Background: This article is dated 7 June 1942. Goebbels compares German heroism with American cowardice. He takes particular aim at General Douglas MacArthur, whom he accuses of cowardice. Internal German morale reports (from the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst) found such attacks were not particularly effective. Germans realized that the American defense had been better than Goebbels suggests, and also thought that, since MacArthur had been ordered to leave he could hardly be accused of cowardice. The essay was originally published in Das Reich, the prestige weekly Goebbels founded in 1940.
The source: “Helden und Filmhelden,” Das eherne Herz (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1943), pp. 337-343.
Nothing is more characteristic of the Jewish-plutocratic view of the world, life, and history than its tendency to gradually but inevitably transform all values in a negative direction. We recall enough examples from the republican System Era in Germany [1918-1933]. It hardly seems necessary to add more. The hero was fool, the coward the honorable man. One preferred to live three lives as a slave than once as a free man. A father with many children was the target of jokes, and the homosexual boy was the model of Nordic manhood. The great men of our history were either corrupt cretins or unconscionable bloodsuckers. The victim was guilty, not the murderer. Great criminals were seen as wonderful subjects for psychoanalytic study. In short, as one of the most prominent Jewish journalists wrote in a Jewish newspaper, the heroic ideal was the most stupid of all ideals, and the dead of the World War had died on a field of dishonor.
Looking back it all seems schizophrenic. It was more than that. Those who used their glittering brilliance to spread such ideas to the public did not believe them. To the contrary, they were only using them to slowly but surely undermine their host people and to prepare it for the great spiritual convulsion that we know all too well as Bolshevism. Its predecessor is democracy. It, too, transforms all values in a way that in the end leads to chaos.
Today, we see the same process going on with the enemy. It is clear proof that the intellectual war leadership is primarily Jewish. One does not need to hear Radio London to detect their Semitic nature. It helps explain the otherwise inexplicable enemy habit of turning defeats and retreats into victories and battles of annihilation into catastrophic enemy defeats. They prepared insufficiently or not at all for the war. They suffer one defeat after the other. They see the loss of critical economic and strategic positions as a cause for optimism. They present plutocracy’s rapacity as a new social order. They burn down churches and murder a hundred thousand priests, yet are said to be saintly fighters for God. They put 180 million people in a physical and spiritual prison and condemn them to the lowest possible standard of living. All this they call paradise on earth.
They value people in a similar way. English and American soldiers may be defeated wherever they go, but are nonetheless vastly superior to the enemy, both in weaponry and morality. Generals whose only skill is in escaping the enemy, sometimes with their troops, other times with only their families, are military heroes of the stature of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, or Napoleon. True military geniuses on the other hand, who stay by their troops even in the most desperate situations and never think of surrender, but rather resist all the arrows of fate, hardly are worth mentioning.
The so-called General MacArthur, for example, is blown up as a true hero. In Germany, someone like General Scherer gets two or three lines in the OKW report. What are the differences between the two? Who is the hero, who the coward?
In the east during the past winter, a German unit was cut off and held firm for 107 days with no outside support. The enemy attacked 128 times. They replied with 10 counterattacks and 43 feints. The officers of the surrounded unit reported with love and admiration that their general stayed with them, and was there at any time for any soldier. He had a willing ear for any of his soldiers at any time. He was a source of spiritual strength during the period the unit was surrounded for both his officers and men. The surrounded group had no supplies for three days, after which they were supplied by exceedingly difficult and dangerous missions by the Luftwaffe, which was an example of heroism and devotion to their comrades. For most of the period, only piles of fruit tree branches provided their defenses. They were attacked from all four directions. Our soldiers had no tanks, whereas the Soviets repeatedly attacked with fresh tanks. They had no quarters to keep them warm in the barbaric cold. Enemy artillery pounded the remaining houses to rubble. The soldiers could not dig into the frozen ground. There was not even any barbed wire.
“We could not stop the enemy from firing on the buildings where we kept our wounded. We had to find some other place to put them. But many who were wounded still stayed in the front lines!” That is what General Scherer said in his plain and unemotional way.
The OKW report of 6 May announced: “In the northern section of the Eastern Front, German troops carried out a planned and brilliant attack that reestablished connections with an important area previously surrounded by the enemy. The unit under the command of General Scherer had courageously held the position since 21.1.1942 despite numerous attacks by superior enemy forces. On the day it was relieved, half of the soldiers were wounded, and half were in action.
The Jewish-democratic press took no notice of this. Now let us consider the other side:
The Japanese attack on Corregidor began after the evacuation of Bataan on 10 April and ended 26 days later with the capitulation of U.S. forces on 6 May. On 10 April, 60,000 men on Bataan had surrendered. 3,500 escaped to Corregidor. General MacArthur, their commander, had left Bataan as early as 10 March with his family. Before leaving, he urged his troops to display bravery, courage, and endurance. His wife gave the soldiers’ wives the good advice to stay with their men, but followed her husband when he left. From Australia, General MacArthur boasted that he would enter Tokyo as the victor. The Japanese captured 12,495 of his soldiers at Corregidor. The number of dead was all of 640. According to the reports, there were enough supplies remaining to continue the battle for another six months. There was no shortage of weapons or munitions.
Corregidor is one of the strongest natural fortresses in the world. The entire island had strong defensive installations, munitions deport, command posts, etc. The underground passages that connect the defensive positions are as broad as a two-lane highway. $500 million had been spent during peacetime to build up the island. The USA public spoke of the island as the American Gibraltar. American experts thought it unconquerable. The island ruled out tanks, so the attack used artillery and air attacks. There were naturally bomb-proof clinics, operating rooms, etc. But the American soldiers nonetheless fell into Japanese hands. Why should they be braver than their general, who was safe in Australia and who was being grotesquely presented to the American public as the USA’s greatest living hero! The facts were reversed. A cowardly escape was transformed by an advertising campaign into a glorious deed. To us, that is simply incomprehensible. To put it mildly, a general like MacArthur by us would get the gentle rebuke that he had forgotten to get off the train in Hollywood. But the USA press declared the defense of Corregidor and Bataan as one of the bravest deeds in American history. The London Times, which has had considerable experience in praising strategic retreats, even said that Corregidor could only be compared to the battle of Thermophylae. A Boston radio station called the island fortress’s resistance a miracle.
If that were not enough, the American Jewish press has been praising the cowardly General MacArthur as a suitable candidate for the presidency of the United States. Various U.S. cities are already unveiling monuments in his honor. People wear buttons with his picture, and he has received the highest honor England has to offer: an honorable position in Madam Tussaud’s famous wax museum. The United Press reports that a body and uniform will be added to his face.
This gets us back to schizophrenia. One could say that all this grotesque nonsense is understandable, since in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and that a land without a history of culture must have different ideas of heroism than a nation with two thousand glorious years of history. But the matter has its serious side. One has to ask just how far the Jews can go in debasing and stupefying a people. The answer to the question shows the danger facing modern humanity if it does not resist this intellectual and spiritual process of decay. Here we have given a single example. The spiritual warfare of our age provides dozens of other examples every day.
Hero or film hero, that is the question. No person with any sense of history can have any doubt to whom the goddess of history will award the laurels at the conclusion of today’s great struggle. We have a long series of proud and famous names as opposed to the enemy’s artificially inflated figures. They serve the most brilliant military leader of our history, and behind them march millions of German soldiers who have been tested a thousand times in battle and victory, in hard times and in privation.
They will live in the history of our nation, and their names will be beacons to coming generations. The momentary fame of American film heroes will have melted along with the wax in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.
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