Third Reich Sourcebook by Rabinbach Anson

Author:Rabinbach, Anson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520208674
Publisher: University of California Press

204

JOSEPH GOEBBELS

The Tasks of the Ministry of Propaganda

Speech delivered to members of the press on 15 March 1933. First published as “Rede vor der Presse über die Errichtung des Reichspropagandaministeriums,” in Goebbels-Reden, vol. 1, 1931–1939, edited by Helmut Heiber (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971), S. 90, 94, 95, 106–7. Published in English in David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London: Routledge, 1933), 136–45.

I see in the newly established Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda a link between government and people, the living contact between the national government as the expression of the popular will and the Volk itself. In the past few weeks we have experienced a growing political coordination [Gleichschaltung] between the government and the whole people. I do not believe that we have reached our goal when, if I may use one of those old-fashioned expressions, we have a 52 percent majority in parliament. A government faced with the great and far-reaching tasks that the present government faces could not survive for long and could not find the popular support it needs from these far-reaching measures if it were satisfied with this 52 percent majority. It must, rather, see its task as making all the necessary propaganda preparations to win the whole people over to its side in the long term. If this government is now resolved never to yield—never under any circumstances—then it has no need for the dead power of the bayonet: it will not be satisfied for long with the knowledge that it has 52 percent behind it while terrorizing the other 48 percent, but will, by contrast, see its next task as winning over that other 48 percent to its own cause.

That will not be accomplished by objective work alone. Rather, the objective work of the government must also be made clear to the people. The task of the press cannot be merely to inform; rather, the press has, above and beyond that, the much greater task of instructing. It naturally has the task of making clear to the people why the government is doing what it does and why the government is forced to act in a certain way and no other. If we were to take over the legacy of the past fourteen years without explaining to the German people the causes of Germany’s decline, I am convinced that our partisan opponents, with all the shrewdness they possess in their sphere, would very soon succeed in holding the new government responsible for the legacy that it has inherited. But that cannot be the case: we shall have to make clear to the German people what we have inherited, how we have inherited it, and what measures we must take and shall have to take to reform this legacy.

The name of the new ministry tells us quite clearly what we mean by this. We have established a Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. But these two terms do not convey the same thing: popular enlightenment is essentially something passive; propaganda, on the other hand, is something active.

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