18.02.1943. “Don’t ever forget, that England imposed this war on us” says the poster. Goebbels speech in Sportpalast, Berlin

15 comments

  1. On 22.02.2023. Putin will have a rally on the Moscow stadium in front of 200.000 people!
    The similarities are uncanny

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech

    The Sportpalast speech (German: Sportpalastrede) or Total War speech was a speech delivered by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin Sportpalast to a large, carefully selected audience on 18 February 1943, as the tide of World War II was turning against Nazi Germany and its Axis allies. The speech is particularly notable as Goebbels almost mentions the Holocaust, when he begins saying “Ausrotten” (using the German word for extermination), but quickly changes it to Ausschaltung (i.e. exclusion). This was the same word Heinrich Himmler used on 18 December 1941, when he recorded the outcome of his discussion with Adolf Hitler on the Final Solution, wherein he wrote “als Partisanen auszurotten” (“exterminate them as partisans”)

  2. I mean technically thats correct. England and France declared war because of the invasion of poland. But hitler knew that could happen. France and England should have pushed hard into germany in september 1939…

  3. Just a note to people who are interested in learning German:

    The sentence structure used for the placard was highly unusual even back then. It is purposfully antiquated to evoke poetic phrasing often found in christian hymns from the 16th and 17th century.

    If you want to make the point that England made you commit crimes against humanity, please use “aufgezwungen hat”!

  5. Interestingly this playbook of ‘sure we invaded a country but its only as we were provoked’ from the nazis would of course later be used by Russia to invade Ukraine in order to ‘defeat Nazis’

  10. Im not entirely sure yet, but it feels like they are trying to remind the audience of some symbol here….

  11. Russia also uses “provocation” as an excuse for aggression on a regular basis. Whether the provocation is real or imagined, this is not a justification.

    Just remember, if someone becomes violent just because they were taunted, they are admitting that not only do they have poor self-control, but also that they are certainly not good Christians, since the Bible explicitly states that you should turn the other cheek in such cases. Putin’s claim to be a good Christian is shown to be false every time he says he has been provoked.

  12. Isn’t that the same slogan rhetoric Russia is using about the West?

    Dictatorship attacks a nation, commits warcrimes, gets criticised, they play the victim role and say “Don’t forget that this is all their fault, not ours, we are innocent”.

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