FRITZSCHE: No, I did not do that. Never did I attempt to arouse hatred against the English, French, Americans, or Russians, et cetera. There is not a single word of this type in perhaps a thousand speeches which I made before the microphone. I did speak strongly against governments, members of governments, governmental systems; but I never preached hatred generally or attempted to awaken it indirectly as was the case—and I ask your pardon for my taking an example from the courtroom—at the moment when a film was presented here and the words were spoken, “Here you see Germans laughing over hanged Yugoslavs.” Never did I try to awaken hatred in this general form and I may point out that for years many anti-National Socialist statements from certain countries, which were still neutral at that time, remained unanswered.
DR. FRITZ: Did your superiors demand that you mark your propaganda with the stamp of antagonism or to stimulate hatred?
FRITZSCHE: Yes, that happened frequently, but it was not demanded that antagonism or hatred should be stirred up against peoples. That was expressly forbidden because we wanted to win these peoples over to our side, but again and again I was requested to arouse hatred against individuals and against systems.
DR. FRITZ: Who requested you to do this?
FRITZSCHE: Dr. Goebbels, Dr. Dietrich, and both of them frequently on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. The reproach was repeatedly made that the German press and the German radio did not arouse hatred at all against Roosevelt, Churchill, or Stalin but that they made these three personalities popular as efficient men. For that reason, for years the German press was forbidden to mention these three names at all unless, in an individual case, permission was given with exact instructions.
DR. FRITZ: Do you mean to say that you refused the request to change your propaganda to incite antagonism and to arouse hatred and did not carry it out?
FRITZSCHE: I should like to outline exactly what I did. When the reproaches of Dr. Goebbels and Dr. Dietrich accumulated, I had all caricatures from the first and second World War collected—from England, the United States of America, France, and a few from Russia. In addition, I had all anti-German propaganda films which I could lay my hands on, collected. Then in five to six demonstrations of several hours each, I presented these caricatures and these films to German journalists and German radio speakers. I, myself, spoke only 2 or 3 minutes in introduction. It is quite possible that I created hatred through these showings, but I should like to leave the judgment of this means of producing hatred in the midst of war to the Tribunal. In any case, Dr. Goebbels said later that he was dissatisfied and we were “bunglers.”
I may add one statement. I would have had a means of carrying out my orders of arousing real hatred, that is, not one means but a whole group of methods; that would have been, to give only one example, a German edition of the last two volumes of the Tarzan series, an adventure series which was very popular in Germany at that time and of which the last two volumes were strongly anti-German. I need not describe them here. I never pointed out such early products of anti-German propaganda. I always deliberately ignored such methods.
DR. FRITZ: If you say that you dispensed with hatred and antagonism in your propaganda, what means did you use in your propaganda during the war?
FRITZSCHE: During the war I conducted the propaganda almost exclusively with the concept of the necessity and the obligation to fight. I repeatedly painted the results of defeat very dark and systematically I gave quotations from the press and the radio of the enemy countries. I quoted repeatedly the enemy demands for unconditional surrender. I used the expression of the “super-Versailles” frequently and did—I emphasize that—describe the consequences of a lost war very pessimistically. It does not behoove me today to make a comparison with reality.