Europe in the Year 2000:: And Other Essays, including “The Art of Propaganda”

by Joseph Goebbels

  We constantly hear news that anti-Semitism is increasing in enemy nations. The charges being made against the Jews are the same ones that were made here. Anti-Semitism in enemy nations is not the result of anti-Semitic propaganda, since Jewry fights that strongly. In the Soviet Union, it receives the death penalty. Jewry does all it can to oppose anti-Semitism. The word Jew itself, for example, is hardly to be found in the otherwise so talkative English and USA newspapers, not to mention the Bolshevist press. Still, anti-Jewish attitudes are growing among the enemy public. This is an entirely natural reaction to the Jewish danger on the part of the affected peoples. In the long run, it does the Jews no good to plead in parliament and the newspapers for tougher laws against anti-Semitism, or to haul out the highest secular and spiritual dignitaries, among them naturally the Archbishop of Canterbury, to say a good word for the poor innocent persecuted Jews. They did that in Germany before 1933 too, but the National Socialist revolution took place nonetheless.

  None of the Führer’s prophetic words has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the destruction of the Aryan race, but rather the wiping out of the Jewish race. This process is of vast importance, and will have unforeseeable consequences that will require time. But it can no longer be halted. It must only be guided in the right direction. One must also be sure to strike the weapon of public deception from Jewry’s hands, which it is desperately using to save its skin. One can already see that in the face of approaching catastrophe the Jews are shrinking into the background. They send their pet Goy to the fore. It will not be long before they will not want to do it any longer, and wash their hands in innocence.

  As one has to grant, we have some experience in these matters, and are taking action to be sure they do not succeed. The Jews will have to answer for their countless crimes against the happiness and peace of mankind, and one day the whole world will give them the penalty that they are suffering today in Germany. We speak without resentment. The time is too grave to spin naive plans of revenge. This is a world problem of the first order that can be solved by the present generation, and must be solved by them. Sentimental considerations have no part here. We see Jewry as the embodiment of a general world decline. Either we will break this danger, or the peoples of the world will break under it.

  No one should say that winners are boastful. At present, we are the victors only in our own nation. Our victory at home, however, drew upon us the diabolic hatred of World Jewry, whose advance members the Jews still with us see themselves as. They want to see the Axis powers defeated, for that is the only way for them to regain their old privileges. It makes sense for us to secure our rear so that we can continue the battle before us with full energy and enthusiasm. When dealing with the Jews there are only two choices: to surrender to them or to fight them. We have chosen the latter. As our enemy attacks without mercy, so do we. The future will prove who is right. Developments to far, however, seem to be more in our favor than the enemy’s. Opposition to the Jews, not friendship with them, is growing around the world. We are convinced that at the end of the war, Jewry will face a humanity that fully understands the Jewish Question.

  Recently a leading London newspaper, which is wholly under Jewish control, printed an article that wondered at the alarming increase in anti-Semitism. It received many letters in response, and had to admit that only a tiny percentage took the Jewish side. The pro-Semitic letters, though the newspaper did not say this, probably were written by the Jews themselves. The others made the strongest attacks on Jewry, and the readership forced the paper to print some of them. They included all the insults one could hope for. This anti-Semitism is not racially grounded, and its roots are not at all clear, but one may still establish with some satisfaction that healthy popular instincts are beginning to manifest themselves even in enemy nations, Things are not much different in the United States. One of the letters encouraged the newspaper to send reporters to streetcars and trains. There they would hear numerous opinions about the Jews that deserved more than ironic dismissal.

  That is the way it normally begins. The Jews in England are reacting in the usual ways. First they look injured and unjustly persecuted. In the synagogues, the rabbis encourage people to be more careful in public, and to avoid provocative behavior. Then they rent a few respected, but buyable leaders from society, business or religious life to make their case. Their well-paid job is to condemn anti-Semitism as a cultural disgrace that is the result of enemy propaganda. They call for stronger laws against it. The poor Jews whine in public about everything they have done for the country, what wonderful and patriotic citizens they have always been and will continue to be, the important offices they hold, etc. The innocent citizen is persuaded by a flood of words that he must have been mistaken in always seeing Jews behind all major political or economic crimes. Soon they find some high church leader who is ready to condemn anti-Semitism as anti-Christian. By the end, not the Jews, but their enemies are responsible for every national misfortune. Then the game starts all over again.

  One has to grant that extraordinarily clever tactics are being used, and that it takes some intelligence or sound instincts to see behind the Jewish facade. But here, too, the jug carries water until it breaks. International Jewry’s attack on the culture and moral order of the world is cleverly concealed, but not cleverly enough so that it cannot be seen through. One must keep at their heels, and give them no rest when they begin to tire. They are virtuosos at the art of transformation. They can appear in a thousand forms, yet are always the same. If one has caught them, they claim injured innocence and send their guard of pity on ahead to beg for mercy. But if one extends them even a finger of pity, they chop the whole hand off. They must therefore be kept in the fear of the Lord.

  We know that they hate us from the depths of their souls. We take pleasure in their hatred. There is nothing that they would not do to us if they had the power. We cannot therefore give them even the slightest bit of power. More than that, it is our duty to tell the world of their nature and their depravity. We must again and again prove their sick role in beginning and carry on this war. We must attack them incessantly, accuse them without pity of the crimes of which they are guilty, until the nations begin to wake up. That may take a long time, but it is worth it. We are dealing with the most dangerous enemy that ever threatened the life, freedom, and dignity of humanity. There can be no mercy. We have pity only for the countless millions of our own people and those of other European nations who will be given over to the hate and destructive will of this devilish race if we become weak and give up the battle. Those Philistines who today are so eager to protect the Jews would be their first victims.

  We must all keep alert. We must be on guard against the insidious cleverness of the international world enemy. In the depths of his soul, he realizes that this war that he so frivolously began, expecting it to be the last step to world domination, has instead become a war for his racial existence. He desperately seeks to stop the inevitable march of events. It will do him no good. We will keep at him. In the end, the Führer’s prophecy about World Jewry in 1939, which they laughed at then, will come true.

  The Jews laughed in Germany too when they first saw us. They are not laughing any longer. They chose to wage war against us. But that war is turning against them. When they planned a war to totally destroy the German nation, they signed their own death warrant.

  Here, too, world history will be the world court.

  The Creators of the World’s Misfortunes

  Lead article in Das Reich magazine, 21 January 1945.

  One could not understand this war if one did not always keep in mind the fact that International Jewry stands behind all the unnatural forces that our united enemies use to attempt to deceive the world and keep humanity in the dark. It is, so to speak, the mortar that holds the enemy coalition firmly together, despite its differences of class, ideology, and interests. Capitalism and Bolshev
ism have the same Jewish roots, two branches of the same tree that in the end bear the same fruit. International Jewry uses both in its own way to suppress the nations and keep them in its service. How deep its influence on public opinion is in all the enemy countries and many neutral nations is plain to see that it may never be mentioned in newspapers, speeches, and radio broadcasts. There is a law in the Soviet Union that punishes anti-Semitism — or in plain English, public education about the Jewish Question — by death. The expert in these matters is in no way surprised that a leading spokesman for the Kremlin said over the New Year that the Soviet Union would not rest until this law was valid throughout the world. In other words, the enemy clearly says that its goal in this war is to put the total domination of Jewry over the nations of the earth under legal protection, and to threaten even a discussion of this shameful attempt with the death penalty.

  It is little different in the plutocratic nations. There the struggle against the impudent usurpation of the Jewish race is not punished by the executioner, but rather by death through economic and social boycott and by intellectual terror. This has the same effect in the end. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt were made by Jewry. They enjoy its full support and reward it with their full protection. They present themselves in their speeches as upright men of civil courage, yet one never hears even a word against the Jews, even though there is growing hatred among their people as a result of this war, a hatred that is fully justified. Jewry is a taboo theme in the enemy countries. It stands outside every legal boundary and thus becomes the tyrant of its host peoples. While enemy soldiers fight, bleed, and die at the front, the Jews make money from their sacrifice on the stock exchanges and black markets.

  If a brave man dares to step forward and accuse the Jews of their crimes, he will be mocked and spat on by their press, chased from his job or otherwise impoverished, and be brought into public contempt. Even that is apparently not enough for the Jews. They want to bring Soviet conditions to the whole world, giving Jewry absolute power and freedom from prosecution. He who objects or even debates the matter gets a bullet in the back of his head or an axe through his neck. There is no worse tyranny than this. This is the epitome of the public and secret disgrace that Jewry inflicts on the nations that deserve freedom.

  That is all long behind us. Yet it still threatens us in the distance. We have, it is true, entirely broken the power of the Jews in the Reich, but they have not given up. They did not rest until they had mobilized the whole world against us. Since they could no longer conquer Germany from within, they want to try it from without. Every Russian, English, and American soldier is a mercenary of this world conspiracy of a parasitic race. Given the current state of the war, who could still believe that they are fighting and dying at the front for the national interests of their countries! The nations want a decent peace, but the Jews are against it.

  They know that the end of the war would mean the dawning humanity’s knowledge of the unhealthy role that International Jewry played in preparing for and carrying out this war. They fear being unmasked, which has in fact become unavoidable and must inevitably come, just as the day follows the night. That explains their raging bursts of hatred against us, which are only the result of their fear and their feelings of inferiority. They are too eager, and that makes them suspicious. International Jewry will not succeed in turning this war to its advantage. Things are already too far along. The hour will come in which all the peoples of the earth will awake, and the Jews will be the victims. Here, too, things can only go so far.

  It is an old, often-used method of International Jewry to discredit education and knowledge about its corrupting nature and drives, thereby depending on the weaknesses of those people who easily confuse cause with effect. The Jews are also masters at manipulating public opinion, which they dominate through their network of news agencies and press concerns that reaches throughout the world. The pitiful illusion of a free press is one of the methods they use to stupefy the publics of enemy lands. If the enemy press is as free as it pretends to be, let it take an open position, for or against, on the Jewish Question. It will not do that because it cannot and may not do so. The Jews love to mock and criticize everything except themselves, although everyone knows that they are most in need of public criticism. This is where the so-called freedom of the press in enemy countries ends.

  Newspapers, parliaments, statesmen, and church leaders must be silent here. Crimes and vices, filth and corruption are covered by the blanket of love. The Jews have total control of public opinion in enemy countries, and he who has that is also master of all of public life. Only the nations that have to accept such a condition are to be pitied. The Jews mislead them into believing that the German nation is backward. Our alleged backwardness is actually proof of our progress. We have recognized the Jews as a national and international danger, and from this knowledge have drawn compelling conclusions. This German knowledge will become the knowledge of the world at the end of this war. We think it our primary duty to do everything in our power to make that happen.

  Humanity would sink into eternal darkness, it would fall into a dull and primitive state, were the Jews to win this war. They are the incarnation of that destructive force that in these terrible years has guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against all that we see as noble, beautiful, and worth keeping. For that reason alone the Jews hate us. They despise our culture and learning, which they perceive as towering over their nomadic worldview. They fear our economic and social standards, which leave no room for their parasitic drives. They are the enemy of our domestic order, which has excluded their anarchistic tendencies. Germany is the first nation in the world that is entirely free of the Jews.

  That is the prime cause of its political and economic balance. Since their expulsion from the German national body has made it impossible for them to shake this balance from within, they lead the nations they have deceived in battle against us from without. It is fine with them, in fact it is part of their plan, that Europe in the process will lose a large part of its cultural values. The Jews had no part in their creation. They do not understand them. A deep racial instinct tells them that since these heights of human creative activity are forever beyond their reach, they must attack them today with hatred. The day is not distant when the nations of Europe, yes, even those of the whole world, will shout: The Jews are guilty for all our misfortunes! They must be called to account, and soon and thoroughly!

  International Jewry is ready with its alibi. Just as during the great reckoning in Germany, they will attempt to look innocent and say that one needs a scapegoat, and they are it. But that will no longer help them, just as it did not help them during the National Socialist revolution, The proof of their historical guilt, in details large and small, is so plain that it can no longer be denied even with the most clever lies and hypocrisy.

  Who is it that drives the Russians, the English, and the Americans into battle and sacrifices huge numbers of human lives in a hopeless struggle against the German people? The Jews! Their newspapers and radio broadcasts spread the songs of war while the nations they have deceived are led to the slaughter. Who is it that invents new plans of hatred and destruction against us every day, making this war into a dreadful case of self-mutilation and self-destruction of European life and its economy, education and culture? The Jews! Who devised the unnatural marriage between England and the USA on one side and Bolshevism on the other, building it up and jealously ensuring its continuance? Who covers the most perverse political situations with cynical hypocrisy from a trembling fear that a new way could lead the nations to realize the true causes of this terrible human catastrophe? The Jews, only the Jews! They are named Morgenthau and Lehmann[27] and stand behind Roosevelt as a so-called brain trust. They are named Melchett[28] and Sassoon[29] and serve as Churchill’s moneybags and order givers. They are named Kaganovich and Ehrenburg[30] and are Stalin’s pacesetters and intellectual spokesmen. Wherever you look, you see Jews. They march as political commis
sars behind the Red army and organize murder and terror in the areas conquered by the Soviets. They sit behind the lines in Paris and Brussels, Rome and Athens, and fashion their reins from the skin of the unhappy nations that have fallen under their power.

  That is the truth. It can no longer be denied, particularly since in their drunken joy of power and victory the Jews have forgotten their ordinarily so carefully maintained reserve and now stand in the spotlight of public opinion. They no longer bother, apparently believing that it is no longer necessary, that their hour has come. And this is their mistake, which they always make when think themselves near their great goal of anonymous world domination. Throughout the history of the nations, whenever this tragic situation developed, a good providence saw to it that the Jews themselves became the gravediggers of their own hopes. They did not destroy the healthy peoples, but rather the sting of their parasitic effects brought the realization of the looming danger to the forefront and led to the greatest sacrifices to overcome it. At a certain point, they become that power that always wants evil but creates good. It will be that way this time, too.

  The fact that the German nation was the first on earth to recognize this danger and expel it from its organism is proof of its healthy instincts. It therefore became the leader of a world struggle whose results will determine the fate and the future of International Jewry. We view with complete calm the wild Old Testament tirades of hatred and revenge of Jews throughout the world against us. They are only proof that we are on the right path. They cannot unsettle us. We gaze on them with sovereign contempt and remember that these outbursts of hate and revenge were everyday events for us in Germany until that fateful day for International Jewry, 30 January 1933, when the world revolution against the Jews that threatened them not only Germany, but all the other nations, began.