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

by Joseph Goebbels

  It will not cease before it has reached its goal. The truth cannot be stopped by lies or force. It will get through. The Jews will meet their Cannae at the end of this war. Not Europe, but rather they will lose. They may laugh at this prophecy today, but they have laughed so often in the past, and almost as often they stopped laughing sooner or later. Not only do we know precisely what we want, we also know precisely what we do not want. The deceived nations of the Earth may still lack the knowledge they need, but we will bring it to them. How will the Jews stop that in the long run? They believe their power rests on sure foundations, but it stands on feet of clay. One hard blow and it will collapse, burying the creators of the misfortunes of the world in its ruins.

  The Year 2000

  Lead article in Das Reich magazine, February 25, 1945.

  The three enemy war leaders, American sources report, have agreed at the Yalta Conference[31] to Roosevelt’s proposal for an occupation program that will destroy and exterminate the German people up until the year 2000. One must grant the somewhat grandiose nature of the proposal. It reminds one of the skyscrapers in New York that soar high into the sky, and whose upper stories sway in the wind. What will the world look like in the year 2000? Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt have determined it, at least insofar as the German people are concerned. One may however doubt if they and we will act in the predicted manner.

  No one can predict the distant future, but there are some facts and possibilities that are clear over the coming fifty years. For example, none of the three enemy statesmen who developed this brilliant plan will still be alive, England will have at most 20 million inhabitants, our children’s children will have had children, and the events of this war will have sunk into myth. One can also predict with a high degree of certainty that Europe will be a united continent in the year 2000. One will fly from Berlin to Paris for breakfast in fifteen minutes, and our most modern weapons will be seen as antiques, and much more. Germany, however, will still be under military occupation according to the plans of the Yalta Conference, and the English and Americans will be training its people in democracy. How empty the brains of these three charlatans must be — at least in the case of two of them!

  The third, Stalin, follows much more far-reaching goals than his two comrades. He certainly does not plan to announce them publicly, but he and his 200 million slaves will fight bitterly and toughly for them. He sees the world differently than do those plutocratic brains. He sees a future in which the entire world is subjected to the dictatorship of the Moscow Internationale, which means the Kremlin. His dream may seem fantastic and absurd, but if we Germans do not stop him, it will undoubtedly become reality.

  That will happen as follows: 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. The Jewish press in London and New York would probably still be applauding. All that would be left is human raw material, a stupid, fermenting mass of millions of desperate proletarianized working animals who would only know what the Kremlin wanted them to know about the rest of the world. Without leadership, they would fall helplessly into the hands of the Soviet blood dictatorship. The remainder of Europe would fall into chaotic political and social confusion that would prepare the way for the Bolshevization that will follow. Life and existence in these nations would become hell, which was after all the point of the exercise.

  Aside from domestic problems of economic, social and political nature, England would suffer a declining population that would leave it even less able to defend its interests in Europe and the rest of the world than it is today. In 1948, Roosevelt’s campaign for reelection would fail, just as Wilson’s did after the First World War, and a Republican isolationist would become president of the USA. His first official act would likely be to withdraw American troops from the European witch’s kettle. The entire population of the USA would doubtless approve. Since there would be no other military power on the continent, in the best case 60 British divisions would face 600 Soviet divisions. Bolshevism certainly would not have been idle during the period. A Labor government, perhaps even a radical half-Bolshevist one, would be in power in England. Under the pressure of public opinion whipped up by the Jewish press and a people weary of war, it would soon announce its lack of interest in Europe. How fast such things can happen is clear from the example of Poland today.

  The so-called Third World War would likely be short, and our continent would be at the feet of the mechanized robots from the steppes. That would be an unfortunate situation for Bolshevism. It would without doubt leap over to England and set the land of classic democracy ablaze. The iron curtain would fall once more over this vast tragedy of nations. Over the next five years, hundreds of millions of slaves would build tanks, fighters, and bombers; then the general assault on the USA would begin. The Western Hemisphere, which despite lying accusations we have never threatened, would then be in the gravest danger. One day those in the USA will curse the day in which a long-forgotten American president released a communiqué at a conference at Yalta, which will long since have sunk into legend.

  The democracies are not up to dealing with the Bolshevist system, since they use entirely different methods. They are as helpless against it as were the bourgeois parties in Germany over against the communists before we took power. In contrast to the USA, the Soviet system needs to take no regard for public opinion or its people’s living standard. It therefore has no need to fear American economic competition, not to mention its military. Even were the war to end as Roosevelt and Churchill imagine, the plutocratic countries would be defenseless before the competition from the Soviet Union on the world market, unless they decided to greatly reduce wages and living standards. But if they were to do that, they would not be able to resist Bolshevist agitation. However things turn out, Stalin would always be the winner and Roosevelt and Churchill the losers. The Anglo-American war policy has reached a dead end. They have called up the spirits, and can no longer get rid of them. Our predictions, beginning with Poland, are beginning to be confirmed by a remarkable series of current events. One can only smile when the English and Americans forge plans for the year 2000. They will be happy if they survive until 1950.

  No thinking Englishman fails to see this today. The British prime minister wore a Russian fur coat at the Yalta Conference. This aroused unhappy comment in the English public. When the London news agencies later reported that it was a Canadian fur coat, no one believed them. People saw in the matter a symbol of England’s subordination to the Kremlin’s will. What happened to the days when England had an important, even decisive say in world affairs! An influential American Senator recently remarked: “England is only a small appendix to Europe!” His comrades treat it that way already. Has it deserved any better? At a dramatic moment in European history, it declared war against the Reich, unleashing a world conflagration that not only went out of control but threatens to leave England itself in ruins. A tiny extension of Germany into purely German territories to the East was sufficient ground to see a threat to the European balance of power. In the resulting war, England found it necessary to throw out its 200-year-old policy of the balance of power. Now a world power has entered Europe that begins to the East in Vladivostok and will not rest in the West until it has incorporated Great Britain itself into its dictatorship.

  It is more than naive for the British prime minister to plan for the political and social status of the Reich in the year 2000. In the coming years and decades, England will probably have other concerns. It will have to fight desperately to maintain a small portion of its former power in the world. It received the first blows in the First World War, and now during the Second World War faces the final coup de grace.

  One can imagine things turning out differently, but it is now too late
. The Führer made numerous proposals to London, the last time four weeks before the war began. He proposed that German and British foreign policy work together, that the Reich would respect England’s sea power as England would respect the Reich’s land power, and that parity would exist in the air. Both powers would join in guaranteeing world peace, and the British Empire would be a critical component of that peace. Germany would even be ready to defend that Empire with military means if it were necessary. Under such conditions, Bolshevism would have been confined to its original breeding grounds. It would have been sealed off from the rest of the world. Now Bolshevism is at the Oder River. Everything depends on the steadfastness of German soldiers. Will Bolshevism to pushed back to the East, or will its fury flood over Western Europe? That is the war situation. The Yalta Communiqué does not change things in the least. Things depend only on this crisis of human culture. It will be solved by us, or it will not be solved at all. Those are the alternatives.

  We Germans are not the only ones who say this. Every thinking person knows that today, as so often in the past, the German people have a European mission. We may not lose our courage, even though the mission brings with it enormous pain and suffering. The foolish know-it-alls have brought the world more than once to the edge of the abyss. At the last moment, the sight of the terrifying misery alarmed humanity enough for it to take the decisive step backwards at the critical moment. That will be the case this time as well. We have lost a great deal in this war. About all we have left are our military forces and our ideals. We may not give these up. They are the foundation of our existence and of the fulfillment of our historical obligations. It is hard and terrible, but also honorable. We were given our duty because we alone have the necessary character and steadfastness. Any other people would have collapsed. We, however, like Atlas carry the weight of the world on our shoulders and do not doubt.

  Germany will not be occupied by its enemies in the year 2000. The German nation will be the intellectual leader of civilized humanity. We are earning that right in this war. This world struggle with our enemies will live on only as a bad dream in people’s memories. Our children and their children will erect monuments to their fathers and mothers for the pain they suffered, for the stoic steadfastness with which they bore all, for the bravery they showed, for the heroism with which they fought, for the loyalty with which they held to their Führer and his ideals in difficult times. Our hopes will come true in their world and our ideals will be reality. We must never forget that when we see the storms of this wild age reflected in the eyes of our children. Let us act so that we will earn their eternal blessings, not their curses.

  Resistance at Any Price

  Lead article in Das Reich magazine, April 22, 1945.

  The war has reached a stage at which only the full efforts of the nation and of each individual can save us. The defense of our freedom no longer depends on the army fighting at the front. Each civilian, each man and woman and boy and girl must fight with unequaled fanaticism. The enemy expects that, once his tanks have broken through, they will find no resistance. He believes that we will be so disconcerted by his material superiority that we will let things take their course, without caring how they turn out. We must prove the enemy’s hopes wrong. No village and no city may give in to the enemy.

  The enemy is strong, but not strong enough to hold all the territory of the Reich without our help. If he persuades us to capitulate, he will have an easy time with us. The enemy has laid waste to our cities and provinces through the worst and most terrible bombing terror. As long as we are determined to resist at all costs, we cannot be beaten, and for us not being beaten means to be victorious.

  This war of nations demands heavy sacrifice. Still, those sacrifices do not begin to compare with those we would be forced to bring if we lose. The enemy naturally wants to make his battle against the Reich as easy and safe as possible, and hopes to diminish our morale by seductive agitation. That is poison for weak souls. He who falls for it proves he has learned nothing from the war. He thinks it possible to take the easy road, when only the hard path leads to freedom. They are the same doubting souls who have no sense of national honor, and think nothing of living under the clubs of Anglo-American banking Jews, accepting charity from their hands. In other words, they are the rubbish of our nation, who nonetheless give the enemy an entirely false idea of this people.

  One sees how the English and American newspapers have fun with them, mocking and scorning them, and comparing them with a brave nation fighting for its life. That nation, which has demonstrated heroism and more heroism, has only one wish when reading these accounts: to kill them. They deserve nothing else. One cannot even claim that they do not know what they are doing. They have to know it, for they have been told often enough, even by the enemy, should they not want to believe us.

  In the midst of a thousand battles, burdens and defeats, our people stand unbroken. Our hearts are proud when we hear from the enemy the wild fanaticism they encounter, how fathers, mothers and even children gather to resist the invaders, how boys and girls throw hand grenades and mines or shoot from cellar windows without regard to danger. They force the enemy to give them respect. They tie up his forces.

  They force him to commit his reserves to hold a rebellious city or a village glowing with national fanaticism, thereby slowing his advance until a new defensive line can be built a few kilometers further on. It is an absurd reversal of the facts to claim they are fighting in desperation. The enemy’s attacks are riskier than the methods we use to resist. They have a solid foundation, which will soon make its impact known in the course of the war. A nation that defended its freedom with all its resources has never yet been defeated. Often, however, those that give in from desperation have been defeated.

  Our entire war effort requires revolutionary changes. The old rules of war are outdated, and have no use at all in our present situation. This is the age of wars between nations. When whole peoples are threatened, whole peoples must defend themselves. The enemy does not want to take a province from us or push us back to more favorable strategic borders; he wants to cut our very arteries by destroying our mines and factories, destroying our national substance. If he succeeds, Germany will become a cemetery. Our people will starve and perish, aside from the millions who will be deported to Siberia as slave labor. In such a situation, any means is justified. We are in a state of national emergency; it is no time to ask what is normally done! Does the enemy worry about that?

  Where does international law allow for the tens of thousands of German women tortured and raped in the East, or the tens of thousands of German children who have been murdered in a cowardly and terrible way, or the many who have fallen victim to barbaric enemy bombing terror? All normal ideas of warfare have long since been discarded by the enemy. Only we good natured Germans still hold to them in the mistaken idea that we might thereby bring the enemy to reason.

  The facts prove the opposite. Our enemies are even insolent enough to call us barbarians and war criminals because here and there we put up touch resistance with the means we have available. Just recently, British terror fliers who had been shot down after doing their destructive work were attacked by men and women in Berlin, who after their homes had been destroyed were trying to rescue their possessions and dig out the corpses of their parents and children. Their reaction was understandable, but German guards protected them with their weapons. What would happen to a captured German pilot, were he lead through a flaming Moscow? To ask the question is to answer it. Knightly behavior will not accomplish much in this war. The German dreamer must wake up if he does not want to lose his freedom and his life. How long will he wait to do what is necessary? Will he wait until Bolshevist posters appear ordering everyone between fourteen and fifty to show up at a certain spot with clothing and two weeks of food in order to be transported to Siberia? Or until the Anglo-American occupation forces ruin our people through starvation and Typhoid Fever?

  Is that an exaggeration?
Not at all! It has become grim reality in the occupied territories in the East and West. Only a few romantic souls fail to see it. They have built a world of illusions, and do not want to believe the hard facts and draw the necessary conclusions. They must change their thinking, and as fast as possible. Someone once said that he did not know which people could be beaten to death, but he did know that the German people had to be beaten to life. What kind of blow will it take to finally wake these people from their illusions, to persuade them to give up their fantasies and errors, for their own good even if not for that of everyone else? What will persuade these obstructionists and defeatists to defend themselves?

  The enemy is out to get us all. The London papers recently reported that Anglo-American officers viewed with contempt the owners of the houses where they were quartered. They were buying German-English dictionaries in order to parley. Only the domestic servants refused to behave in so unworthy a manner. What can one say about such creatures? Beating them seems the only possible solution. Thank God, these are isolated events. What can a German think about people who have had their property destroyed and who have been told they will be tortured in the manner of the Middle Ages, who still want to have a pleasant conversation with their conquerors?

  Why do we mention these examples? In order to protect healthy people against infection. Were they to succumb, it would all be over. We would have no salvation, no future. We must help ourselves if we are to receive any help at all. It is more than naive to hope that the enemy will help us. We still have enough means and opportunities to defend ourselves and to bring the war to a successful conclusion if we only use them. This is the center of our efforts.