Force, Falsehood 2 Bulwarks of Nazism, Says Feuchtwanger

(The following excerpt is from Lion Feuchtwanger’s contribution to the second Brown Book, “Dimitroff contra Goering”)

The two principles upon which National Socialism stands are force and falsehood.

Upon the pages which follow you will find recorded 800 murders by National Socialists. There can be no doubt that this is but a part of the killings which the “Third Reich” effected.

What you will find in the lists which follow is not based upon conjecture. It is moreover nothing but a factual enumeration of those who were killed, the date of the killing, the place. It is a monotonous list, dull reading. Against the georgeous kaleidoscopic fanfare of lies by our opponcents our truth looks very raw and sober. Instead of the grand ringing words you will find here nothing but bare facts, figures, dates.

800 MURDERED

Herr Hitler declared, for example, that in no country is personality so protected as it is in Germany. He declared that the national revolution cost no more than fifty-one lives in all, and that these fifty-one were rascals. In the following you will find the names of 800 who were murdered and the dates of their murder. We therefore ask the German government how it is that only fifty-one of these murders were known to Hitler and what caused him to characterize these dead as rascals. We call upon the German government to verify the statements in this list, and to have the murderous acts which it enumerates investigated, one murder at a time, by uncorrupted judges. The German government will be very wary of doing so … Only by consistent, systematic lies can the government hold out; without its falsification apparatus it would go overnight.

It is an exceptionally well built lying apparatus, built with a great deal of love, one must grant the National Socialists, executed with refinement to the last detail. Peace and order are feigned by every possible means. Whoever strolis along the Kurfuerstendamm in Berlin, along the Jungfernesteg in Hamburg, or along the Hohenstrasse in Cologne; whoever goes skiing in the neighborhood of Garmisen-Partenkirchen, sees nothing but peace and order.

MAINTAINED BY VIOLENCE

But this order will be maintained only by means of the acts of viclence of the concentration camp, by means of ever recurring murders, as you will find recorded in the lists of this book. German peace and order is a lie. What those in power in the “Third Reich” do or leave undone is a lie; what they say and what they ignore is a lie. They get up with a lie and go to bed with it. Falsechood is their order, their law, their judgment, their German, their science, their right, their faith. Their National Socialism is a lie, and their Socialism. Only one thing is real: their greed, their thirst for revenge, their brutality.

And because it is so, because the foundation upon which these people stand is falsehood, it is doubly necessary to undermine this foundation and constantly to contrast the kaleidoscopic lies of the National Socialists, with the hideous, bloody, actuality.