7īoth leaders realized that The Protocols was a fake, but both thought it contained “inner truth.” It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brains these disclosures originate the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. He, too, was thinking about The Protocols: I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.” 6 At about the same time, Adolf Hitler was dictating Mein Kampf. That is not because the worldview of Jewish aspirations expressed therein are too utopian or fantastic-one sees today how one point after the other of The Protocols is being realized-but rather because I do not think the Jews are so completely stupid as not to keep such important protocols secret. On April 10, 1924, the young Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: “I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery. What did the top Nazi leaders think? Although Hitler and Goebbels were believers in an international Jewish conspiracy, neither believed that its existence depended on The Protocols being what it claimed to be. 5 I review its distribution, consider its employment at various levels of the propaganda system at specific times, discuss why it appeared so rarely in Nazi propaganda, and conclude with an observation on analogous uses of The Protocols today.
4 This article examines the role of The Protocols from Hitler's takeover in 1933 to the end of the war. There is an enormous literature on the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich, but few books focus on propaganda, and little of the literature discusses the use of The Protocols in that propaganda. Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Wide Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion suggests that it had great influence over Nazism: “The Völkischer Beobachter invoked them constantly, while Julius Streicher's weekly Der Stürmer alternated between elaborations of The Protocols and lurid stores of German maidens raped by Jews and German children ritually murdered.” 2 Influential early students of Nazism such as Hermann Rauschning and Konrad Heiden, who published during the Nazi era, believed that it had had an enormous impact on Hitler, and their often unfounded statements continue to be influential today. 1 Its astonishing contents also draw the attention of those who find it absurd and repellent-and who sometimes take it more seriously than do antisemites. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery of remarkable attraction for antisemites.
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