Antisemites

"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."

"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."

"A nation without a religion - that is like a man without breath."

"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."

"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."

"One only honours what one conquers or defends."

"To be modern only means to fill new forms with eternal truths."

"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."

"Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk."

"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."

"Today there seems to be only one absolute thing: relativism."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"1923. You challenged your fate. To surmount or to die! It was not yet time. Therefore you became a victim. Your answer was: Death!"

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"The socialism we want has nothing to do with international Marxist-Jewish egalitarianism. We want socialism as a doctrine of the community."

"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…"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself."

"Accuse the other side of that of which you are guilty."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction."

"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."

"I'm looking for the teacher who is simple enough to be great, and great enough to be simple."

"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."

"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."

"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.’"

"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."

"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."

"Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"Say what you will: politics spoils a man’s character. Or rather: politics show how basically rotten man’s character is."

"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."