by Joseph Goebbels
The English are well known throughout the world for their lack of political scruples. They are experts at the art of hiding their misdeeds behind a facade of virtue. They have been at it for centuries, and it has become such a part of their nature that they hardly notice it any longer. They carry on with such a pious expression and deadly seriousness that they even convince themselves that they are the exemplars of political virtue. They do not admit their hypocrisy to themselves. It never happens that one Englishman says to another with a wink or a smile “We don’t want to fool ourselves, do we now.” They do not only behave as if they were the model of piety and virtue — they really believe that they are. That is both amusing and dangerous.
One has to be on the alert when dealing with them. They managed to conquer the world because they never encountered a worthy opponent. In the last three centuries we Germans often had comparable strength in Europe, but we were usually far inferior when it came to exploiting national and international opportunities. The English were unshakably confident in their belief that Great Britain’s world domination was a sign of divine providence. Those who attempted to resist, or defend themselves against the empire were ruthlessly suppressed, using the occasional low blow when it was necessary. The English always talked about their nobility and sense of fair play, but they were anything but when circumstances required. We saw enough proof of that at the end of the war, and in the years from 1919 to 1933.
We Germans, on the other hand, have been a political people only in the past few years. England recognizes this change as a major political danger in Europe. It was entirely different before the war. England then could do to Germany what it wanted. We were a harmless people who went about our business, giving the world our poets, musicians, and philosophers, never realizing that there were other nations just waiting for the opportunity to knock us flat.
England was at the center of it all. It found the occasion, the method, and the results. The war caught Germany entirely by surprise, proof that we had not wanted it. Then England got moving. English propaganda turned the whole world against us. One had not thought them capable of it. The experts found its planning and execution brilliant. English propaganda was limited to a few powerful slogans. With devilish depravity, they were spread systematically throughout the entire world and pounded into the brains of millions of people. At the end, they were helpless victims of mass hypnosis.
There were really only a few slogans that the English spread throughout the world. They spoke of children’s hands chopped off, eyes poked out, women raped, and old people tortured.
Long years of anti-German propaganda campaign persuaded the whole world that Germany was a nation of barbarians, uncivilized and inhumane, and that it was the moral and cultural obligation of the rest of the earth to destroy Germany and to break its power. Only then could the world know peace and friendship. That made it easy for the rest of the world to join England in fighting Germany.
We Germans had no idea how to respond. We watched the English campaign with honest stupidity. The good German citizen shook his head and wondered how anyone could lie like that. We suffered the consequences at the end of the war. During the last months of the war, England attempted to hammer into the minds of the German population the idea that it was fighting our government, not us. The English did not want to hurt the German people, their war propaganda said. The Kaiser had to go. Then the European nations could end the war.
American President Wilson proclaimed his well-known Fourteen Points. In brief, they announced that the Allies did not want to force peace on the Germans, that none of the warring countries should have to pay reparations, or be otherwise harmed, or lose national honor or territory. The Allies’ only demand was to replace the Kaiser with a republic, after which peace with honor would follow for everyone.
These stupid lies were brewed by the English. Wilson was simply the Foreign Office’s loudspeaker. And good old Germany believed what England got the Americans to say. We fell into the trap. We did everything that England wanted, and had to pay the bill in the end.
When the news of the German revolution reached London in November 1918, they could hardly believe it. Even the highest circles doubted it. One of England’s leading men of the time later said privately that London had not thought it possible that the German people would fall for the swindle.
The results were catastrophic. Germany was robbed of its honor and its land. We were disarmed and robbed of our merchant fleet and navy, and of our colonies. We were given an impossible reparations burden. Its only purpose was to wreck the German economy.
Still, it did have one good result. It taught the German people something. On the one hand Germany was impoverished, but the way was paved for the National Socialist renaissance. Its battle was directed against the Treaty of Versailles, as well as those who benefited from it both at home and abroad. It disposed of those who had signed the Treaty of Versailles and presented those who supported them with the choice either of setting the shameful treaty aside or of being confronted with accomplished facts on the part of a Germany once more strong.
Germany today has been transformed and educated by National Socialism. It joins the great powers, a nation entirely different than that of 1914, and especially 1918. The German people has become political. If it were today as it formerly was, it would be in danger of falling prey to another English swindle, just like that of the war. England is trying to do exactly the same today as it did with such success during the war. England’s swindle today is just as blatant, dirty, and impudent as it was back then. They think we are as dumb today as we were then. The men in London think the German people today are as dumb as they rightly thought we were in 1914 and 1918. This is their mistake.
Today the English newspapers openly write that the task of English propaganda is to drive a wedge between the German people and its leadership. But we hear that as clearly as they do, and the German people draws the proper conclusion. That is the goal of English propaganda! They want to split Hitler and the nation. Naturally they find hypocritical and smooth-sounding arguments, just as they did during the Kaiser’s day. They say that Germany must return to the camp of the civilized nations. Oh? To the circle of civilized nations that we have come to know during the past 25 years? Those civilized nations that even after the end of the war allowed millions of mothers and children to starve, that sent Negroes to bring culture to the Rhine, that shot Schlageter, stole our colonies, exploited Germany, and coldly and cynically broke their most solemn promises to us, the promises the German people had been deceived by?
It was easy to fool Germany back then. Today, we Germans respond differently. And we now have ways to defend ourselves against London’s lies once the English propaganda machine moves into high gear. It floods the public with scare after scare, spreading countless lies with the most pious expression. They report rebellions by German soldiers, insurrections and strikes in working class districts, growing conflicts between classes, anarchy in the Protectorate. They sympathize with a small circle of opposition clergy and make that cause of a few complaining intellectuals into the cause of England and the entire civilized world.
It does not work any longer. Our people have been educated in the school of National Socialism. We no longer naively accept England’s shamelessness. We are defending ourselves, even counterattacking as is the National Socialist custom. And how! Our counterattack is powerful, and hits dead center. When they throw mud at us, we do not stand back 30 meters and wave our little sword. We have developed thick skins. We are not refined aesthetes who get queasy in the midst of political disputes. That annoys the enemy.
The experienced English propagandists for the first time are seeing an opponent facing them whom they did not previously think they had to worry about. They are being surpassed in an area in which they once were the undisputed master. The National Socialist movement has taught the German nation not only to defend against propaganda, but to use it itself. We Germans know something about propaganda. During our struggle for power our enemies had absolute power, yet we threw them to the ground. We are not as defenseless today as we once were. Today we have the most powerful army in the world. We defend an idea that fills us with holy conviction, and we wield a propaganda that hits its target, that is experienced and hardened by battle. We use this spiritual weapon with pleasure and enthusiasm.
The new version of the charge of chopped of children’s hands will not work with the German people any more, nor will it persuade most of the rest of the world. People see through John Bull. The world’s people know what is going on. England can look for allies wherever it wants, but it will not find them in Germany. There it will find nothing but thundering laughter. Our advice to the propaganda experts in the Foreign Office is to get rid of their old lies and find better ones that will be worth our while to deal with.
If the English want a fight with Germany, they will not be fighting the Führer or a small ruling circle, but a united nation of 80 million Germans. They might want to find a way other than armed conflict. That would have no prospect of success, and would in fact present England with the real danger of losing its Empire. One does London a favor by encouraging it to be realistic, to have a clear understanding of Germany, and to stop the bombast and empty threats. It must face the hard and unchangeable facts.
England’s Guilt
by Joseph Goebbels
It is a major error to assume that England’s plutocrats slipped into the war against their will or even against their intentions. The opposite is true. The English warmongers wanted the war and used all the resources at their disposal over the years to bring it about. They surely were not surprised by the war. English plutocracy had no goal other than to unleash war against Germany at the right moment, and this since Germany first began to seek once again to be a world power.
Poland really had little to do with the outbreak of war between the Reich and England. It was only a means to an end. England did not support the Polish government out of principle or for humanitarian reasons. That is clear from the fact that England gave Poland no help of any kind whatsoever when the war began. Nor did England take any measures against Russia. The opposite, in fact. The London warring clique to this day has tried to bring Russia into the campaign of aggression against Germany.
The encirclement of Germany long before the outbreak of the war was traditional English policy. From the beginning, England has always directed its main military might against Germany. It never could tolerate a strong Reich on the Continent. It justified its policy by claiming that it wanted to maintain a balance of forces in Europe.
Today there is still another reason. The English warmongers conceal it. It is crassly egotistic. The English prime minister announced the day the war began that England’s goal was to destroy Hitlerism. However, he defined Hitlerism in a way other than how the English plutocracy actually sees it. The English warmongers claim that National Socialism wants to conquer the world. No nation is secure against German aggression. An end must be made of the German hunger for power. The limit came in the conflict with Poland. In reality, however, there is another reason for England’s war with Germany. The English warmongers cannot seriously claim that Germany wants to conquer the world, particularly in view of the fact that England controls nearly two thirds of the world. And Germany since 1933 has never threatened English interests.
So when Chamberlain says that England wants to destroy Hitlerism in this war, he is in one sense incorrect. But in another sense, he is speaking the truth. England does want to destroy Hitlerism. It sees Hitlerism as the present internal state of the Reich, which is a thorn in the eye of English plutocracy.
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.
Capitalism democracy suffers from every possible modern social ailment. The lords and City people can remain the richest people one earth only because they constantly maintain their wealth by exploiting their colonies and preserving unbelievable poverty in their own country.
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.
That is why England declared war on Germany. Since it was accustomed to letting others fight its wars, it looked to the European continent to find those ready to fight for England’s interests. France was ready to take on this degrading duty, since the same kind of people ruled France. They too were ready for war out of egotistic reasons. Western European democracy is really only a Western European plutocracy that rules the world. It declared war on German socialism because it endangered their capitalist interests.
A similar drama began in 1914. England had more luck during those four and a half years than it is having today. Europe’s nations had no chance to see what was happening. The nations of Europe today have no desire to play the same role they played during the World War. England and France stand alone. Still, England is trying once again to wage war without making any personal sacrifice. The goal is to blockade Germany, to gradually bring it to submit by starvation. That is longstanding English policy. They used it successfully in the Napoleonic wars, and also during the World War. It would work now as well, if the German people had not been educated by National Socialism. National Socialism is immune to English temptations. English propaganda lies no longer work in Germany. They have gradually lost their effectiveness in the rest of the world as well, since German propaganda today reaches far beyond its borders. This time, English plutocracy will not succeed in driving a wedge between the German people and their leadership, though that is their goal.
The German nation today is defending not only its honor and independence, but also the great social accomplishments it has made through hard and untiring work since 1933. It is a people’s state built on the foundation of justice and economic good sense. In the past, England always had the advantage of facing a fragmented Germany. It is only natural that English plutocracy today seeks to split the German people and make it ripe for new collapse.
English lying propaganda can no longer name things by their proper names. It therefore claims that it is not fighting the German people, only Hitlerism. But we know this old song. In South Africa, England was not fighting the Boers, only Krugerism. In the World War, England wanted to destroy Kaiserism, not the German people. But that did not stop English plutocracy from brutally and relentlessly suppressing the Boers after that war or the Germans after our defeat.
A child once burned is twice shy. The German people were once victims of lying English war propaganda. Now it understands the situation. It has long understood the background of this war. It knows that behind all English plutocratic capitalism’s fine words, its aim is to destroy Germany’s social achievements. We are defending the socialism we have build in Germany since 1933 with every military, economic and spiritual means at our disposal. The bald English lies have no impact on the German people.
English plutocracy is finally being forced to defend itself. In the past, it always found other nations to fight for it. This time, the English people must themselves risk their necks for the lords and City men. They will meet a unified German people of workers, farmers, and soldiers who are prepared to defend their nation with every means at their disposal.
We did not want war. England inflicted it on us. English plutocracy forced it on us. England is responsible for the war, and it will have to pay for it.
The whole world is waking up today. It can no longer be ruled by the capitalist methods of the 19th century. The peoples have matured. They will one day deal a terrible blow to the capitalist plutocrats who are the cause of their misery.
It is no accident that National Socialism has the historical task of carrying out this reckoning. Plutocracy is collapsing intellectually, spiritually, and in the not too distant future, militarily. We are acting consistently with Nietzsche’s words: “Give a shove to what is falling.”