I shall now ask the Tribunal to take the files relative to Section 3, devoted to the ideological Germanization, and to propaganda.
When I had occasion to speak to the Tribunal about forced labor and economic pillage I said that the Germans had taken all available manpower, goods, and raw materials from the occupied countries. They drained these countries of their reserves. The Germans acted in exactly the same manner with regard to the intellectual and moral resources. They wished to seize and eliminate the spiritual reserves. This expression “spiritual reserves,” which is extremely significant, was not invented by the Prosecution. I have borrowed it from the Germans themselves. I have quoted to the Tribunal another extract from a work which was submitted as a document under Number RF-5 of the French documentation. This was a book published in Berlin by the Nazi Party. The author was Dr. Friedrich Didier. This work has a preface by the Defendant Sauckel and is entitled Working For Europe. The quotation which I should like to make appears in the document book under 1100, which is simply the order of sequence, as the book itself has already been presented and submitted. The book includes a chapter entitled “Ideological Guidance and Social Assistance.” The author is concerned with the ideological guidance of the foreign workers who were taken away by millions to the Reich by force. This preoccupation with the ideological guidance of such an important element of the population of the occupied countries is already remarkable in itself; but it is, on the other hand, quite evident that this preoccupation is general with regard to all the inhabitants of the occupied countries, and the author in this case has simply confined himself to his subject. I have chosen this quotation to begin my section because its wording seemed to me to be particularly felicitous to enable us to get an idea of the German plans in regard to propaganda.
Page 69 of the book that has been put in evidence reads:
“The problem of ideological guidance of the foreign worker is not as simple as in the case of the German fellow worker. In employing foreigners far more importance must be paid to the removal of psychological reservations. The foreigner must get accustomed to unfamiliar surroundings. His ideological scruples must be dispersed, if he has any. The mental attitude of the nationals of former enemy states must be just as effectively refuted as the consequences of foreign ideologies.”
In the occupied countries the Germans undertook to eliminate the mental reserves and to expurgate the ideology of each man in order to substitute for them the Nazi conception. Such was the object of the propaganda. This propaganda had already been introduced in Germany and it was carried on there unceasingly. We have seen from the article just quoted that there was also a preoccupation with the ideological guidance of the German worker, although the problem was considered there to be more simple. When we speak today of Nazi propaganda we are often tempted to underestimate the importance of this propaganda. There are grounds for underestimating it, but they are false grounds. On the one hand, when we consider the works and the themes of propaganda, we are often struck by their crudeness, their obviously mendacious character, their intellectual or artistic poverty. But we must not forget that the Nazi propaganda utilized all means, the most crude as well as the more subtle and often skillful methods. From another point of view the crudest affirmations are those that carry most weight with some simple minds.
Finally, we must not forget that if the Germans had won the war, these writings, these films, which we find ridiculous, would have constituted in the future our principal and soon our sole spiritual food.
Another remark that is often heard is that German propaganda achieved only very poor results. Indeed, these results are quite insignificant, especially if one takes into account the means which this propaganda had at its disposal. The enslaved peoples did not listen to the news and to the exhortations of the Germans. They threw themselves into the resistance. But here again we must consider that the war continued, that the broadcasts from the countries which had remained free gave out magnificent counter propaganda, and that finally the Germans after a time suffered military reverses.
If events had been different perhaps this propaganda would, in the long run, have brought about an acquiescence on the part of the more important elements of the populations which would have been worse than the oppression itself. It is fortunate that only a very small minority in the different countries were corrupted by the Nazi propaganda, but however small this minority may have been, it is for us a cause for sadness and of just complaint.
The slogans of Nazi propaganda appear to us less childish and less ridiculous when we consider the few wretches who, influenced by it, enrolled in a legion or in the Waffen SS to fight against their countries and against humanity. By their death in this dishonorable combat or after their condemnation some of these men have expiated their crimes. But Nazi propaganda is responsible for the death of each one of them and for each one of these crimes.
Finally, we are not sure that we know today exactly the real effect of Nazi propaganda. We are not sure that we are able to measure all the harm which it has done to us. The nations count their visible wounds, but propaganda is a poison which dissolves in the mental organism and leaves traces that cannot be discerned. There are still men in the world who, because of the propaganda to which they have been subjected, believe, perhaps obscurely, that they have the right to despise or to eliminate another man because he is a Jew or because he is a Communist. The men who believe this still remain accomplices and, at the same time, are victims of Nazism.