Do you want to REALLY know history, or do you want to duck your head into the sand?

We have all learned a certain narrative about 1930's Germany. Many people today talk about how we are going through something similar.

Most of us have never actually read the words of the people who were living it then. I came across a collection of speeches letters that Joseph Goebbles published in German newspapers. They paint an interesting story -- perhaps one most of us never knew.

Imagine ... actually READING history from original sources, rather than being spoon-fed what to think by people with an agenda!

Goebbles has been labeled the "Minister of Propaganda." In fact, his title was "Reich Minister." "Reich" basically meant the nation of Germany, with the understanding that it was a government of the People. Imagine that.

He probably did engage in propaganda, just like Tony Fauci, Bill Clinton, and Barry Soetoro do today, and politicians have often done. But propaganda is merely persuasion, like corporate advertisers do. It can be truthful, or it can be lies.

Anyway, it can be interesting to read his actual words. When we do, perhaps a different narrative appears.

The New Year 1934

What a difference from the New Year’s Eve of a year ago. Then the Reich stood before the abyss. The people were torn by hatred and civil war. ... the specter of Bolshevism was everywhere.

Where once there was hopelessness and despair, today a whole nation is filled with faithful devotion.

They will judge the year 1933. It will go down in history as the year the German nation finally broke free of its two thousand years of misery.

What an astonishing collection of significant political, cultural and economic events mark this year of German awakening! It finally destroyed the Marxist nonsense that had tortured the German people for six decades, condemning them to political impotence. Only a year ago it threatened the Reich, ready at any moment to seize power.

Twelve months ago the [political] parties carried on their nonsense in the parliaments, government crisis followed crisis, and the fate of the Reich was determined by special interests that used the holy idea of Germany only for their party’s benefit.

This political foundation had to be established if the government had any intention of dealing with the big problems of the day, if it was to do everything possible to deal with the specter of unemployment. The government had not only the intention to do something, it acted. It attacked unemployment with impressive measures. With God’s help, it was able to do even more than it promised: over two million people are at work again, and even the hard winter did not slow us down.

The year 1933 ends under this happy sign. With nostalgia we look back once again. It was a proud and manly year. It was a year of beginning and renewal, the first since the end of the war of which we can say that it ended for Germany better than it had begun.

In these last hours of the year, we join in humble thanks to the great God who gave us the gift of doing our work loyally and industriously. We ask his blessings for the coming year, and promise that we will not be unworthy of his blessings.

The year of revolution is over. The year of construction is beginning.

https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb23.htm

Communism with the Mask Off

English newspapers ... alleged similarities between Russian Bolshevism and German National Socialism.

... an astonishing misconception exists among the most prominent West European circles as to the danger which communism presents to the life of the individual and of the nation. Such people still cling to their opinion in face of the terrible and devastating experiences of the past eighteen years in Russia.

The author of the article stated that the two symbols which are to-day opposed to one another, namely that of Bolshevism and National Socialism ...

One sees here much verbiage and little understanding. The anonymous writer of this article has obviously not studied the essential and fundamental principles either of National Socialism or Bolshevism. He considers merely certain superficial phenomena and he has not taken cognisance of what serious journalists have had to say on the matter in question or compared his views with their objective statements.

I shall try here to analyse Bolshevism into its basic elements and show these as clearly as I can to the German and European public.

International communism would entirely do away with all national and racial qualities which are founded in human nature itself; in property it sees the most primary cause of the break-down of world trade in the capitalist system. Accordingly it exploits this through an extensive and carefully organised and brutal system of action, setting aside personal values and sacrificing the individual to a hollow mass-idol that is only a travesty of actual life itself.

At the same time it ignores and destroys all the idealistic and higher strivings of men and nations, through its own crass and empty materialist principles.

On the other hand, National Socialism sees in all these things—in property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism—these forces which carry on every human civilisation and fundamentally determine its worth.

Bolshevism is explicitly determined on bringing about a revolution among all the nations. In its own essence it has an aggressive and international tendency. But National Socialism confines itself to Germany and is not a product for export, either in its abstract or practical characteristics.

Bolshevism denies religion as a principle, fundamentally and entirely. It recognises religion only as an “opium for the people.” For the help and support of religious belief, however, National Socialism absolutely places in the foreground of its programme a belief in God and that transcendental idealism which has been destined by Nature to bring to expression the racial soul of a nation.

National Socialism would give the lead in a new concept and shaping of European civilisation. But the Bolshevics carry on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international underworld, against culture as such. Bolshevism is not merely anti-bourgeois; it is against human civilisation itself.

In its final consequences it signifies the destruction of all the commercial, social, political and cultural achievements of Western Europe, in favour of a deracinated and nomadic international cabal which has found its representation in Judaism.

Bolshevism, which is in reality an attack on the world of the spirit, pretends to be intellectual itself. Where circumstances demand, it comes as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But underneath the false mask which it here and there assumes there are always the satanic forces of world destruction.

... according to the claims of all leading Bolshevists, is to be used for carrying out the world revolution, the brutal and merciless domination of this madly-led apparatus of State and Party at the hands of a small terrorist minority which is mostly Jewish ...

The fact that, in order to carry out its aims, Bolshevism uses propagandist methods which are perceptible only by those which have experience in such things and are entirely accepted in good faith by the average citizen makes this Terror International extraordinarily dangerous for other states and peoples.

Swept clear of internal enemies and united under the National Socialist standard, Germany placed herself at the head of the groups marshalled in the fight against the international bolshevisation of the world.

As National Socialists, we have seen Bolshevism through and through. We recognise it beneath all its masks and camouflages. It stands before us derobed of its trappings, bare and naked in its whole miserable imposture. We know what its teachings are, but we know also what it is in practice.

Here I shall give an unvarnished picture, which is backed up in all particulars by incontestable facts. If there is a spark of reason left in the world, and the faculty for clear thinking, then the states and peoples must be shocked at the prospect and induced to come together for their common defence against this acute danger.

Murder of individuals, murder of hostages and mass murder are the favourite means applied by Bolshevism to get rid of all opposition to its propaganda.

Read the article for a list of the millions of people murdered by the communists.

https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb58.htm

The Racial Question and World Propaganda

When one further considers the alienation of German intellectual life by International Jewry, its corruption of German justice that finally led to the fact that only one out of every five judges was German, the takeover of the medical profession, their predominance among university professors, in short, the fact that nearly all intellectual professions were dominated by the Jews, one has to grant that no people with any self esteem could tolerate that for long. It was only an act of national renewal when the National Socialist revolution took action in this area.

People abroad often do not know the real causes of German Jewish legislation. The statistics are most persuasive.

Nonetheless, we held back at the beginning of our work. We had more important things to do than to take on a question of such great scope. It is entirely the fault of Jewry that things turned out differently. The boycott and atrocity propaganda they made in other countries was an attempt by International Jewry to accomplish by means of public opinion in other countries what had been made impossible by our takeover in Germany. They attempted to cause difficulties for Germany’s rebirth through a worldwide boycott campaign, and to render it ineffective.

Jewry’s strength is in its anonymity; if it loses that, the results can only be harmful.

Our country still faces a world boycott by International Jewry, even if it is not as open as it was earlier, and we are still threatened by a cleverly thought out and systematically executed world conspiracy.

They can do what they want; Germany has overcome the danger. It has taken radical steps to drive out Bolshevism and its ideological content along with its racially-linked concepts.

World propaganda against us will be answered with world propaganda for us.

The truth is always stronger than the lie.

The world is cordially invited to send its journalists and representatives to Germany so that they can see for themselves the courage and determination of the government and people to remove the last remnants of the war and the November revolt, and to introduce a balance of power that will guarantee Germany a secure existence, honor, and its daily bread. No one who sees this nation at work can have doubts about its future. The more foreigners visit us, the more friends young Germany will win.

Any fair, thinking and objective person, wherever he may come from, will find a people and a government trying to overcome the difficulties of the postwar period by its own strength, and who are attacking the problems they face with hard, manly pride. We need to show the world what we once showed the other parties: We never lose our nerve.

https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb41.htm

More:

https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goebmain.htm