Big lie

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler believed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist and antisemitic political leader in the Weimar Republic.

For other uses, see Big Lie (disambiguation).

Hitler's use of the expression

The source of the big lie technique is this passage, taken from Chapter 10 of James Murphy's translation of Mein Kampf (the quote is one paragraph in Murphy's translation and in the German original):

But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X[1]

Goebbels's use of the expression


Though the following supposed quotation of Joseph Goebbels has been repeated in numerous books and articles and on thousands of web pages, none of them has cited a primary source. Thus its attribution to anyone must be considered dubious. According to the research and reasoning of Randall Bytwerk, it is an unlikely thing for Goebbels to have said.[2]

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.

It is verified that Goebbels did put forth a theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression "big lie". Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler's first use of the phrase. The article, titled Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik (English: "From Churchill's Lie Factory") was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.[3]

Holocaust
See also: Jewish war conspiracy theory

Jeffrey Herf maintains that Goebbels and the Nazis used the big lie to turn long-standing anti-semitism into mass murder.[4] Herf argues that the big lie was a narrative of an innocent, besieged Germany striking back at an "international Jewry", which it said started World War I. The propaganda repeated over and over the claim that a conspiracy of Jews was the real power in Britain, Russia and the United States. It went on to state that the Jews had begun a "war of extermination" against Germany, and so Germany had a duty and a right to "exterminate" and "annihilate" the Jews in self-defense.[5]

Usage in Hitler's psychological profile

The phrase was also used in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile:[6]

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.[7]

The above quote appears in the report, A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend, by Walter C. Langer,[7][8] which is available from the US National Archives. [9] A somewhat similar quote appears in Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behaviour and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany's Surrender, by Henry A. Murray, October 1943[10]:

Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.

gollark: I mean, half my browser tabs use more than that!
gollark: It's fiiiiiine, just kill and restart the program every time it leaks more than 20MB.
gollark: Wow, you managed to leak 5MB doing... what?
gollark: Maybe rewrite in Haskell.
gollark: Ah yes, conservation of bugs.

See also

Notes
  1. "Project Gutenberg of Australia - Mein Kampf tr. James Murphy". Archived from the original on 24 July 2008. Retrieved 2008-08-23.
  2. Bytwerk, Randall. "False Nazi Quotations", German Propaganda Archive, 2008.
  3. Joseph Goebbels, 12 January 1941. Die Zeit ohne Beispiel. Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP. 1941, pp. 364-369 [original German: Das ist natürlich für die Betroffenen mehr als peinlich. Man soll im allgemeinen seine Führungsgeheimnisse nicht verraten, zumal man nicht weiß, ob und wann man sie noch einmal gut gebrauchen kann. Das haupt-sächlichste englische Führungsgeheimnis ist nun nicht so sehr in einer besonders hervorstechenden Intelligenz als vielmehr in einer manchmal geradezu penetrant wirkenden dummdreisten Dickfelligkeit zu finden. Die Engländer gehen nach dem Prinzip vor, wenn du lügst, dann lüge gründlich, und vor allem bleibe bei dem, was du gelogen hast! Sie bleiben also bei ihren Schwindeleien, selbst auf die Gefahr hin, sich damit lächerlich zu machen.]
  4. Jeffrey Herf (2006). The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II And the Holocaust. Harvard University Press. p. 211. ISBN 9780674038592.
  5. Jeffrey Herf, "The 'Jewish War': Goebbels and the Antisemitic Campaigns of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry", Holocaust and Genocide Studies, (Spring 2005) 19#1 pp. 51–80,
  6. A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler. His Life and Legend Archived 2005-08-28 at the Wayback Machine by Walter C. Langer. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Washington, D.C. With the collaboration of Prof. Henry A. Murr, Harvard Psychological Clinic, Dr. Ernst Kris, New School for Social Research, Dr. Bertram D. Lawin, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. p. 219 (Nizkor)
  7. "OSS Psychological Profile of Hitler, page 46" (PDF). cia.gov. Retrieved 17 June 2018.
  8. "A Psychological Profile of Adolf Hitler" (PDF). Ia801304.us.archive.org. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  9. Langer, Walter (2011-03-24). A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend. All-about-psychology.com. p. 57.
  10. "Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler" (PDF). Ia601305.us.archive.org. p. 219. Retrieved 17 January 2018.

References
  • Baker White, John (1955). The Big Lie. Evans Brothers. OCLC 1614230.
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