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German Propaganda Archive Calvin University

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Background: Helmut Sündermann was a top official in the Nazi Party press office, and an unrepentant anti-Semite after the war. When this article appeared, the war situation was dismal. The Ardennes offensive had failed. A major Soviet offensive was driving into German territory. There simply wasn’t any good news. Sündermann has nothing encouraging to say, claiming only that the Allies were warmongers of long standing. I translated this article because of its title, “The Big Lie,” which in this case is that the Allies assert that Germany is responsible for the war, whereas he claims it has always been peaceful, fighting only in self-defense.

The source: Helmut Sündermann, “Die große Lüge, Völkischer Beobachter (Vienna edition), 21 January 1945, pp. 1-2. The original is available on ANNO, the outstanding Austrian effort to digitize the country’s newspapers.


The Big Lie

by Helmut Sündermann

We Germans noted with some astonishment of the bloodthirsty slogans with which our enemies, particularly in the West, send their soldiers to Europe’s battlefields. An increasing number of voices in the Anglo-American camp think announcing war aims such as Morgenthau and Vansittart proclaim unproductive, since they can only strengthen the German will to resist.

The warmongers surely thought about this possibility. The fact that they nonetheless reveal their true plans and intentions has other grounds: If they want to keep their heavily bleeding, fighting troops going for a little while longer, they have to proclaim war aims that are consistent with the slogans on which they base their battle in Europe. They cannot go before their peoples and say: “We want a Jewish world state.” They also cannot use their earlier lying fiction: “For democracy and representative government” because it had no force once the Soviets got involved.

The notorious warmonger Vansittart was the first to use the new slogan: “We are fighting not against National Socialism, but rather against the whole German people.” He asserted that for centuries Germany has been the only aggressor in Europe and the world, that since the age of Charlemagne the German element drove “incessantly for bloody expansion” and similar such phrases, which subsumed under the term “Vansittartism” have been circulating amongst our enemies for a long time, fogging the minds of the Anglo-Americans.

There supposedly are American soldiers who, convinced by such slogans, really believe in a “crusade” and think that the world will be much better off once the German people is exterminated. They fight with the crazy idea that Germany, the German national character, and “Prussian militarism and caste spirit” are the main barriers to the world peace that will certainly become reality once they gone. Germany and the Germans have been the personification of war for centuries, with a natural passion to conquer and destroy in order to expand.

All the slogans of extermination that we have heard in recent years are nothing but a somewhat logical consequence from crazy premises, a continuation and result of a big lie that the Anglo-American war criminals repeated incessantly and with which they have loaded the packs of their soldiers.

It requires no great evidence to refute the fundamental ideas of our enemies’s world-wide agitation. Still, it is perhaps helpful to remind ourselves of a few facts that compellingly show where the troublemakers of our troubled globe are in reality, where the real thieving and warmongering peoples and states are, whose imperialist policies have influenced all of modern human history.

Here are a few facts to remember to give the proper answer to the historical “proofs” that Vansittart and Morgenthau present. In the course of the last five hundred years — from about 1400 to 1939 — Germany, England, Russia, and since 1776, the year of its founding — the USA — have changed the size of their territory as follows:

In 1400 the German Reich was about 950,000 square kilometers. In 1939 it had 635,000. In five centuries it shrunk by about a third, although its population grew four-fold in the same period.

When the United States was established, it had about one million square kilometers. In 1939 — 160 years later — it has 10,854,000 square kilometers. In only a century and a half its size has grown by ten-and-a-half times. This figure would be substantially larger if we included those countries, particularly in Central and South America, which through capitalistic machinations have become fully depending on the USA, without officially belonging to it.

The Grand Duchy of Moscow — the beginning of what later became Russia —  comprised about 700,000 square kilometers in 1462. The Soviet Union was over 22 million square kilometers in 1939. Over five centuries, Russia increased its territory by more than 130 times.

The English kingdom in 1400, still separate from Scotland, may have been around 220,000 square kilometers. British possessions in 1939 were about 40,120,000 square kilometers. That is an increase of 182 times from its beginning.

These facts need no elaboration. They reveal everything there is to say about the historic tragedy of the German Reich when compared to the imperialism of England, Russia, and the USA.

A word about the “military attitude” and “war lust” that Vansittart, Morgenthau, and their comrades claim is typically German. The British historian Seeley, in his well-known book The Expansion of England, said this about British military policy between 1688 and 1815: “Between the Revolution of 1688 and the Battle of Waterloo, we waged seven major wars, the shortest of which lasted about seven years, the longest twelve. Of the 126 years, 64, over half, were at war.”

If we continue Seeley’s calculations, England waged 13 further wars between 1815 and 1918, a total of 36 years, and in addition conducted 14 military actions that given weak resistance cannot be called wars. Its already vast possessions in all parts of the world grew insatiably.

The history of the USA after 1800 displays a significant series of military conquests, during which time Germany conducted only wars of liberation, unification, and defense. A North American military operation in 1815 took over Florida, which until then had been under Spanish control. Between 1846 and 1848 it waged a purely military campaign of conquest against Mexico, seizing California and New Mexico. 1854 brought the first military conflict with Japan, into whose harbors an American war fleet forced entrance. In 1898 the United States fought a new war with Spain. This time it was about territory, above all possession of the strategically and militarily important island of Cuba. In the same war, the USA won control of the Philippines.

Then there were regular USA military “interventions” in Central and South America. Panama (1903), Nicaragua (1911), Honduras (1914), Haiti, the Dominican Republic, even Mexico, encountered North American expeditionary forces and warships when their internal developments were not as Washington wished. The occupation of Greenland, Iceland, the Azores, and all the other “bases” that Roosevelt demanded in this war are nothing other than the continuation of the constant and often brutal military threats that the USA made against all the smaller states in the Western Hemisphere over the last 150 years.

The military undertakings of England, the USA, and the Soviet Union have one thing in common: they aim at the political subordination of other countries, at the conquest of foreign territory. The Soviets have the broadest goal: they recognize no limits to their aim, openly admitting their demand for world Soviet state.

Everyone remembers Bolshevism’s wars of conquest in the 23 years between 1918 and 1941. In the two hundred years between 1700 and 1900, the tsars waged no fewer than 22 wars lasting a total of 101 years to expand their territory. Just after taking power in 1918 the Bolshevists attempted to subordinate Finland. In 1918/1919 they waged war for the same reason against Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In 1920 they made their first attack on Poland. Between 1921 and 1924 in the Caucasus, they fought and subjugated the then independent Georgia. In 1939 the Soviets not only occupied eastern Poland, they incorporated it into their territory. In December they began their first war with Finland, also a pure war of conquest. In 1940 they incorporated the Baltic states and Bessarabia. Molotov’s further demands were met by the only possible answer: the German-Soviet war.

Is there any need for further evidence of the enormous lies on which the whole Anglo-American case for their blind war against Germany and the German people is based? The path to lasting peace is not over the ruins of the German nation — which is fighting for nothing other than its very life — but will be blocked as long as an imperialist desire for conquest dominates Anglo-American policy, as long as Bolshevist dictatorship threatens the entire world.

We are not surprised that the Jewish coalition of our enemies conceals its true intentions. But their lie is too blatant to withstand the test of hard and bloody battles. Let us do all we can to dispel the poison of international agitation by revealing the clear light of historic truth!

The enemy’s promises in recent years have collapsed like a house of cards. When the cloak covering their lies about Germany and the German people has also fallen and the cold truth about their war guilt and war crimes comes to light, it will be the dawn of a new beginning for the peoples, which must happen after this war if the world is to remain a home for upright peoples.



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