ABSTRACT

All these elements, so primitive and threadbare in their psychology, are nevertheless thoroughly effective in practice. It would be a great mistake to suppose that so cunning an individual as the German Minister of Propaganda [Goebbels] is not perfectly well aware that the atrocity propaganda against the Jews . . . is preposterous nonsense, that he does not see through the racial swindle just as clearly as those compatriots of his whom it has driven out of their country. It would be simply foolish to imagine that any member of the élite truly and sincerely believes in the bases of the ‘philosophy.’ They have been deliberately concocted for their demagogic effectiveness and for the furtherance of the party’s political aims. They have also been chosen with a cunning realization of the needs of the . . . German masses. Other representations of good and evil, of hero and weakling, may ‘work’ in other countries; the selection for Germany was already indicated by the experience of the pan-Germans and the anti-Semitic ‘racial’ parties.