being young.
    • Viel schon haben wir ertragen. Mehr noch werden wir ertragen müssen. Danken wir Gott, dass wir jung sind.
  • The life is worth living. It's not true, what the tired and reactionary say. We're not on this earth to suffer and die. We're here to fulfill a mission.
    • Denn das Leben ist wert, dass man es lebt. Das ist nicht wahr, was die Müden und Überlebten sagen. Wir sind nicht in diese Welt gesetzt, um zu leiden und zu sterben. Wir haben hier eine Mission zu erfüllen.
  • The fatherland shall one day be like this: We're not all equal, but we're all brothers.
    • So muß das Vaterland einmal werden. Nicht alle gleich, aber alle Brüder.
 
He who cannot hate the devil cannot love God.
  • That's what the democratic parties personify: business groups! Nothing more. 'Weltanschauung? What kind of reactionary expression is that? Honor, loyalty, creed, convictions? Man, you are living in yesterday!'
    • So sind die Parteien der Demokratie: Geschäftsgruppen! Weiter nichts. Weltanschauung? Was ist das für ein reaktionärer Begriff? Ehre, Treue, Glauben, Überzeugung? Mann, sie sind von Gestern!
  • To be a socialist means to let the ego serve the neighbour, to sacrifice the self for the whole. In its deepest sense socialism equals service. The individual refrains and the commonwealth demands.
    Frederick the Great was a socialist on a king's throne.
    "I'm the first servant of the state." A kingly socialist saying.
    Property is theft – so says the mob. Each to his own – so says the personality.
    • Sozialist sein: das heißt, das Ich dem Du unterordnen, die Persönlichkeit der Gesamtheit zum Opfer bringen. Sozialismus ist im tiefsten Sinne Dienst. Verzicht für den Einzelnen und Forderung für das Ganze.
      Friedrich der Große war ein Sozialist auf dem Königsthron.
      "Ich bin der erste Diener am Staat." Ein königliches Sozialistenwort!
      Eigentum ist Diebstahl: das sagt der Pöbel. Jedem das Seine: das sagt der Charakter.
  • Hypocrisy is the characteristic feature of the dying bourgeois epoch.
    • Die Heuchelei ist das charakteristische Merkmal der untergehenden bürgerlichen Epoche.
  • Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.
    Aristocracy with the meaning - the best are ruling.
    Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its "people's sovereignty" the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized.
    • Jedes Zeitalter wird, wenn es historischen Rang hat, von Aristokratien gestaltet.
      Aristokratie = die Besten herrschen.
      Niemals regieren Völker sich selbst. Diesen Wahnsinn hat der Liberalismus erfunden. Hinter seiner Volkssouveränität verstecken sich nur die gerissensten Schelme, die nicht erkannt sein wollen.
 
Hereafter we all have to be redeemed. The world is pulling with a thousand strings. We sin because of indifference and negligence and heap new guilt on the old original one. Our life is a chain of sin and expiation ruled by an incomprehensible providence.
  • How beautiful life is! Music and dancing! The violins are sobbing. The first stopper of a bottle of champagne bangs. And now there's a mad singing and shouting. Everybody joins in and sings and shouts! Embracing, friendship, eternal friendship! How beautiful the women are! Dressed in black and red. But you are the prettiest, Hertha! … Hey, you grumblers, go to hell! Music and dancing. The violins are sobbing. Women dressed in black and red. But you are the prettiest, Hertha!
    • Wie schön ist das Leben! Musik und Tanz! Die Geigen schluchzen. Der erste Sektpfropfen knallt. Und nun ein tolles Singen und Schreien. Man singt und schreit mit. Umarmung, Freundschaft, ewige Freundschaft! Welch' schöne Frauen! In schwarz und rot! Und doch bist Du die Schönste, Hertha Holk! … Heda, ihr Miesmacher, der Teufel soll euch holen! Musik und Tanz. Die Geigen schluchzen. Frauen in schwarz und rot. Und doch bist Du die Schönste, Hertha Holk!
  • O this world is beautiful because of you! To love somebody means that we're closer to God.
    • O diese Welt ist schön durch dich! Die Liebe zu einem Menschen führt uns Gott näher.
  • After supper we are sitting close to the church in a quiet spot. As if from a distance we hear prayers and singing. The monks are holding their vesper services. Then it falls silent, wonderfully silent!
    The sun has already set. … We are quiet, too. … A door is closed somewhere. A man's, then a woman's voice. Children are praying! My dear Jesus! Then it falls silent again. Wonderfully silent!
    The night spreads its wide, black wings over the land.
    • Nach dem Abendbrot sitzen wir an der Kirche in einem stillen Winkel. Wie von ferne hören wir Gebet und Singen. Die Mönche halten ihre Abendandacht. Und dann wird es still, wunderbar still!
      Die Sonne ist schon untergegangen. … Auch wir schweigen. … Irgendwo wird eine Tür geschlossen. Eine Männer-, dann eine Frauenstimme. Kinderbeten! Du lieber Jesus mein! Dann wird es wieder still. Wunderbar still!
      Die Nacht legt ihre breiten, schwarzen Flügel auf das Land.
  • Great hour! Spent together, rejoicing and dreaming. Days and years are gathering. We are a still island in the ocean of the world. Beginning and end! Border between life and eternity! Euphoria, fulfillment, existence!
    • Große Stunde! Mit dem zweiten Menschen, dem anderen verjubelt und verträumt. Tage, Jahre sammeln sich. Eine ruhende stille Insel im Ozean Welt sind wir. Ende und Anfang! Grenze zwischen Leben und Ewigkeit! Rausch, Fülle, Dasein!
  • When you stroll through Munich it can happen that you suddenly stand in front of an old house, an idyllically-dreaming church that smiles like a friendly anachronism into our modern time.
    • Wenn man durch München ohne Ziel streift, kann man es erleben, daß man plötzlich vor einem alten Haus, einer heimlich-verträumten Kirche steht, die wie ein freundlicher Anachronismus in unsere moderne Zeit hineinlächelt.
  • That was my longing: for the mountains' divine solitude and peacefulness, for pure, white snow. I got tired of the big city.
    I am at home again in the mountains. There I sit for many hours amid their white virginity and find myself again.
    • Das war meine Sehnsucht: nach göttlicher Einsamkeit und Ruhe der Berge, nach unberührtem, weißen Schnee. Ich war der großen Stadt müde geworden.
      Ich bin wieder zu Hause in den Bergen. Da sitze ich viele Stunden in ihrer weißen Jungfräulichkeit und finde mich selbst wieder.
  • Old Christmas Songs. I feel something like a longing for a lost homeland.
    We are giving gifts to each other. A beautiful, old New Testament from Hertha Holk is my greatest joy. I thank her for being my solace and my strength.
    • Alte Weihnachtslieder. Ich habe etwas wie Sehnsucht nach einem verlorenen Vaterland.
      Wir beschenken uns. Ein schönes, altes Jesustestament von Hertha Holk ist meine größte Freude. Ich danke ihr, dass sie mein Trost und meine Stärke ist.
 
While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.
  • This city is grey and miserable. The houses are covered with soot, the people grave and taciturn. Black masses move along the streets; meager and pale faces, the necks bend down. Children are sitting at the street corners, begging. In front of the shops women are standing with old, grey faces.
    Night falls. The discharge tubes ignite. Light shines down on misery and filth.
    My heart wrenches.
    Whores and pimps are dragging themselves through the small and narrow lanes. Yonder red lights are glowing. The evening seems to spread black wings over the city. Richness and misery are living close to each other.
    It makes you feel like crying.
    • Grau ist die Stadt und elend. Die Häuser verrußt, die Menschen ernst und wortkarg. Schwarze Massen wälzen sich durch die Straßen; schmale, bleiche Gesichter über gebeugte Nacken. Kinder sitzen an den Straßenecken und betteln. Vor den Läden stehen Frauen mit alten, grauen Gesichtern.
      Es wird Abend. Die Bogenlampen flammen auf. Licht über Elend und Schmutz.
      Das Herz krampft sich mir zusammen.
      Durch schmale, enge Gassen schlurfen Dirnen und Zuhälter. Da brennen rote Lichter. Es ist, als schlüge der Abend schwarze Flügel über die Stadt. Reichtum und Elend wohnen hier nebeneinander.
      Man möchte weinen.
  • The end of the year! I draw the balance. Inquiry of conscience and request to the Spirit for progress and maturity.
    I grew stronger inside of me and I strive for a clearer knowledge and stronger faith.
    • Jahresende! Ich mache Bilanz. Gewissensschau und Bitte an den Geist um Fortschritt und Reife.
      Ich bin stärker im Innern geworden und strebe zu klarerer Erkenntnis und festerem Glauben.
  • Christ is the genius of love and as such the most diametric antipole to Jewry, which is the incarnation of hate. … Christ was the first anti-Jewish opponent of stature. … The Jew is the lie that became flesh. He nailed Christ to the cross, and thus for the first time in history nailed the eternal truth to the cross.
    • Christus ist das Genie der Liebe, als solches der diametralste Gegenpol zum Judentum, das die Inkarnation des Hasses darstellt. … Christus ist der erste Judengegner von Format. … Der Jude ist die menschgewordene Lüge. In Christus hat er zum erstenmal vor der Geschichte die ewige Wahrheit ans Kreuz geschlagen.
  • The Jew is contrary to our being. … He desecrated our people, spat on our ideals, paralyzed the strength of the nation, made our customs rotten, and polluted the morale.
    • Der Jude ist uns im Wesen entgegengesetzt. … Er hat unser Volk geschändet, unsere Ideale besudelt, die Kraft der Nation gelähmt, die Sitten angefault und die Moral verdorben.
  • He who cannot hate the devil cannot love God.
    • Wer den Teufel nicht hassen kann, der kann auch Gott nicht lieben.
  • Hereafter we all have to be redeemed. The world is pulling with a thousand strings. We sin because of indifference and negligence and heap new guilt on the old original one. Our life is a chain of sin and expiation ruled by an incomprehensible providence.
    • Wir müssen alle einmal erlöst werden. Die Welt zieht uns mit tausend Banden. Wir fehlen aus Gleichgültigkeit und Nachsicht und häufen neue eigene Schuld auf alte ererbte. Unser Leben ist eine Kette aus Schuld und Sühne, darüber ein nach unerforschlichen Gesetzen wirkendes Schicksal waltet.
  • Goethe as an old man: he was so very punctual. At that time he also wrote many things that were very punctual. The rounded thing is boring. Turn it as you may, it remains round and pretty.
    I love the edges, the sharp lines, and fractures.
    I show to him a picture of Dostoevsky. How ruptured, furrowed, tormented!
    He looks like Michelangelo; the face of an endurer and a prophet.
    • Der alte Goethe: er war so pünktlich. Er schrieb damals auch vieles, was sehr pünktlich war. Das Runde ist langweilig. Dreh es wie du willst, es bleibt rund und schön.
      Ich liebe Ecken, Kanten und Risse.
      Ich lege ihm ein Bild von Dostojewski vor. Wie zerrissen, wie zerfurcht und zerhauen!
      So sieht auch Michelangelo aus; ein Dulder- und Prophetengesicht.


  • In the newspapers there is insulting and stirring up hatred. Those irresponsible daubers!
    The people are on the streets -- rampaging and protesting. The magnates are sitting at the green table and calmly finish their game.
    Old Europe is dying.
    Well, it's a crazy world! Thrift, Horatio!
    As if by a mysterious power one feels compelled to go out onto the streets. The thoughts wander outside to the stage which is portraying a drama of world history -- not an edifying one, but still a drama. It gives the earnest observer a lot to think about.
    • In den Zeitungen wird gehetzt und geschimpft. Diese verantwortungslosen Schmieranten!
      Das Volk ist auf der Straße, randaliert und demonstriert. Die Herren sitzen am grünen Tisch und spielen seelenruhig ihre Partie zu Ende.
      Die alte Europa geht in die Binsen.
      Ja, es ist eine tolle Welt! Wirtschaft, Horatio!
      Man wird wie von einer geheimnisvollen Macht auf die Straße gezogen. Die Gedanken sind draußen, wo sich ein Stück Weltgeschichte abspielt -- kein erhebendes zwar, aber ein Stück. Der ernsthafte Zuschauer hat viel dabei nachzudenken.
  • The night folds her trembling hands over a weary world. Out of a pale blue rises the shining moon. My thoughts are flying to the stars like lonely swans.
    • Nacht faltet zitternde Hände über der müden Welt. Aus blassem Blau steigt leuchtend der Mond. Meine Gedanken fliegen wie einsame Schwäne in die Sterne.
  • I believe in God. When everything collapses, we grip the last hold, we look from the secure haven how the godless society of the old, holy Europe falls apart. May the game begin.
    • Ich glaube an Gott. Wenn alles stürzt, fassen wir die letzte Planke und schauen vom sicheren Port, wie die entgötterte Gesellschaft des alten, heiligen Europa zusammenstürzt. Möge das Spiel beginnen.
  • Give your goods to the poor: Christ.
    Property is theft - as long as it's not mine: Marx.
    • Verteile Dein Gut an die Armen: Christus.
      Eigentum ist Diebstahl – solange es nicht mir gehört: Marx.
  • Now I have found the word: we modern Germans are something like Christ-socialists. Christ is the genius of love, and as such the diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate.
  • The war we are fighting until victory or the bitter end is in its deepest sense a war between Christ and Marx.
    Christ: the principle of love.
    Marx: the principle of hate.
    • Der Kampf, den wir heute ausfechten bis zum Sieg oder bis zum bitteren Ende, ist im tiefsten Sinne ein Kampf zwischen Christus und Marx.
      Christus: das Prinzip der Liebe.
      Marx: das Prinzip des Hasses.

1930s

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  • We demand a strict social justice, work and livelihood for the broad masses, residences and bread and thus life joy for the German worker.
    • “The German Worker,” Der Angriff (24 August 1930), as quoted in English translation Attack: Essays from the Time of Struggle, RJG Enterprises (2010) p. 292
  • Already the elections of the year 1929 brought us a great influx from the Marxist camp. In Berlin alone, we managed in the municipal elections in November 1929 to snatch from the Reds of both colors nearly sixty thousand votes.
    • “Factory Cells,” Der Angriff (The Attack ) (1 June 1931) as quoted in English translation Attack: Essays from the Time of Struggle, RJG Enterprises (2010) p. 287
  • Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must. Only the annihilation of a system of exploitation carries with it the core of the rebirth of our people.
  • The people's community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy. Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland... The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions.
  • The lines of German socialism are sharp, and our path is clear. We are against the political bourgeoisie, and for genuine nationalism! We are against Marxism, but for true socialism! We are for the first German national state of a socialist nature! We are for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party!
  • We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces. We have no intention of begging for that right… Since the political powers of the day are neither willing nor able to create such a situation, socialism must be fought for. It is a fighting slogan both inwardly and outwardly. It is aimed domestically at the bourgeois parties and Marxism at the same time, because both are sworn enemies of the coming workers’ state. It is directed abroad at all powers that threaten our national existence and thereby the possibility of the coming socialist national state.
  • The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.”
    • Written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932).Translated as “Those Damned Nazis: Why a Workers Party?
    • “Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
  • We are a workers’ party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance. . . The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things.
  • What we are witnessing below, these thousands upon thousands and ten thousands upon ten thousands of people, who, in a frenzied delirium of exultation and enthusiasm, are acclaiming the new leadership of the state -- this is truly the fulfillment of our dearest wish, the crowning achievement of our work. We are fully justified in saying Germany is awakening!
    • Wolfgang Benz, A Concise History of the Third Reich, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press (2006) p. 20. Quote from January 30, 1933
  • We make no bones about the fact that the radio belongs to us and to no-one else. And we will place the radio in the service of our ideology and no other ideology will find expression here . . . The radio must subordinate itself to the goals which the Government of the national revolution has set itself.
    • "Goebbels on the Function of Radio Under National Socialism” speech, (25 March 1933), Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., Nazism 1919-45, (University of Exeter, 1983-84) 2 vols, p. 383
  • On this day the whole nation at all levels, in all its professions, occupations, and estates, acknowledges the dignity and blessedness of labour. On a day when in former times we heard the rattles of machine-guns and the hate-inspired songs of the class struggle and the Internationale, in this first year of Hitler’s government and the German people is assembled in unanimous, unswerving loyalty to the state, the race (Volk), and the German nation to which we all belong. Every difference is wiped away. The barriers of class hatred and the arrogance of social status that for over 50 years divided the nation from itself have been torn down. Germans of all classes, tribes (Stämme), professions, and denominations have joined hands across the barriers that separated them and have vowed henceforth to live as a community, to work and fight for the fatherland that unites us all. … The class struggle is at an end. The idea of the national community rises above the ruins of the bankrupt liberal-capitalist state. … Thus the German people marches into the future.
    • Speech at the first Labor Day celebration held under Nazi auspices (1 May 1933) Sheri Berman, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancient Regime to the Present Day, New York, Oxford University Press, (2019) p. 254
  • The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.
    • Claudia Koonz , The Nazi Conscience, London and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University (2004) p. 13. Quote from March, 1933.
 
My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.
  • The nation and the government in Germany are one thing. The will of the people is the will of the government and vice versa. The modern structure of the German State is a higher form of democracy [ennobled democracy] in which, by virtue of the people’s mandate, the government is exercised authoritatively while there is no possibility for parliamentary interference to obliterate and render ineffective the execution of the nation’s will.
    • “On National-Socialist Germany And Her Contribution Towards Peace.” Speech to the representatives of the international press at Geneva on September 28. 1933. German League of Nations Union News Service, PRO, FO 371/16728. Included within Völkerbund: Journal for International Politics, Ausgaben 1-103, 1933, p.16
  • Propaganda is a means to an end. Its purpose is to lead the people to an understanding that will allow it to willingly and without internal resistance devote itself to the tasks and goals of a superior leadership. If propaganda is to succeed, it must know what it wants. It must keep a clear and firm goal in mind, and seek the appropriate means and methods to reach that goal. Propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks.
  • Here propaganda has its place. It must prepare the way actively and educationally. Its task is to prepare the way for practical actions. It must follow these actions step by step, never losing sight of them. In a manner of speaking, it provides the background music. Such propaganda in the end miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people. A government that uses it properly can do what is necessary without running the risk of losing the masses.
  • Youth belongs to us and we will yield them to no one.
    • Goebbels’ speech on August 4, 1935 as quoted in John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Regent College Publishers, 2001, pp. 114-115.
  • International communism would entirely do away with all national and racial qualities which are founded in human nature itself; in property it sees the most primary cause of the break-down of world trade in the capitalist system. Accordingly it exploits this through an extensive and carefully organised and brutal system of action, setting aside personal values and sacrificing the individual to a hollow mass-idol that is only a travesty of actual life itself. At the same time it ignores and destroys all the idealistic and higher strivings of men and nations, through its own crass and empty materialist principles. On the other hand, National Socialism sees in all these things—in property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism—these forces which carry on every human civilisation and fundamentally determine its worth.
  • While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.
  • The world is again on the move. That happens about once a century, and when such a displacement process (Umschichtungsprozess) is over it is no good coming along ten years later and saying that we were not on the spot because we happened at the time to be busy with our confessional disputes. No: we must be ready to hand; and he is safest who has a united nation behind him.
    • Speech in Hamburg (20 November 1935), quoted in Gaynor Johnson (ed.), Our Man in Berlin: The Diary of Sir Eric Phipps, 1933-1937 (2008), p. 139 and Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle (1959), p. 73
  • He who defends the Jew harms his own people.
    • "Der Jude," Der Angriff. Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1935)
  • subhumans exist in every people as a leavening agent
    • Speech at the "Weltgefahr des Bolschewismus" ("World danger of Bolshevism") (1936)
  • We did not complain in the past because Germany was not rearmed. We complain now because we are strong enough to do so.
    • Answer to Lord Halifax, who had asked Goebbels why he had waited until now to complain about the treatment of Germany in the British press (November 1937), quoted in Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle (1959), p. 101
  • How deeply the perverse Jewish spirit has penetrated German cultural life is shown in the frightening and horrifying forms of the Exhibition Of Degenerate Art in München ….. This has nothing at all to do with the suppression of artistic freedom and modem progress. On the contrary, the botched art works which were exhibited there and their creators are of yesterday and before yesterday. They are the senile representatives, no longer to be taken seriously, of a period that we have intellectually and politically overcome and whose monstrous, degenerate creations still haunt the field of the plastic arts in our time.”
    • Von der Großmacht zur Weltmacht on the seizure of thousands of works of German art. (26 November 1937)
  • The fact that the causes and effective potentialities of Bolshevism were already existent in a latent form in democracy explains why Bolshevism flourishes only on democratic soil, and is indeed generally the inevitable consequence of a radical and excessively democratic conception of the State. Bolshevism allegedly makes a classless society its aim. The equality of whatever bears a human form, which democracy applied only to political and social life, is set up as a ruling principle for economic life also. In this respect there are supposed to be no differences left. But this equality of all individuals in respect of economic goods can, in the Marxist-Bolshevist view, result only from a brutal and pitiless class struggle. ... It is only logical that in connexion with this, Bolshevism should proclaim the equality of nations and races. ... The opposition between the democratic and the Bolshevist mentality and conception of the State are in the last resort merely theoretical, and here we have the answer to the mysterious riddle which overshadows Europe and the explanation both of the opposition in the lives of nations to-day and of the things which they have in common. It enables us to see at once why democracy and Bolshevism, which in the eyes of the world are irrevocably opposed to one another, meet again and again on common ground in their joint hatred of and attacks on authoritarian nationalist concepts of State and State systems. For the authoritarian nationalist conception of the State represents something essentially new. In it the French Revolution is superseded.
  • We have modernized and ennobled the concept of democracy. With us it means definitely the rule of the people, in accordance with its origin. We have given the principle of Socialism a new meaning. ... Never have we left anyone in doubt that National-Socialism is not for export. ... We do not aim at world domination, but we do intend to defend our country, and it is our new conceptions which give us the inexhaustible and ever-renewed strength to do so.
  • England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people's state. And it is not the case that we think England is the richest land on earth. There are lords and City men in England who are in fact the richest men on earth. The broad masses, however, see little of this wealth. We see in England an army of millions of impoverished, socially enslaved, and oppressed people. Child labor is still a matter of course there. They have only heard about social welfare programs. Parliament occasionally discusses social legislation. Nowhere else is there such terrible and horrifying inequality as in the English slums. Those with good breeding take no notice of it. Should anyone speak of it in public, the press, which serves plutocratic democracy, quickly brands him the worst kind of rascal. They do not hesitate to make major changes in the Constitution if they are necessary to preserve capitalist democracy.
    • “Englands Schuld,” Illustrierter Beobachter, Sondernummer, p. 14. The article is not dated, but is from the early months of the war, likely late fall of 1939. Joseph Goebbels’ speech in English is titled “England's Guilt.” [1]
  • Germany, on the other hand, has based its domestic policies on new and modern social principles. That is why it is a danger to English plutocracy. It is also why English capitalists want to destroy Hitlerism. They see Hitlerism as all the generous social reforms that have occurred in Germany since 1933. The English plutocrats rightly fear that good things are contagious, that they could endanger English capitalism.
    • “Englands Schuld,” Illustrierter Beobachter, Sondernummer, p. 14. The article is not dated, but is from the early months of the war, likely late fall of 1939. Joseph Goebbels’ speech in English is titled “England's Guilt.”

Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

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Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
  • The nation is the organic union of a people to protect its life.
  • Bourgeois patriotism is the privilege of a class.
  • We are the world’s Pariah not because we do not have the courage to resist, but rather because out entire national energy is wasted in eternal and unproductive squabbling between the right and the left.
  • Nationalism is more wide-reaching than internationalism.
  • The sin of bourgeois patriotism was to confound a certain economic form with the national. It connected two things that are entirely different. Forms of the economy, however firm they may seem, are changeable. The national is eternal. If I mix the eternal and the temporal, the eternal will necessarily collapse when the temporal collapses. This was the real cause for the collapse of liberal society. It was rooted not in the eternal, but in the temporal, and when the temporal declined it took the eternal down with it. Today it is only an excuse for a system that brings growing economic misery. That is the only reason why international Jewry organizes the battle of the proletarian forces against both powers, the economy and the nation, and defeat them.
  • The faith in the nation is a matter for everyone, never a group, a class or an economic clique. The eternal must be distinguished from the temporal. Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must. Only the annihilation of a system of exploitation carries with it the core of the rebirth of our people.
  • If a Communist shouts “Down with nationalism!”, he means the hypocritical bourgeois patriotism that sees the economy only as a system of slavery. If we make clear to the man of the left that nationalism and capitalism, that is the affirmation of the Fatherland and the misuse of its resources, have nothing to do with each other, indeed that they go together like fire and water, then even as a socialist he will come to affirm the nation, which he will want to conquer.
  • Because we are socialists we have felt the deepest blessings of the nation, and because we are nationalists we want to promote socialist justice in a new Germany.
  • A young fatherland will rise when the socialist front is firm.
  • Socialism will become reality when the Fatherland is free.
  • Socialism is the doctrine of liberation for the working class. It promotes the rise of the fourth class and its incorporation in the political organism of our Fatherland, and is inextricably bound to breaking the present slavery and regaining German freedom. Socialism, therefore, is not merely a matter of the oppressed class, but a matter for everyone.
  • Socialism gains its true form only through a total fighting brotherhood with the forward-striving energies of a newly awakened nationalism. Without nationalism it is nothing, a phantom, a mere theory, a castle in the sky, a book. With it it is everything, the future, freedom, the fatherland!
  • The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism was to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence.
  • The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political.
  • The bourgeoisie does not want to recognize the strength of the working class. Marxism has forced it into a straitjacket that will ruin it. While the working class gradually disintegrates in the Marxist front, bleeding itself dry, the bourgeoisie and Marxism have agreed on the general lines of capitalism.
  • We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces.
  • It is a matter of forming a new state consciousness that includes every productive citizen. Since the political powers of the day are neither willing nor able to create such a situation, socialism must be fought for.
  • Socialism is possible only in a state that is united domestically and free internationally. The bourgeoisie and Marxism are responsible for failing to reach both goals, domestic unity and international freedom. No matter how national and social these two forces present themselves, they are the sworn enemies of a socialist national state.
  • We are against the political bourgeoisie, and for genuine nationalism!
  • We are for the first German national state of a socialist nature!
  • We are for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party!
  • Work is not mankind’s curse, but his blessing. A man becomes a man through labor. It elevates him, makes him great and aware, raises him above all other creatures.
  • If it works against the general welfare, then it is treason against the fatherland.
  • The worker in a capitalist state — and that is his deepest misfortune — is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker.
  • We do not want to make everyone the same. Nor do we want levels in the population, high and low, above and below. The aristocracy of the coming state will be determined not by possessions or money, but only on the quality of one’s accomplishments. One earns merit through service. Men are distinguished by the results of their labor. That is the sure sign of the character and value of a person. The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things.
  • We call ourselves a workers’ party because we want to free labor from the chains of capitalism and Marxism. In battling for Germany’s future, we freely admit to it, and accept the odium from the liberal bourgeoisie that results. We know that we will succeed in bringing new blessings out of their curses.
  • He who creates value works, and is a worker. A movement that wants to free labor is a workers’ party.
  • We oppose the Jews because we are defending the freedom of the German people. The Jew is the cause and beneficiary of our slavery He has misused the social misery of the broad masses to deepen the dreadful split between the right and left of our people.
  • The Jew is the plastic demon of decomposition. Where he finds filth and decay, he surfaces and begins his butcher’s work among the nations. He hides behind a mask and presents himself as a friend to his victims, and before they know it he has broken their neck.
  • The Jew is uncreative. He produces nothing, he only haggles with products. With rags, clothing, pictures, jewels, grain, stocks, cures, peoples and states. He has somehow stolen everything he deals in. When he attacks a state he is a revolutionary. As soon as he holds power, he preaches peace and order so that he can devour his conquests in comfort.
  • What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor. When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism.
  • We oppose the Jews because we affirm the German people. The Jew is our greatest misfortune.
  • What we demand is new, decisive, and radical, revolutionary in the truest sense of the word.
  • Consistent with his spiritual attitude, the National Socialist makes uncompromising demands in politics.
  • In place of a slave colony, we want a restored German national state. The state is not an end in itself for us, but rather a means to an end. The true end is the race, the sum of all the living, creative forces of the people. The structure that today calls itself the German republic is not a way to maintain our racial inheritance. It has become an end in itself with no real connection to the people and their needs.
  • Want work and bread for every productive national and blood comrade. Pay should be according to accomplishment. That means more pay for German workers!
  • Down with democratic parliamentarianism!

1940s

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  • To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole. Socialism is in its deepest sense service.
    • As quoted in Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm, Farrar & Rinehart (1941) p. 233, Matthew Lange, Antisemitic Elements in the Critique of Capitalism in German Culture, 1850-1933, Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, (2007) p. 290
  • The Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race.
  • That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
    • "Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik" ("Churchill's Lie Factory"), 12 January 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1941), pp. 364-369
    • This and similar lines in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf about what he claimed to be a strategem of Jewish lies using "the principle & which is quite true in itself & that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily," are often misquoted or paraphrased as: "The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed."
  • "Who should die, the Germans or the Jews? You know what your eternal enemy and opponent intends for you. There is only one instrument against his plans for annihilation."
  • I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even yet imagine?
    • Ich frage euch: Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? Wollt ihr ihn, wenn nötig, totaler und radikaler, als wir ihn uns heute überhaupt erst vorstellen können?
    • Sportpalast speech, 18 February 1943
  • If Germany stays united and marches to the rhythm of its revolutionary socialist outlook, it will be unbeatable. Our indestructible will to life, and the driving force of the Führer’s personality guarantee this.
    • “The Winter Crisis is Over” speech on June 4, 1943 at the Berlin Sport Palace, “Überwundene Winterkrise, Rede im Berliner Sportpalast,” Der steile Aufstieg (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1944), pp. 287-306.
 
A mother who is not everything for her children: a friend, a teacher, a confidant, a source of joy and founded pride, inducement and soothing, reconciliator, judge and forgiver, that mother obviously chose the wrong job.
  • We and we alone [the Nazis] have the best social welfare measures. Everything is done for the nation. . . .The Jews are the incarnation of capitalism.
    • As quoted in I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, Victor Klemperer, Vol. 2 , Random House, Inc. (2001) p. 317. Goebbels’ “Our Socialism” editorial was written on April 30, 1944.
  • If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered.
    • Article titled 'Das Jahr 2000' printed in the newspaper Das Reich, February 25, 1945, pp. 1-2

Diary excerpts

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  • She has confessed her parentage to me. Since then, the first enchantment ruined.
    • Goebbels diary entry in 1924 after finding out his girlfriend Else Janke had a Jewish mother.
  • We will turn National Socialism into a party of class struggle,…
    • May 1925 as quoted in Hitler: Only the World was Enough, Brendan Simms, Penguin Books (2020), p. 105
  • Düsseldorf; big red posters up. Lenin or Hitler! Thundering attendance. All of them communists. They want to state a disturbance. I grip them in no time and do not let go for two hours. We are making progress.
    • 9 October 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
  • Germany gives in and sells out to the capitalist West. A horrible prospect: Germany’s sons will bleed to death on the battlefield of Europe as the mercenaries of capitalism. Perhaps, probably in a ‘holy war against Moscow!’ Can there be anything political more infamous. Are our rulers blockheads or rogues!
    • 16 October 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
  • And in the last analysis better to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal capitalist servitude.
    • 23 October 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
  • National and socialist! What comes first and what second? For us in the West there can be no doubt. First the socialist redemption, then, like a hurricane, national liberation.
    • 11 September 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
  • Speech in the evening. Almost exclusively port workers. One proper communist. I am almost at one with him.
    • 14 November 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
  • On to Chemnitz. Speech to two thousand communists. Meeting quiet and factual. At the end devastating free-for-all fight. A thousand beer glasses smashed. Hundred and fifty wounded, thirty seriously, two dead.
    • 23 November 1925, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
  • [Hitler] has thought it all out. His ideal: Blend of collectivism and individualism. The land: all that is on it and below it for the people. Production, individualistic for those who create. Combines, trusts, production of finished articles, transport, etc. to be socialized.
    • 13 April 1926, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
  • Say what you will: politics spoils a man’s character. Or rather: politics show how basically rotten man’s character is.
    • 7 June 1926, The Early Goebbels Diaries 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, edit. Oliver Watson, trans. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, (1963)
  • What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.
    • 16 October 1928
  • The Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race.
    • The Goebbels Diaries 1939-1941, trans. & edit. Fred Tayor, New York, NY, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983, (entry: December 29, 1939), p. 77
  • The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.
    • 14 February 1942
  • A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophecy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.
    • 27 March 1942
  • Berndt reicht mir eine Ausarbeitung über die von uns zu betreibende okkultistische Propaganda ein. Hier wird in der Tat Einiges geleistet. Die Amerikaner und Engländer fallen ja vorzüglich auf eine solche Art von Propaganda herein. Wir nehmen alle irgendwie zur Verfügung stehenden Kronzeugen der okkulten Weissagung als Mithelfer in Anspruch. Nostradamus muß wieder einmal daran glauben.
    • Berndt handed in a plan for the occultist propaganda to be carried on by us. We are getting somewhere. The Americans and English fall easily for this kind of propaganda. We are therefore pressing into service all star witnesses of occult prophecy. Nostradamus must once again submit to being quoted.
    • 19 May 1942 concerning the use of Nostradamus's famous "Hister" quatrain
    • as displayed and translated in Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy, Discovery Channel
  • I have devoted exhaustive study to the Protocols of Zion. In the past objection was always made that they were not suited to present day propaganda. In reading them now I find that we can use them very well. The Protocols of Zion are as modern today as they were when published the first time! At noon I mentioned this to the Führer. He believed the protocols to be absolutely genuine!

Attributed

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  • I demand that the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be expelled from the Nazi Party.
    • As quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, William L. Shirer, New York: NY Simon & Schuster (2011), p. 127, first published 1960
  • I think it's terrible that we [the Nazis] and the Communists are bashing each other's heads ... Where can we get together sometime with the leading Communists?
    • Attributed in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer, Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 126
  • Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood. . . .It poisons our own values and subjects us to the service of low and base instincts.
    • Nazi Culture by George L. Mosse (1966) p. 109


Misattributed

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  • The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.
  • If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.
    • Compare sourced quote set forth above: "The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it."
    • Attributed to Goebbels in Publications Relating to Various Aspects of Communism (1946), by United States Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities. No reliable source has been located, and this is probably simply a further variation of the Big Lie idea.
    • Variants:
      • If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.
      • If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
      • If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
      • If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes truth.
      • If you repeat a lie many times, people are bound to start believing it.
        • Attributed in The Sack of Rome (2006) by Alexander Stille, p. 14, and also attributed in A World Without Walls: Freedom, Development, Free Trade and Global Governance (2003) by Mike Moore, p. 63.
  • Accuse the other side of that of which you are guilty.

Quotes about Goebbels

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Alphabetized by author
 
Personally, I think Goebbels was using anti-Semitism merely as a means of achieving personal power. Whether he had any deep-seated hatred against the Jews is questionable. I think he was too much of a thief and dishonest opportunist to have any deep-seated feelings for or against anything. But for years Goebbels had been trying in vain to become a big power. At last he saw his chance. He had whipped up anti-Semitic feelings to such a point by his vicious propaganda that he now thought he could do anything. He probably didn't think about the consequences himself. He was a fanatic of an abnormal caliber. ~ Hermann Göring
 
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. ~ Daniel Hannan
  • The National Socialist-Labor Party, of which Adolf Hitler is patron and father, persists in believing Lenin and Hitler can be compared or contrasted in a party meeting. Two weeks ago an attempted discussion of this subject left to one death, sixty injuries and $5,000 damages to beer glasses, tables, chairs, windows and chandeliers in Chemnitz. Last night DR. Göebells tried the experiment in Berlin and only police intervention prevented a repetition of the Chemnitz affair. On the speaker's assertion that Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight, a faction war opened with whizzing beer glasses. When this sort of ammunition was exhausted a free fight in which fists and knives played important roles was indulged in. Later a gang marched to the offices of the Socialist paper Vorärts and smashed plate-glass windows. Police made nineteen arrests.
  • Hitler neither developed his ideas in a vacuum nor rose to power alone. A rather motley crew of people formed his inner circle. Its membership changed many times, as people fell in and out of favor. Three individuals who stuck with Hitler throughout his political career and gained international profiles were Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler. All of them would play key roles in the Nazi regime, each amassing enormous power even as they fought among themselves for Hitler's favor.
    • Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2016), p. 58
  • Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) was a rather different kind of Nazi. A journalist and writer, he had a PhD and wrote a novel called Michael, although it remained unpublished until the Nazi Party press picked it up in 1929. Goebbels first came into contact with members of the Nazi Party in 1924; by 1926 he was Gauleiter (Party leader) of Berlin, and two years later Hitler made him head of propaganda. In 1933 Goebbels became minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda. He kept that post throughout the entire Third Reich, although his ambitious, energetic nature meant that he was always trying to find ways to play even bigger roles.
    • Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2016), p. 58-59
  • Goebbels was a master propagandist who excelled in stirring up hatred and orchestrating gigantic extravaganzas, such as the annual Nazi Party rallies. He was the only one of Hitler's early associates who stayed with him right to the end. When Hitler committed suicide in 1945, Goebbels did so, too: he and his wife, Magda, had their children poisoned before he had her and himself shot. Goebbels's extensive diaries, large parts of which had been published, reveal him to have been a "true believer," committed to Hitler as a person and to the realization of his ideas. To many observers Goebbels was the sinister face of Nazism, an image captured by photographer Alfred Eisenstadt in a 1933 picture taken at the League of Nations conference in Geneva.
    • Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2016), p. 59-60
  • But perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps our memory deceives us. Dr. Goebbels and his Propaganda Machine have their own version of what happened twenty-five years ago. To hear them talk, you would suppose that it was Belgium that invaded Germany! There they were, these peaceful Prussians, gathering in their harvests, when this wicked, Belgium – set on by England and the Jews – fell upon them; and would no doubt have taken Berlin, if Corporal Adolf Hitler had not come to the rescue and turned the tables. Indeed, the tale goes further. After four years of war by land and sea, when Germany was about to win an overwhelming victory, the Jews got at them again, this time from the rear. Armed with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points they stabbed, we are told, the German armies in the back, and induced them to ask for an armistice, and even persuaded them, in an unguarded moment, to sign a paper saying that it was they and not the Belgians who had been the ones to begin the War. Such is history as it is taught in topsy-turvydom. And now it is holiday again, and where are we now? Or, as you sometimes ask in the United States – where do we go from here?
  • There remains the problem of Goebbels' reputation. He wore the title of Big Liar (bestowed by Anglo-Saxon propaganda) and yet he never stopped battling for propaganda to be as accurate as possible. He preferred being cynical and brutal to being caught in a lie. He used to say: "Everybody must know what the situation is." He was always the first to announce disastrous events or difficult situations, without hiding anything. The result was a general belief between 1939 and 1942 that German communiqués not only were more concise, clearer and less cluttered, but were more truthful than Allied communiqués (American and neutral opinion) -- and, furthermore, that the Germans published all the news two or three days before the Allies. All this is so true that pinning the title of Big Liar on Goebbels must be considered quite a propaganda success.
    • Jacques Ellul, "The Characteristics of Propaganda" in Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays by Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, eds., (SAGE, 2006) p. 48, note 47.
  • It helped, too, that the Nazis were able to recruit the widely respected former Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned his post in 1930 after effectively endorsing Hitler's campaign against the revised reparations schedule known as the Young Plan. Yet even with his imprimatur on them, it took real political skill to sell such unorthodox economic solutions to a relatively sophisticated and highly variegated electorate. The Nazis' success without doubt owed much to Joseph Goebbels, the evil genius of twentieth-century marketing, who sold Hitler to the German public as if he were the miraculous offspring of the Messiah and Marlene Dietrich. The Nazi election campaigns of 1930, 1932. and 1933 were unprecedented assaults on public opinion, involving standardized mass meetings and eye-catching posters, as well as rousing songs (like the Horst-Wessel Lied) and calculated physical intimidation of opponents. Though much of this owed its inspiration to Mussolini - not least the snazzy uniforms for supporters, and the Roman salutes - Goebbels understood the need for finesse as well as bombast. For one thing, he saw more clearly than the star himself the need to adjust Hitler's message according to which of the German electorate's many segments was being addressed.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 238-239
  • Along with most of his most senior henchmen, Hitler seems genuinely to have believed that Jews posed an insidious biological threat to the German Volk. Yet it is impossible to overlook an element of self-repression in much Nazi propaganda on this issue; those most publicly averse to the idea of interracial sex often gave the unintended impression that this was precisely the direction of their own private fantasies. As a young man, Goebbels became engaged to Else Janke, an elementary school teacher who was half-Jewish. She helped him to find a job at the Dresder Bank during the 1923 hyperinflation, but was reluctant to marry him, possibly because of his club foot. Shortly after she told him that her mother was Jewish, Goebbels noted that 'the original magic was gone'. 'The discussion recently about the race question kept ringing in my ears,' she wrote to him after a quarrel. 'I could not get it out of my mind, and almost saw the problem as an obstacle to our further life together. I am firmly convinced, you see, that in this respect your thinking goes decidedly too far.' It was at this time that the future Propaganda Minister first read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, where he found 'the root of the Jewish question . . . laid bare'. Goebbels's first references in his diary to the Jews as 'filthy pigs', 'traitors' and 'vampires' date from the breakdown of his relationship with Janke.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 256-257
  • Goebbels spoke with deep respect of the Russian utopia impulse, while Strasser even called for an alliance with Moscow ‘against the militarism of France, against the imperialism of England, against the capitalism of Wall Street.’ Even more socialistic was the group’s economic program: large landholdings were to be abolished, and all peasants were to be organized into agricultural cooperatives; small businesses were to be grouped into guilds; corporations with more than twenty employees were to be partially socialized. Where enterprises continued in private hands, the personnel were to be entitled to a share of 10 per cent of the profits…
    • Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York (1974), p. 234
  • Looking for formulas which could unite the nationalistic socialists with Communists, Goebbels found a whole catalogue of identical attitudes and convictions. He by no means rejected the theory of class struggle. He contended that the collapse of Russia would ‘bury forever our dreams of a National Socialist Germany.’
    • Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York (1974), p. 234
  • Did I ever tell you about Goebbels? He incurred Hitler's disapproval after that incident with the movie actress for which he was beaten up. That clubfooted fanatic! He forced women to submit to him sexually because of his powerful position. He influenced Hitler to become anti-Semitic more than Hitler had been before. Hitler used to come to my house once in a while for a cup of coffee, and because I led a normal life, he would leave about nine o'clock. I was in the habit of retiring early. However, Hitler used to spend practically all of his nights, sometimes until four a.m., with Goebbels and his family. God knows what evil influence Goebbels had on him during those long visits.
  • Goebbels was the strongest representative of anti-Semitism. He saw his big chance to become powerful by using the press for anti-Semitic reasons. Personally, I think Goebbels was using anti-Semitism merely as a means of achieving personal power. Whether he had any deep-seated hatred against the Jews is questionable. I think he was too much of a thief and dishonest opportunist to have any deep-seated feelings for or against anything. But for years Goebbels had been trying in vain to become a big power. At last he saw his chance. He had whipped up anti-Semitic feelings to such a point by his vicious propaganda that he now thought he could do anything. He probably didn't think about the consequences himself. He was a fanatic of an abnormal caliber. Streicher was a tame man compared to Goebbels, because Streicher is half crazy and stupid, whereas Goebbels was just unscrupulous, clever and dangerous. You couldn't discuss anything with Goebbels. And for the same reason, you couldn't discuss anything with Himmler. Goebbels was so dishonest that it didn't pay to discuss anything with him.
  • One of the cleverest men in Hitler's close circle was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin and also Minister for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda. He was a skilled orator and in the struggle against the Communists for Berlin's vote he had demonstrated great personal courage. But he was also a dangerous demagogue, quite unscrupulous in his agitations against parents and school teachers; and he was largely responsible for the notorious pogrom, the so-called 'Crystal night', of November 1938. He was certainly in a position to recognize the errors and weaknesses of the National-Socialist system, but he lacked the courage necessary to lay his knowledge before Hitler. In Hitler's presence he- like Goering and Himmler- was a little man. He both feared and idolised him. Hitler's powers of suggestions were seldom so apparent as in his relationship with Goebbels. The highly skilled demagogue fell silent in Hitler's presence. He did his best to unravel his master's wishes, and in his propaganda- at which he might almost be called a genius- he seldom, if ever, displeased the dictator.
  • On Sunday, 21st November [1937], Goebbels and his wife came to tea at the Embassy. I had expected to dislike him intensely, but am ashamed to say that I did not. We had a good deal of talk about the Press, concerning which he contrasted the admirably restrained behaviour of the German Press at the time of King Edward's abdication with the shameless fashion in which our Press was for ever attacking the Führer. To this I said that there was a great difference between a constitutional monarch and a very controversial Führer. He admitted this was a very fair answer, but "do not forget that your Crown has a thousand years behind it and is very strong—we are only three or four years old and are very sensitive." This confirmed what I had always been inclined to think about part of the Nazi attitude arising from an inferiority complex.
  • Goebbels and some other northern leaders thought of themselves as revolutionaries, with more in common with the Communists than with the hated bourgeoisie. There was some sympathies for Russia. And there was talk of a party trade union.
    • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, (1999) p. 272
  • The next day, the last of Lord Halifax's visit, Goebbels came to tea. He was really the cleverest of the Nazis and the only leading member of the party with whom conversation was amusing. But there was a bitter streak in his character. He once told me that he often looked back with nostalgia on the early days of the party when there was something to attack. The task of making public speeches was now dreary. He merely wrote on a sheet of paper: Hitler's services to Germany, 5 minutes; the Jews, 10 minutes; Winter Help, 5 minutes, and so on. When he came to each item he merely spouted the old story. He did not, however, tell me that Nazi plans for aggression would soon bring new zest to life and that instead of a domestic enemy, there would be a host of foreigners to attack. But all this must have been in his mind, for 1939 found his Ministry as much prepared as any other instrument of German aggression.
  • Goebbels was at this time writing articles and making speeches which implied that although Communism was misguided it was the potentially ally of the brand of revolutionary National Socialism that he was promoting. ‘We will never get anywhere’ he wrote in Briefe, ‘if we lean on the interests of the cultured and propertied classes. Everything will come to us if we appeal to the hungry and despair of the masses.'
  • Among the higher leadership [in the Nazi Party], while there is still a certain unity, personalities are beginning to play a constantly greater part. Hitler is perhaps more powerful than before, but he becomes more and more a figure separated from actualities. He depends a great deal on Hess, who is really his confidential man now and whom it is likely he may make Foreign Minister. Goering and Goebbels still remain good comrades of Hitler and are undoubtedly attached to him, but the difference* between Goering and Goebbels are becoming more evident. Goering is more moderate, while Goebbels, sensing the feeling of the masses and being above all an opportunist is becoming more radical. If It would come to a show-down between the radical and moderate elements, Goering would, however, undoubtedly be likely to be on the radical side as the one having the more chances. [...] If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come.
    This is a very disjointed and incoherent letter. I am dictating it under pressure as I wish to catch the courier pouch. What I do want to say really is that for the present this country is headed in directions which can only carry ruin to it and will create a situation here dangerous to world peace. With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country.
  • I met him several times. He was clever, fanatic; having a clubfoot he might have suffered a minority inferiority complex, knowing that because of his physical appearance, he knew he never could reach leadership. He was unscrupulous in his propaganda. I always opposed Goebbels. I always tried to have people educated on a broad basis, while Goebbels tried to supply them with knowledge for the moment. Goebbels considered humans as objects to be used for political purposes - for the moment.
  • I always had the feeling that Goebbels didn't respect people as a whole. He was reckless in his contacts in his own office. He had no consideration for anyone. He was only concerned about governing.
  • On the question of social justice, so crucial to Goebbels, Hitler did not share his view that bolshevism was the heir to Russia nationalism. According to Goebbels, no czar had understood the Russian people’s nationalist instincts as well as Lenin, who, in contrast to the German Communists, was not an internationalist Marxist.
  • Goebbels envisioned a Russia ‘freed from Jewish internationalism’ that would win the struggle for a ‘socialist nation state’ as an ‘eternal rejection of materialism.’ Russia would serve as Germany’s model, for it was ‘our natural ally against the fiendish temptation and corruption of the West.’
    • Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993, p. 69. Remarks concerning Goebbels’ article “National Socialism or Bolshevism” in Nationalsozialistische Briefe, (Oct. 15, 1925)
  • After the first few issues [of Nationalsozialistische Briefe] appeared most of its readers were convinced that Joseph Goebbels was a communist in disguise. In Rheydt, people had thought so for years. There was indeed very little difference between the language of Goebbels and the language of the communists. The Party ‘big shots’ became apprehensive.
    • Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: A Biography, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, (1948) p. 24
  • It is true that in the National Socialist Letters, Goebbels put the accent on Socialism rather than on Nationalism, to such an extent that he sponsored an alliance between a Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia; he also flirted with an ideological alliance with other rebellious ‘have not’ counties such as India and China.
    • Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: A Biography, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, (1948) p. 24
  • In a number of contributions published in the Voelkischer Beobachter [Goebbels] celebrated Lenin as the national liberator of his country. ‘The Soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevist or Marxist or international, but because it is national—because it is Russian,’ he wrote to a leftist friend. ‘No Czar has ever aroused the national passion of the Russian people as Lenin did.’
    • Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: A Biography, Hollis and Carter, London, UK (1949) p. 25
  • [Goebbels] specialized in articles on Bolshevism of a decidedly pro-Russian tone. He worked on a speech, "Lenin or Hitler?" (Oct. 15, 1925) In this comparative study he came to the conclusion that Hitler’s ideas were superior. Nevertheless, the comparison was not necessarily unflattering to the Russian.
    • Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: A Biography, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, (1948) p. 25
  • Hitler and Goebbels also argued at length about Russia and the Fuehrer made it unequivocally clear that Goebbels was no longer to indulge in praising Lenin as a ‘national liberator’ nor to draw any parallels between the Bolshevists and the Nazis. On April 16 [1926], Goebbels noted: ‘His arguments are convincing, but I think he has not quite recognized the Russian problem. Still, I may have to reconsider some of its aspects.’
    • Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: A Biography, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York (1948) p. 31
  • Goebbels saw the ultimate enemy as international capitalism, and those who held power in Germany as its lackey, betraying their nation for personal gain. These were the traditional targets of the Communists, of course, so the Nazis and the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, were in direct competition for the same constituency, two rabid dogs fighting for one bone… And Goebbels, who has so recently been happy to describe himself as a ‘German Communist’ led the fight with all the intensity of a religious convert.
    • Anthony Read, The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle, New York: NY and London: UK,, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2004) pp. 141-142
  • It was Strasser’s radicalism, his belief in the ‘socialism’ of National Socialism, which attracted the young Goebbels. Both wanted to build the party on the proletariat. The diary of Goebbels is full of expressions of sympathy for Communism at this time.
    • William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, New York: NY Simon & Schuster (2011), first published 1960, pp. 126-127
  • This man's rhetoric and ability to organise are unique. There was no situation he couldn’t deal with. The party members followed him with great love. The stormtroopers would have let themselves be hewn to pieces for him. Goebbels, that was like Hitler himself. Goebbels, well that was our Goebbels.
    • Horst Wessel in the 1920s.
      Was dieser Mann an Rednertalent und Organisationstalent aufwies, ist einzigartig. Es gab nichts, dem er sich nicht gewachsen zeigte. Die Parteigenossen hingen an ihm mit großer Liebe. Die S.A. hätte sich für ihn in Stücke schlagen lassen. Goebbels, das war wie Hitler selbst. Goebbels, das war eben unser Goebbels. Source: Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels, Munich 1990, p. 114

See also

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