Goebbels quotes: what he said, with sources, and the big lie line he did not

• "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." Rejected as misattributed. The checked Bytwerk German Propaganda Archive texts, the International Military Tribunal transcript and Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression vols. 1 to 8 have no such wording in Goebbels's name. The phrase "big lie" is Hitler's, from Mein Kampf (vol. 1, ch. 10), where he used it of opponents.
• "A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth." Rejected as apocryphal. No German original or dated source was found; it is repeated on quotation sites without a citation.
• "Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will." Rejected as unverifiable. It is not in the Goebbels texts checked and is often given without a citation.

Randall Bytwerk of the German Propaganda Archive at Calvin University, who hosts and translates many of the speeches below, lists the first line among things Goebbels did not say. The big lie technique page traces where the idea does come from: Hitler's accusation in Mein Kampf, and a 1943 report for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services by Walter Langer that describes a big lie as a deliberate method. The psychology library entry covers the repetition research.

"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."

Source: Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1941), pp. 364-369. The quotes file notes that Goebbels attributes the principle to the English leadership and does not state it as his own method. This is the pattern the archive tags accusation in a mirror: the opponent is charged with the technique the speaker's side is accused of using. Whether his ministry also lied is a question for the record in the ministry case study, not for this sentence.

Bundesarchiv portrait of Goebbels, 1933, the year the Propaganda Ministry was founded (Bild 146-1968-101-20A, photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann).

On 9 January 1928, in the Berlin speech "Erkenntnis und Propaganda" (published in Signale der neuen Zeit, Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1934, pp. 28-52): "We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths."

At the Nuremberg Party Rally, September 1934 (Der Kongress zur Nürnberg 1934, Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1934, pp. 130-141): "Propaganda is a means to an end. Its purpose is to lead the people to an understanding that will allow it to willingly and without internal resistance devote itself to the tasks and goals of a superior leadership. If propaganda is to succeed, it must know what it wants. It must keep a clear and firm goal in mind, and seek the appropriate means and methods to reach that goal. Propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks."

The quotes file gives the rally month but not the day within it.

The three salute from an open car at the Nuremberg rally of 1 to 4 August 1929, five years before the 1934 speech above (Nuremberg rallies, 1927 to 1933).

"It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio and the airplane. It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio."

In October 1938 party officials in Berlin handed out 500 small radio receivers to "needy national comrades" on Goebbels's birthday, according to the original press caption (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H14243, photograph by Nau). The radio landing page covers the medium more widely.

The ministry building from Wilhelmplatz, July 1936 (Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1993-020-32A). It faced the Reich Chancellery.

Six months earlier, in this Völkischer Beobachter notice of 25 and 26 February 1933, the Party's propaganda head, Dr. Goebbels, is named as taking over the radio report for all of Hitler's rallies from 25 February to 4 March. The entry tags it identity fusion.

The fourth of ten questions put to the hall: "Fourth: The English maintain that the German people is resisting the government's total war measures. It does not want total war, but capitulation! (Shouts: Never! Never! Never!) I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?"

The Bundesarchiv press caption lists Knight's Cross holders, armaments workers and wounded soldiers among those present. The audience was seated in advance, not a sample of the public, and its answers were broadcast as the voice of the nation. The entry tags it bandwagon, fear appeal and demagoguery.

The second passage is antisemitic and describes the Soviet advance: "Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy. International Jewry is the devilish ferment of decomposition that finds cynical satisfaction in plunging the world into the deepest chaos and destroying ancient cultures that it played no role in building." Bytwerk notes that in the spoken version Goebbels begins to say "extermination" of the Jews and breaks off mid-word.

On the yellow star, from "Die Juden sind schuld!" (The Jews Are Guilty!), 16 November 1941, reprinted in Das eherne Herz (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943, pp. 85-91): "One of these measures is the institution of the yellow star that each Jew must wear. We wanted to make them visible as Jews, particularly if they made even the least attempt to harm the German community. It is a remarkably humane measure on our part, a hygienic and prophylactic measure to be sure that the Jew cannot infiltrate our ranks unseen to sow discord."

From "Der Krieg und die Juden" (The War and the Jews), 9 May 1943, reprinted in Der steile Aufstieg (1944, pp. 263-270): "None of the Führer's prophetic words has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the destruction of the Aryan race, but rather the wiping out of the Jewish race. This process is of vast importance, and will have unforeseeable consequences that will require time. But it can no longer be halted. It must only be guided in the right direction."

The quotes file notes the date follows Bytwerk's page and may be early, since Bytwerk records a diary entry of 8 May 1943 discussing the article. The other four (Nuremberg 1933, the longer passage from Das Reich of 16 November 1941, and Das Reich of 21 January 1945 and 25 February 1945) are listed with their sources in the quotes index. For what these campaigns were part of, see Holocaust propaganda.

The same file also holds the Das Reich article "Das Jahr 2000" (25 February 1945), which uses the phrase "an iron curtain" a year before Churchill popularised it; it carries an antisemitic line, so it is given in the quotes index only.

On the night of 10 May 1933 students burned books on the Opernplatz; Goebbels spoke near midnight (details in the book burnings case study). The Bundesarchiv press caption calls the burned works "undeutsche Schriften" (un-German writings), tagged name-calling. That speech is not in the quotes file, so no line from it is given here.

Poster for the "Entartete Kunst" exhibition published in Berlin by Berek (Federal Archive); the title is the label. The entry credits the NSDAP and tags it name-calling and scapegoating.

The Bundesarchiv caption dates his visit to Sunday, 27 February 1938, at the Berlin showing.

Goebbels visited Leni Riefenstahl on 25 November 1937 during preparations for her film Olympia (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S34639, photograph by Rolf Lantin). See Film under Goebbels.

On 12 November 1944 Volkssturm volunteers were sworn in at Berlin and marched past Reich Minister Goebbels (Bundesarchiv caption). The entry notes the event was staged as a mass spectacle for the press and tags it bandwagon and identity fusion.

The archive title names the boy as Hitler Youth member Willi Hübner, photographed on 9 March 1945 (Bild 183-J31305). Published accounts identify the man as Goebbels; the entry says that identification rests on those accounts, not on the print. It is tagged transfer.

This British leaflet of 1943 prints a line it attributes to Goebbels of 31 December 1940. The entry tags it card-stacking and notes the quotations are as printed on the leaflet, not checked against the originals. That line is therefore not among the verified quotations in this archive.

A 1941 Soviet poster reproduced in the United States by the private charity Russian War Relief; the American date is not stated. It is tagged name-calling: an animal caricature and a sarcastic label for a named official, the same technique recorded on the Nazi side.

US Office of War Information poster No. 48 (1943) quotes a Berlin spokesman of 28 October 1942, as printed on the sheet without a source. It is tagged card-stacking and name-calling.

• The Reich Propaganda Ministry case study says his diaries record years of friction with the Reich press chief Otto Dietrich.
• The Film under Goebbels case study cites the entry of 2 November 1939 about Łódź, from Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, Part I, vol. 7 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998), with the German original and a translation.
• The Nazi propaganda ministry doctrine page records that Leonard Doob's "nineteen principles of Goebbels" (Public Opinion Quarterly 14, 1950) are Doob's reconstruction from the diaries, not a document Goebbels wrote.

Diary entries are private notes, not public statements, and are held to the same source test as the rest: date, edition, translator. Until the archive verifies an entry against an edition, it is cited in a case study and not added to the quotes file.