For several years now, a statement attributed to the Reich Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich has been circulating on the Internet, and today it sounds in unison with the rhetoric of a number of authoritarian regimes. We checked whether Joseph Goebbels said something similar.

Full quote, heard as often indicated, “at the opening of the Ministry of Propaganda (RPL) on March 12, 1933,” looks like this: “Our democratic scribblers and oppositionists are throwing mud at our country, working off the money that the West pays them. These oppositionists exist on US money and are obedient dogs of their overseas masters; It’s no secret that all the so-called “oppositionists”—the enemies of our people—are financed by the plutocratic West and live on its handouts.”

This statement is called a Goebbels quote and many online resources, including “Ukrainian truth", "In the West.ru", "CHplus" And "Peekaboo", and social network users (Telegram, Twitter, "VKontakte"). She was brought by such famous people as the producer Alexander Rodnyansky, oppositionist Gennady Gudkov, financier Slava Rabinovich, blogger Dmitry Chernyshev (mi3ch), writer and journalist Nikolai Kononov, journalist Mikhail Sokolov and political strategist Konstantin Kalachev. And although the quote is most often used to draw parallels between the state rhetoric of the Third Reich and modern Russia and Belarus, Belarusian propagandist Grigory Azaryonok described this statement as "brilliant".

Let's start with the circumstances under which Goebbels' quote is said to have been uttered. RPL (Reichspropagandaleitung) is not a propaganda ministry, but a structure within the Nazi Party (NSDAP) for working with the press, cinema, radio and the education system. It existed as a party body since 1926, even before the National Socialists came to power, and subsequently remained formally independent from the Reich Ministry of Education and Propaganda. But last was actually founded on March 13 (not 12) 1933, shortly after victory NSDAP in the elections. The department was headed by Paul Joseph Goebbels, at that time the youngest member of the cabinet in Hitler's government.

Goebbels' activities in those days can be traced through his diary. On March 11, he spoke with workers in Berlin's Lustgarten park (the text of this speech, apparently, has not survived). On March 12, he took part in mourning events in honor of those who fell in the First World War, and stood next to Hitler when he spoke on the radio. On March 13 he announced his appointment, and the next day he took the oath of office before Reich President Hindenburg. Finally, on March 15, at the capital's Kaiserhof Hotel, Goebbels held a press conference dedicated to his new work. The speech made there was later included in collection "Revolution of the Germans. 14 years of National Socialism." However, neither this text nor the transcripts of other speeches for 1929–1933, which formed the collection, contain any mention of “democratic hacks living on handouts from the West.” We were unable to find anything similar in other publications with speeches and diaries of Goebbels, in his propaganda text "30 articles about the war for the German people", also on the website Bundesarchiv. Moreover, the statement is practically not found on the Internet either in German or in English.

Some Internet users admit that the real author of the phrase is not Goebbels, but Adolf Hitler. Supporters of this version note similarity between the quote being checked and in the words of the Fuhrer, voiced in a conversation with politician Hans Ritter von Lex on March 13, 1933, but readers can see for themselves that the similarity is very distant.

The history of the use of quotes in Russian is another matter. The oldest surviving reference to the phrase today dates back to 2007, when it appeared on forum Belarusian analytical newspaper "Secret research" At the same time, the user who mentioned her referred to a message from the forum administrator Vadim Deruzhinsky, judging by the chronology, dated December 29, 2006. This message was deleted five years later, in December 2011, and today all that remains is an empty field.

What is the reason for this removal? It turns out that a few days before this action, LiveJournal user labas (Igor Petrov), author of the Lost Quotes Service series of publications, released his own investigation, in which I found out that at that time Deruzhinsky’s message, which still existed, was the first time that not only this, but a whole group of quotes were mentioned, signed with the names of Goebbels, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. These quotes that separated on Runet, including in the form of a selection, were taken, as indicated, “from the books of V. Koch “Anatomy of Fascism” (Prague, 1999. P. 11, 216, 217) and A. D. Grishin and V. S. Kravchenko “Fascism in Europe” (Moscow, 1992. P. 55).” Both of these books never existed, as even a cursory search on the World Wide Web proves.

Even before the release of Petrov’s investigation, one of the users contacted Vadim Deruzhinsky, part-time editor-in-chief of the newspaper Secret Research, and this is what he replied: “As far as I remember, these quotes were taken from a handwritten letter from our reader (more precisely, the reader sent us his article, but we did not publish it because of its politicization, I cited excerpts in the post). Perhaps, when reading his handwriting, I listed some letters incorrectly. I did not check these quotes, trusting the author of the letter - a completely serious person, especially since in context everything seems normal, and I have already seen several quotes somewhere before. Well, the most important thing is that I didn’t need to check these quotes, since I didn’t intend to use them in any publication (and, of course, I would have checked them if I wanted to use them in any article).”

Then, in the spring of 2008, Deruzhinsky claimed that there was also some unknown speech by Goebbels on March 12, 1933, but five days after the release of Igor Petrov’s investigation, which contained strong evidence to the contrary, he deleted the original message with the selection. Let us add that some other quotes from that collection turned out to be in no way connected with the authors indicated under them.

Thus, if you believe Vadim Deruzhinsky, who first published them, the primary source of a whole series of statements was an article by an unknown reader with reference to non-existent books.

Cover photo: Wikipedia