Background: Here Goebbels takes on the role of prophet, imaging the world two generations after German victory. The war was nearing its end, but Goebbels seeks to persuade his fellow citizens that victory is still possible. Goebbels uses the phrase “an iron curtain” to describe the results of the Soviet Union’s advance into Europe, a phrase later made famous by Winston Churchill. Goebbels did not coin the phrase, but his use brought it to prominence.
The source: “Das Jahr 2000,” Das Reich, 25 February 1945, pp. 1-2.
The three enemy war leaders, American sources report, have agreed at the Yalta Conference to Roosevelt’s proposal for an occupation program that will destroy and exterminate the German people up until the year 2000. One must grant the somewhat grandiose nature of the proposal. It reminds one of the skyscrapers in New York that soar high into the sky, and whose upper stories sway in the wind. What will the world look like in the year 2000? Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt have determined it, at least insofar as the German people are concerned. One may, however, doubt if they and we will act in the predicted manner.
No one can predict the distant future, but there are some facts and possibilities that are clear over the coming fifty years. For example, none of the three enemy statesmen who developed this brilliant plan will still be alive, England will have at most 20 million inhabitants, our children’s children will have had children, and the events of this war will have sunk into myth. One can also predict with a high degree of certainty that Europe will be a united continent in the year 2000. One will fly from Berlin to Paris for breakfast in fifteen minutes, our most modern weapons will be seen as antiques, and much more. Germany, however, will still be under military occupation according to the plans of the Yalta Conference and the English and Americans will be training its people in democracy. How empty the brains of these three charlatans must be — at least in the case of two of them!
The third, Stalin, follows much more far-reaching goals than his two comrades. He certainly does not plan to announce them publicly, but he and his 200 million slaves will fight bitterly and toughly for them. He sees the world differently than do those plutocratic brains. He sees a future in which the entire world is subjected to the dictatorship of the Moscow Internationale, which means the Kremlin. His dream may seem fantastic and absurd, but if we Germans do not stop him, it will undoubtedly become reality. That will happen as follows: If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered. The Jewish press in London and New York would probably still be applauding. All that would be left is human raw material, a stupid, fermenting mass of millions of desperate proletarianized working animals who would only know what the Kremlin wanted them to know about the rest of the world. Without leadership, they would fall helplessly into the hands of the Soviet blood dictatorship. The remainder of Europe would fall into chaotic political and social confusion that would prepare the way for the Bolshevization that will follow. Life and existence in these nations would become hell, which was after all the point of the exercise.
Aside from domestic problems of economic, social, and political nature, England would suffer a declining population that would leave it even less able to defend its interests in Europe and the rest of the world than it is today. In 1948, Roosevelt’s campaign for reelection would fail, just as Wilson’s did after the First World War, and a Republican isolationist would become president of the USA. His first official act would likely be to withdraw American troops from the European witch’s kettle. The entire population of the USA would doubtless approve. Since there would be no other military power on the continent, in the best case 60 British divisions would face 600 Soviet divisions. Bolshevism certainly would not have been idle during the period. A Labor government, perhaps even a radical half-Bolshevist one, would be in power in England. Under the pressure of public opinion whipped up by the Jewish press and a people weary of war, it would soon announce its lack of interest in Europe. How fast such things can happen is clear from the example of Poland today.
The so-called Third World War would likely be short, and our continent would be at the feet of the mechanized robots from the steppes. That would be an unfortunate situation for Bolshevism. It would without doubt leap over to England and set the land of classic democracy ablaze. The iron curtain would fall once more over this vast tragedy of nations. Over the next five years, hundreds of millions of slaves would build tanks, fighters, and bombers; then the general assault on the USA would begin. The Western Hemisphere, which despite lying accusations we have never threatened, would then be in the gravest danger. One day those in the USA will curse the day in which a long-forgotten American president released a communiqué at a conference at Yalta, which will long since have sunk into legend.
The democracies are not up to dealing with the Bolshevist system, since they use entirely different methods. They are as helpless against it as were the bourgeois parties in Germany over against the communists before we took power. In contrast to the USA, the Soviet system needs to take no regard for public opinion or its people’s living standard. It therefore has no need to fear American economic competition, not to mention its military. Even were the war to end as Roosevelt and Churchill imagine, the plutocratic countries would be defenseless before the competition from the Soviet Union on the world market, unless they decided to greatly reduce wages and living standards. But if they were to do that, they would not be able to resist Bolshevist agitation. However things turn out, Stalin would always be the winner and Roosevelt and Churchill the losers. The Anglo-American war policy has reached a dead end. They have called up the spirits, and can no longer get rid of them. Our predictions, beginning with Poland, are beginning to be confirmed by a remarkable series of current events. One can only smile when the English and Americans forge plans for the year 2000. They will be happy if they survive until 1950.
No thinking Englishman fails to see this today. The British prime minister wore a Russian fur coat at the Yalta Conference. This aroused unhappy comment in the English public. When the London news agencies later reported that it was a Canadian fur coat, no one believed them. People saw in the matter a symbol of England’s subordination to the Kremlin’s will. What happened to the days when England had an important, even decisive say in world affairs! An influential American Senator recently remarked: “England is only a small appendix to Europe!” His comrades treat it that way already. Has it deserved any better? At a dramatic moment in European history, it declared war against the Reich, unleashing a world conflagration that not only went out of control but threatens to leave England itself in ruins. A tiny extension of Germany into purely German territories to the East was sufficient ground to see a threat to the European balance of power. In the resulting war, England found it necessary to throw out its 200-year-old policy of the balance of power. Now a world power has entered Europe that begins to the East in Vladivostok and will not rest in the West until it has incorporated Great Britain itself into its dictatorship.
It is more than naive for the British prime minister to plan for the political and social status of the Reich in the year 2000. In the coming years and decades, England will probably have other concerns. It will have to fight desperately to maintain a small portion of its former power in the world. It received the first blows in the First World War, and now during the Second World War faces the final coup de grace.
One can imagine things turning out differently, but it is now too late. The Führer made numerous proposals to London, the last time four weeks before the war began. He proposed that German and British foreign policy work together, that the Reich would respect England’s sea power as England would respect the Reich’s land power, and that parity would exist in the air. Both powers would join in guaranteeing world peace, and the British Empire would be a critical component of that peace. Germany would even be ready to defend that Empire with military means if it were necessary. Under such conditions, Bolshevism would have been confined to its original breeding grounds. It would have been sealed off from the rest of the world. Now Bolshevism is at the Oder River. Everything depends on the steadfastness of German soldiers. Will Bolshevism to pushed back to the East, or will its fury flood over Western Europe? That is the war situation. The Yalta Communiqué does not change things in the least. Things depend only on this crisis of human culture. It will be solved by us, or it will not be solved at all. Those are the alternatives.
We Germans are not the only ones who say this. Every thinking person knows that today, as so often in the past, the German people have a European mission. We may not lose our courage, even though the mission brings with it enormous pain and suffering. The foolish know-it-alls have brought the world more than once to the edge of the abyss. At the last moment, the sight of the terrifying misery alarmed humanity enough for it to take the decisive step backwards at the critical moment. That will be the case this time as well. We have lost a great deal in this war. About all we have left are our military forces and our ideals. We may not give these up. They are the foundation of our existence and of the fulfillment of our historical obligations. It is hard and terrible, but also honorable. We were given our duty because we alone have the necessary character and steadfastness. Any other people would have collapsed. We, however, like Atlas carry the weight of the world on our shoulders and do not doubt.
Germany will not be occupied by its enemies in the year 2000. The German nation will be the intellectual leader of civilized humanity. We are earning that right in this war. This world struggle with our enemies will live on only as a bad dream in people’s memories. Our children and their children will erect monuments to their fathers and mothers for the pain they suffered, for the stoic steadfastness with which they bore all, for the bravery they showed, for the heroism with which they fought, for the loyalty with which they held to their Führer and his ideals in difficult times. Our hopes will come true in their world and our ideals will be reality. We must never forget that when we see the storms of this wild age reflected in the eyes of our children. Let us act so that we will earn their eternal blessings, not their curses.
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