The New York Times (December 31, 1943)
‘Dangerous year’ seen by Goebbels
But the Nazi Propaganda Minister says Germans are still ‘sure of victory’
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, German Propaganda Minister, writing in the latest issue of The Reich, declared that 1944 would be a “dangerous year” containing “riddles upon riddles,” and then urged the German people to have “faith,” the German Transocean News Agency said in a wireless dispatch to the United States yesterday.
Dr. Goebbels’ article, as transmitted for American consumption, attempted to minimize Allied gains during 1943 and repeated the stock phrase that German home-front morale was still strong, but failed to make any personal predictions of victory, either in 1944 or later.
The Propaganda Minister, who has previously used such phrases as “unshakable certainty” to describe his belief in an Axis triumph, said in his latest article merely that the German people were still “sure of victory.”
The article, according to the dispatch recorded by the Federal Communications Commission, concluded:
The year 1944 contains riddles upon riddles, but we know that we can and must solve them all. It will be a dangerous year in which the fate of civilized mankind is once more at stake. But just as it has been so frequently in crises of former centuries, a great salvation is at hand when man believes it to be the most distant.
We must have full faith in it and fight for it. Our salvation is in loyalty to ourselves and to the tasks set for us.
Sees Germans out to win
London, England (Reuters) – (Dec. 30)
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, in his article in this week’s The Reich, quoted by Transocean News Agency, said the German people had never before been so determined to fight and win.
The British and Americans, by cunning and arrogant bluff and propaganda, succeeded in creating the impression in certain parts of the world that their victory was an absolute certainty. In reality, they are still outside the unassailable walls of our continent.
If they could, London and Washington would head over all the German leaders to hangmen, but they have not got the power to do it and they never will have.
After likening Germany’s role to that of a police force dealing with “a mob of gangsters,” Dr. Goebbels added:
There is no crime against humanity, culture or civilization that has not been committed by the enemy in this war.
He then said:
When, after all this, has the right to take of war crimes and to demand judgment before history? Is it the enemy or we?