Goebbels and Truth

For some years a colleague and I have been working to discourage the use of a dubious quotation by Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

No one ever provides a source for the quotation.  Our point is not that Goebbels always told the truth, but rather that an effective propagandist is unlikely to say in public that he lies. Goebbels prefered to tell the truth, or at least part of it, whenever possible, since clear lies reduce the effectiveness of propaganda.  

I recently came across an interesting 1940 Nazi poster announcing Goebbels’s love of truth:

The truth is always stronger than the lie

In 1940 it was easy for Goebbels to tell most of the truth most of the time, since Nazi forces were winning on every front.  In 1945, to the contrary, he had a problem  Although he told some bald-faced lies then, he more often resorted to vague claims that Germany would somehow still win the war because of its insurmountable will.

New Blog on Fabricated Quotation

My colleague Quentin Schultze and I will shortly publish an article on the fabricated quotation by Joseph Goebbels that I have discussed in the past on this blog.  I will provide details when it appears.

Meanwhile, we have started a blog to follow the spread and use of the quotation — and, we hope, its gradual disappearance, although we have no high expectations that two professors will be able to do much to stop its spread.

Another Fabricated Hitler Quotation

Although there is no shortage of quotations from Nazi sources that demonstrate its evil, people occasionally invent quotations that sound like what they think the Nazis would say to support a point.  I have a page on false Nazi quotations that looks into such matters.

Today I’m adding a quotation found in more than 1,700,000 web pages and a fair number of books.  Hitler is alleged to have said: “What luck for rulers that men do not think.” I’m not absolutely certain is it a fabrication, but I’m almost sure.  It isn’t in Mein Kampf, nor the published edition of Hitler’s speeches.  No one I can find who cites it provide a source. One book cited by several others provides the quotation, but no source.

But it sounds like what people think Hitler would have said, so it keeps spreading.

Another Fake Nazi Quotation

I've added another falsified quotation by Adolf Hitler to the False Nazi Quotations page. This one runs: "Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death." It's cited on more than 12,000 Internet pages at the moment -- but not once in a book, and none of the pages that cites it gives a source. It seems mostly to be used by conspiracy theorists, and provides a good example of their gullibility. They tend to believe anything that supports their point of view, frequently not troubling to check the reliability of the information.

False Nazi Quotations

I sometimes get requests to verify quotations circulating around the Internet. Some of the quotations are either forged or taken out of context. The Nazis, of course, said enough objectionable things to provide lots of citations, but accuracy in these matters is good. I've added a page, which will grow with time, on fabricated Nazi quotations.