Background: In this article, dated 21 January 1945, Goebbels makes his last lengthy published attack on the Jews, whom he claims are responsible for the misery caused by the war. There are hints of the Holocaust in Goebbels’ words.

The source: “Die Urheber des Unglücks der Welt,” Das Reich, 21 January 1945, pp. 1, 3.

The Creators of the World’s Misfortunes

by Joseph Goebbels

One could not understand this war if one did not always keep in mind the fact that International Jewry stands behind all the unnatural forces that our united enemies use to attempt to deceive the world and keep humanity in the dark. It is, so to speak, the mortar that holds the enemy coalition firmly together, despite its differences of class, ideology, and interests. Capitalism and Bolshevism have the same Jewish roots, two branches of the same tree that in the end bear the same fruit. International Jewry uses both in its own way to suppress the nations and keep them in its service. How deep its influence on public opinion is in all the enemy countries and many neutral nations is plain to see that it may never be mentioned in newspapers, speeches, and radio broadcasts. There is a law in the Soviet Union that punishes anti-Semitism — or in plain English, public education about the Jewish Question — by death. The expert in these matters is in no way surprised that a leading spokesman for the Kremlin said over the New Year that the Soviet Union would not rest until this law was valid throughout the world. In other words, the enemy clearly says that its goal in this war is to put the total domination of Jewry over the nations of the earth under legal protection, and to threaten even a discussion of this shameful attempt with the death penalty.

It is little different in the plutocratic nations. There the struggle against the impudent usurpation of the Jewish race is not punished by the executioner, but rather by death through economic and social boycott and by intellectual terror. This has the same effect in the end. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt were made by Jewry. They enjoy its full support and reward it with their full protection. They present themselves in their speeches as upright men of civil courage, yet one never hears even a word against the Jews, even though there is growing hatred among their people as a result of this war, a hatred that is fully justified. Jewry is a taboo theme in the enemy countries. It stands outside every legal boundary and thus becomes the tyrant of its host peoples. While enemy soldiers fight, bleed, and die at the front, the Jews make money from their sacrifice on the stock exchanges and black markets. If a brave man dares to step forward and accuse the Jews of their crimes, he will be mocked and spat on by their press, chased from his job or otherwise impoverished, and be brought into public contempt. Even that is apparently not enough for the Jews. They want to bring Soviet conditions to the whole world, giving Jewry absolute power and freedom from prosecution. He who objects or even debates the matter gets a bullet in the back of his head or an axe through his neck. There is no worse tyranny than this. This is the epitome of the public and secret disgrace that Jewry inflicts on the nations that deserve freedom.

That is all long behind us. Yet it still threatens us in the distance. We have, it is true, entirely broken the power of the Jews in the Reich, but they have not given up. They did not rest until they had mobilized the whole world against us. Since they could no longer conquer Germany from within, they want to try it from without. Every Russian, English, and American soldier is a mercenary of this world conspiracy of a parasitic race. Given the current state of the war, who could still believe that they are fighting and dying at the front for the national interests of their countries! The nations want a decent peace, but the Jews are against it. They know that the end of the war would mean the dawning humanity’s knowledge of the unhealthy role that International Jewry played in preparing for and carrying out this war. They fear being unmasked, which has in fact become unavoidable and must inevitably come, just as the day follows the night. That explains their raging bursts of hatred against us, which are only the result of their fear and their feelings of inferiority. They are too eager, and that makes them suspicious. International Jewry will not succeed in turning this war to its advantage. Things are already too far along. The hour will come in which all the peoples of the earth will awake, and the Jews will be the victims. Here, too, things can only go so far.

It is an old, often-used method of International Jewry to discredit education and knowledge about its corrupting nature and drives, thereby depending on the weaknesses of those people who easily confuse cause with effect. The Jews are also masters at manipulating public opinion, which they dominate through their network of news agencies and press concerns that reaches throughout the world. The pitiful illusion of a free press is one of the methods they use to stupefy the publics of enemy lands. If the enemy press is as free as it pretends to be, let it take an open position, for or against, on the Jewish Question. It will not do that because it cannot and may not do so. The Jews love to mock and criticize everything except themselves, although everyone knows that they are most in need of public criticism. This is where the so-called freedom of the press in enemy countries ends. Newspapers, parliaments, statesmen, and church leaders must be silent here. Crimes and vices, filth and corruption are covered by the blanket of love. The Jews have total control of public opinion in enemy countries, and he who has that is also master of all of public life. Only the nations that have to accept such a condition are to be pitied. The Jews mislead them into believing that the German nation is backward. Our alleged backwardness is actually proof of our progress. We have recognized the Jews as a national and international danger, and from this knowledge have drawn compelling conclusions. This German knowledge will become the knowledge of the world at the end of this war. We think it our primary duty to do everything in our power to make that happen.

Humanity would sink into eternal darkness, it would fall into a dull and primitive state, were the Jews to win this war. They are the incarnation of that destructive force that in these terrible years has guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against all that we see as noble, beautiful, and worth keeping. For that reason alone the Jews hate us. They despise our culture and learning, which they perceive as towering over their nomadic worldview. They fear our economic and social standards, which leave no room for their parasitic drives. They are the enemy of our domestic order, which has excluded their anarchistic tendencies. Germany is the first nation in the world that is entirely free of the Jews. That is the prime cause of its political and economic balance. Since their expulsion from the German national body has made it impossible for them to shake this balance from within, they lead the nations they have deceived in battle against us from without. It is fine with them, in fact it is part of their plan, that Europe in the process will lose a large part of its cultural values. The Jews had no part in their creation. They do not understand them. A deep racial instinct tells them that since these heights of human creative activity are forever beyond their reach, they must attack them today with hatred. The day is not distant when the nations of Europe, yes, even those of the whole world, will shout: The Jews are guilty for all our misfortunes! They must be called to account, and soon and thoroughly!

International Jewry is ready with its alibi. Just as during the great reckoning in Germany, they will attempt to look innocent and say that one needs a scapegoat, and they are it. But that will no longer help them, just as it did not help them during the National Socialist revolution, The proof of their historical guilt, in details large and small, is so plain that it can no longer be denied even with the most clever lies and hypocrisy.

Who is it that drives the Russians, the English, and the Americans into battle and sacrifices huge numbers of human lives in a hopeless struggle against the German people? The Jews! Their newspapers and radio broadcasts spread the songs of war while the nations they have deceived are led to the slaughter. Who is it that invents new plans of hatred and destruction against us every day, making this war into a dreadful case of self-mutilation and self-destruction of European life and its economy, education and culture? The Jews! Who devised the unnatural marriage between England and the USA on one side and Bolshevism on the other, building it up and jealously ensuring its continuance? Who covers the most perverse political situations with cynical hypocrisy from a trembling fear that a new way could lead the nations to realize the true causes of this terrible human catastrophe? The Jews, only the Jews! They are named Morgenthau and Lehmann and stand behind Roosevelt as a so-called brain trust. They are named Mechett and Sasoon and serve as Churchill’s moneybags and order givers. They are named Kaganovitsch and Ehrenburg and are Stalin’s pacesetters and intellectual spokesmen. Wherever you look, you see Jews. They march as political commissars behind the Red army and organize murder and terror in the areas conquered by the Soviets. They sit behind the lines in Paris and Brussels, Rome and Athens, and fashion their reins from the skin of the unhappy nations that have fallen under their power.

That is the truth. It can no longer be denied, particularly since in their drunken joy of power and victory the Jews have forgotten their ordinarily so carefully maintained reserve and now stand in the spotlight of public opinion. They no longer bother, apparently believing that it is no longer necessary, that their hour has come. And this is their mistake, which they always make when think themselves near their great goal of anonymous world domination. Throughout the history of the nations, whenever this tragic situation developed, a good providence saw to it that the Jews themselves became the gravediggers of their own hopes. They did not destroy the healthy peoples, but rather the sting of their parasitic effects brought the realization of the looming danger to the forefront and led to the greatest sacrifices to overcome it. At a certain point, they become that power that always wants evil but creates good. It will be that way this time, too.

The fact that the German nation was the first on earth to recognize this danger and expel it from its organism is proof of its healthy instincts. It therefore became the leader of a world struggle whose results will determine the fate and the future of International Jewry. We view with complete calm the wild Old Testament tirades of hatred and revenge of Jews throughout the world against us. They are only proof that we are on the right path. They cannot unsettle us. We gaze on them with sovereign contempt and remember that these outbursts of hate and revenge were everyday events for us in Germany until that fateful day for International Jewry, 30 January 1933, when the world revolution against the Jews that threatened them not only Germany, but all the other nations, began.

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.

[Page copyright © 2001 by Randall Bytwerk. No unauthorized reproduction. My e-mail address is available on the FAQ page.]

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