Here as so often, I can only repeat what I later wrote in Mein Kampf. The first thing good propaganda must do is to reach the masses. To do that it must be based on a good understanding of them. The idea that the masses are capable of abstract thought is pure illusion. In so far as the propagandists’ objective is not to enlighten them but to seduce and inspire them, perhaps it is better that way. Their character is feminine; they respond to emotion, not to the intellect. I strongly suspect that all of this remains true even though the percentage of our people who take their Abitur has multiplied many times over in the last hundred years. That is not to mention the vast increase in the number of those who attended a university. In short, the old saying, vox populi, vox dei is wrong. It would be more appropriate to say, vox populi, vox porci.
Considering these facts, the most important quality successful propaganda has to have is simplicity. It should take a few essential themes and hammer at them, repeatedly and consistently. And it should go on doing so until even the dullards, who in any crowd or population make up the majority, finally get the message. But even that is not enough; relax your efforts for a minute, and they will quickly forget whatever they have learned. There is, in all this, no room for subtlety or irony; however, sarcasm, which is to irony as a trumpet is to a piccolo, can occasionally be employed. There should be no attempt to present both sides of the picture; no fifty shades of gray, please! Everything must be presented in strong contrasts of black and white without anything in between. Posters, too, should be as simple, as direct, and as easy to grasp as one can make them. That is why, right from the beginning, we made many of them red.
Propaganda does not have to be true to be successful. Perhaps, to the contrary. Most people are utterly lacking in imagination. Consequently, confronted with a really big lie, they assume it must be true. Just look at the mass of lies the enemy produced to cover us with! By contrast, German wartime propaganda violated all these rules and then some. One of the worst errors, which affected us soldiers on the front directly, was the attempt to deride and ridicule the enemy. We knew perfectly well that our opponent was strong, brave, and often cruel. To claim otherwise was to belittle our efforts, as well as the blood we shed so freely.
Some of the things we Germans did, and did not do, were, frankly, downright stupid. Thus the Kaiser, though no longer having much influence on the day-to-day conduct of the war, continued to strut around with his glittering entourage. He would have done better if he had done as I subsequently did in World War II, i.e. donned a simple uniform and partaken in the food his troops received from the field kitchens. But no, his Majesty was too fine for that. Or is it possible that, after a few months, he felt he would no longer be welcome? In any case, he much preferred to spend his time chopping wood at his Luxembourg headquarters.
As it happened, the construction of the residence of the Crown Prince, Schloss Cecilienhof, in Potsdam continued through most of the war. That immense building, which has no fewer than 176 rooms, was shaped like an English cottage. An English cottage! Luckily, not too many people were aware of this particular blunder. But it does show the half-hearted spirit with which the Kaiser, who, after all, was a grandson of Queen Victoria, went to war against his English relatives. Even when he finally permitted his navy to send their Zeppelins and bomb London, he told them to spare Buckingham Palace and other monuments. All this while our soldiers were dying by the hundreds of thousands and their families, in countless cases, literally starving.
The government of England, and later that of the United States, understood all this perfectly well. Right from the beginning they painted us Germans in the most lurid colors. Their lies started with the Kaiser, whom they called “The Beast of Berlin” and “The Spirit of Carnage.” They ended, if at all, with the most humble soldier and citizen. Early on, the key man in charge was a certain Lord Bryce. A one-man factory of lies, he invented stories of Belgian nuns being raped and/or having their breasts cut off. He created stories of babies being bayoneted for fun and Allied soldiers being crucified. He told stories of cultural treasures, such as the library at Louvain, being deliberately destroyed. If English caricatures of the time could be believed, even German barbed wire was somehow crueler and less humane than that which the Allies used! And it worked—at least as long as the war lasted. As the English themselves later admitted, once it had ended almost all the stories were exposed for the lies they were. But by then the damage had been done.
As even that Jew and arch-Zionist, Nahum Goldman, admitted, the Imperial German Army was in many ways a superb organization. There was none better! For four years on end it fought, practically alone, against the entire world. Battle by battle, it inflicted more casualties than it took. It brought down our enemies one by one. Romania, which had gone over to the other side, in 1916. Russia in 1917. In the same year, assisted by the Austrians, it all but knocked Italy out of the war. In 1918, had it not been for the Americans, it might very well have defeated the British and the French too. Even the enemy, in rare moments of truth, acknowledged the fighting qualities of our soldiers.
When the war finally ended, on every single front German troops were still fighting on foreign soil. Nevertheless, time took its toll. The longer the war lasted, the shorter manpower became. What few Ersatz (replacements) the homeland could still provide us with tended to be of lower quality than those whose places they filled. Only half-trained, and this is one of the few points on which that pacifist scoundrel, Erich Maria Remarque, spoke the truth, they died like flies. Partly because of enemy propaganda, partly because of a growing shortage of food, and partly because the soldiers experienced the overwhelming material superiority of the enemy, discipline deteriorated.
Still the army went on fighting. Until, finally, a Dolchstoss (stab in the back) dealt it a blow more powerful than anything millions of enemy soldiers and four years of mortal combat had succeeded in delivering.
5. Revolution and Collapse
To repeat, ultimately the only way to defeat a Weltanschauung is to oppose it by another equally powerful one. This was precisely the point where the Wilhelmine Reich, for all its glitter, economic success, and military strength, was at its weakest. We front line soldiers started feeling the effects as early as 1915, when the enemy began dropping leaflets over our positions. At first we laughed at them and used them for all kinds of interesting purposes. Gradually, though, the feelings of some of us changed. Particularly effective were the ones that, by blaming the war on “the Prussians,” sought to drive a wedge between them and us Bavarians. But there were others, too.
In September 1916 our division went through the Battle of the Somme, an inferno if ever one there was. Later, I learned that, on the first day of the offensive alone, sixty thousand—sixty thousand—English soldiers were killed or wounded. Truly, as Ludendorff wrote of them, they were lions led by asses. We, for our part, had a million and a half—a million and a half—shells fired at us during the preliminary bombardment alone. The conditions inside our Stollen, or fortified underground shelters, where we were constantly under threat of being buried alive, defy the imagination. Yet some of us had to remain in them for weeks on end. Depending on how you define “casualty,” how you count, and which historian you believe, the total number reached 660,000 for the English and the French and 600,000 on our side.
It was during this battle that I was wounded for the first time. More or less unable to walk, I was lucky to make my way back to friendly lines. From there an ambulance train took me and the rest back to Germany or, to be precise, a hospital at Beelitz not far from Berlin. The hospital, which had been built just a few years earlier, was magnificent, whereas the change from the mud, dirt, and blood of the front to the clean white linen that awaited us there was shocking at first and took some time to get used to. It was during my stay at Beelitz that I first noticed the gulf which, increasingly, was separating the front from the homeland.
The English historian John Keegan once wrote that the only quality that counts in
the field is courage. I didn’t need him, who, owing to a childhood disease, never wore his country’s uniform, to tell me this. In fact the reason why many self-appointed military historians first start scribbling away is precisely because they want to make up for the fact that they personally did not experience the events they try to describe. But he was right: among us frontline troops, whoever did not have courage could expect nothing but contempt.
Here in the hospital things were very different. People were not afraid to boast of their cowardice, whether it was of the kind that had caused them to inflict wounds on themselves or that which had saved them from serving at all. Later, after my wound had sufficiently healed, I was able to confirm these impressions in Berlin itself. It was my first visit to the capital, and the impression it left on me was a sad one. Bitter want was evident everywhere, and the huge city was suffering from hunger. Housewives spent hours every day queuing for the most elementary necessities. Come the next year, more Berliners had died of disease than were killed at the front. I soon discovered that many people shared the views of those I had met in the hospital. Shortly thereafter, the military authorities sent me to Munich, where my regiment recruited is manpower and where its replacement-battalion was based. The situation there was similar yet worse. Avoiding service was not considered a crime. Instead, it had developed into a fine art.
In all this, it was impossible to overlook the role played by the Jews. I know now, as I did not know then, that, in May 1916, Ludendorff, responding to complaints that had reached him, ordered a so-called “Jew-count” to be held. Against expectations, it showed that Jewish soldiers served and died in proportion to their number in the population. This astonishing finding caused the study to be suppressed. And with very good reason. How those who were responsible for carrying it out reached their conclusions I cannot imagine. Or perhaps, on second thought, I can do so all too well. All I know is that, in my firsthand experience in both Berlin and Munich, almost every official was a Jew, and every Jew was an official. Certainly, their proportion in town far exceeded their slender presence at the front.
The situation in the financial world was even worse. As also happened in all other belligerent countries, the war caused the German economy to move toward greater centralization. Large firms with the requisite resources at their disposal swallowed small ones lock, stock, and barrel. In their efforts to do so they were often assisted by the state, which found it easier to deal with a few of the former than with many of the latter.
As so often, those who profited most were the Jews. In 1914 one study, done by a German scholar and publicized much later in a work published in 2011, said that Jews represented one quarter of the businessmen forming “the dense corporate network” that linked large German firms together. One quarter—meaning that, in proportion to their number in the population, they were over-represented by no less than 2,500 percent! More interesting still, Paul Windolf, the author of the study, wasn’t an anti-Semitic curmudgeon left over from the Third Reich. Born in 1936, too late to come under the influence of our propaganda, he was a professor of business administration at the University of Trier. The latter is widely known to be one of the most left-leaning and politically correct in the whole of Germany. Enough said.
Things reached a nadir in the so-called turnip-winter of 1916-17. In the summer of 1917 the official food ration only provided 1,560 calories. That was barely half the figure needed to keep an adult in good health. Yet we somehow held on. In late 1917 the collapse of Russia freed large numbers of troops for service on other fronts, causing morale to recover to some extent. The Battle of Caporetto in October, which came close to driving Italy out of the war, also helped. Looking across the front, it seemed as if it were the Allies who were now in a pickle, a fact reflected by the endless conferences they were holding in Paris. They had good reason to worry. For over three years they had strained every muscle and tried every trick to break the backbone of the Reich, only to see every single one of their offensives repulsed with huge losses. Now the time had come for us to deliver the final blow; one which, everyone in Germany firmly hoped and believed, would at long last produce the victory, and with it the end of the war, we were fervently looking forward to.
It was not to be. In January 1918 our army was busily preparing for the greatest offensive in history until then. It was one whose innovative infantry and artillery tactics are still being studied at military academies and colleges the world over. It was just then that the munitions strike broke out. The strike started in Berlin, where 400,000 workers put down their tools. From there it spread to Kiel, Hamburg, Mannheim, Augsburg, and other industrial cities. The total number of those who, demanding “peace and bread,” defied the authority or the state may have been as high as a million.
Fortunately, it did not last for very long, so the immediate impact on the production of war material was limited. But the psychological damage it did to our side and the encouragement it gave to the enemy cannot be overestimated. Was this the monolithic Reich, they asked, which they had been unsuccessfully fighting for so long? The strike’s acknowledged leader, Kurt Eisener, was a Jew. So was his second in command, the agitator Rosa Luxemburg. As a typical Ostjude, a Jew from Eastern Europe, that was her way of thanking the country which had given her shelter! The rest were a pack of Social Democrats. In 1914 they suffered a debacle when the workers refused to follow their calls to commit treason. Now, practically unhindered, they resumed their treasonous activities. Determined to do whatever it took to ensure that Germany would not win the war, they even went on the road to meet enemy representatives.
By the summer of 1918 the atmosphere at the front was going from bad to worse. From March to July of that year we launched no fewer than three offensives, each one involving every resource we still had. The last of them, known as the Third Battle of the Marne, brought us closer to Paris than we had been at any time since September 1914. Owing to the introduction of the huge “Paris Gun,” with its 130-kilometer (81 mile) range, it also caught the public’s imagination as few others did. Ultimately, all the offensives came to a halt and had to be suspended. The fact that our advances enabled us frontline soldiers to see the enemy’s immense material superiority and the way he fed his troops with our own eyes did not help either.
Meanwhile, with every passing month, more and more American troops were coming to their allies’ rescue. Their companies joined into regiments, the regiments into divisions, and the divisions into corps until there were two million of them. Not terribly cohesive and lacking experience, they and their commanders may not have been the best in the world. Had it been a fair one-on-one struggle, we would have made mincemeat of them. Still, they were healthy, strong, well fed, and well equipped. And they were simply there.
The Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL), or Supreme Army Headquarters, was well aware of these facts. Later, Ludendorff in his memoirs designated the 8th of August as “the Black Day of the German Army.” It was the day on which, for the first time, entire units broke and started running in front of the tanks the English had massed against them. Given how strained our economy was, we did not have a proper answer. As they ran, they were attacked from the air. By this time, the enemy’s superiority in that medium had become overpowering. In response, all the poor fellows could do was to climb trees like monkeys!
In September and October the English launched a series of massive attacks on our lines. These were the same ones, incidentally, which my division had held in the fall of 1914 and again in the summer of 1917. Yet so overwhelming was the enemy’s strength that they were able to launch a simultaneous offensive on the Meuse, hundreds of kilometers to the southeast, in which no fewer than a million of their troops participated. This was the point at which signs of disintegration, which previously had been few and far between, started appearing in earnest. Red flags began to be lifted over the trenches. Striking sailors from Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg, and Kiel requisitioned trucks and visited us. Led by the usual crowd of Jew boys, they called on
us to put down our arms. In the name of the Liberty, Dignity, and Beauty of our National Being, they claimed!
At the time of the armistice on 11 November I myself was in a hospital at Pasewalk, a city in Pomerania, where I had been sent to recover from the injuries gas had inflicted on my eyes. I was just starting to feel a little better when the news broke. We patients got it from an old pastor who had been sent to us for the purpose. He explained that the Emperor had abdicated, that a new government had been established, and that Germany was now a republic. Getting to that point, he could not avoid bursting into tears. Later, he added that we were now helplessly exposed to the enemy’s tender mercies and could expect a dark future in front of us.
I too broke down. As I staggered back to my ward, darkness surrounded me. I buried my aching head between the blankets and the pillow. It was the first time I had wept since my mother’s death eleven years previously. So our heroism and the unprecedented sacrifices we had made, the indescribable suffering inflicted both on us soldiers and the civilian population, and the millions of dead whom no one would bring to life again—everything—had all been in vain.
Over the next few years, during which I began my political activity, I had plenty of opportunities to analyze the causes of the collapse. In fact, addressing them in numerous public meetings large and small, I did so until I was blue in the face. Some of my conclusions simply continued thoughts that had been with me during the war and even before it had started. The rest were directly related to our defeat.
The Second Reich, as it was widely known, had been born under an auspicious star amidst the thunder of victorious battle. For that we had Bismarck to thank and, coming right after him, Chief of Staff Helmut von Moltke and Minister of War Albrecht von Roon. Nothing symbolized it as well as the Siegessäule, or Victory Column, in Berlin. Originally sixty-seven meters tall, it was wrapped entirely by captured enemy cannons. In 1939, as part of my plan to renovate the city and to turn it into Europe’s capital, I had its height increased by another seven and a half meters. I also moved it from its original site at the Königsplatz (now misnamed the Platz der Republik) near the Reichstag to the Grosser Stern. But back to the Reich. Over the first forty-three years of its existence it enjoyed immense prosperity and economic growth. Simple people, who always and everywhere form the great majority, were impressed by that prosperity as well as the evident military strength of the Reich, which was put on display on appropriate occasions.
Hitler in Hell Page 7