Posts recently reported by Facebook in its efforts to combat misinformation attribute the quote: “Let me control the media and I will make every nation a herd of pigs” to Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. The Reuters Fact Check team could find no evidence to substantiate this claim, and Third Reich scholars say it is unlikely Goebbels said those words.
Examples of postings that make this claim can be found here, here and here.
As explained here by the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Joseph Goebbels organized the propaganda campaign in which Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in Nazi Germany. Goebbels favors a nationalist, expansionist, racist vision of the future of Germany ‘which’ won many Germans after the Nazi regime and strongly convinced that the opposition was useless’. ”
The end result of Goebbels ‘work was “a war that cost the lives of some 55 million people, including the systematic murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children in the Holocaust”, explains the Holocaust and the United Nations’ outreach program in ‘State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda.’ (here). Further reading, provided by the American Holocaust Memorial Museum, is available at www.ushmm.org/propaganda/.
The Reuters Fact Check team could not find the alleged Goebbels citation online in any scientific sources, nor any sites referring to the citation.
On April 25, 2020, Randall Bytwerk, emeritus professor and creator of the German Propaganda Archive (here) at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich. (Here, here), the alleged quote posted on his blog, “Goebbels Didn’t, Say It” (here).
On a visitor to the website or quoting Goebbels, Bytwerk wrote: ‘It was almost certainly fabricated, and for the usual reasons’ – namely that those who use the quote online do not provide a source, that ‘the sites that mention that it is often questionable,’ and that “no reliable scholar mentions it”. He also noted that he “never encountered this quote” in his extensive reading of Goebbels ‘writings, and that Goebbels was “unlikely” to make such a statement’ as ‘a good propagandist’.
Reuters emailed Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University specializing in Eastern Europe, World War II and the Holocaust (here). he would have spoken of ‘the media’ rather than ‘the press’ and also unlikely to have referred to his own nation as pigs. Snyder said he had never come across such a quote in such a scientific source.
Richard J. Evans, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and author of “The Coming of the Third Reich”, “The Third Reich In Power” and “The Third Reich at War” (www.richardjevans.com/) , also told Reuters by email that Goebbels’ would never have used the term ‘media’, explaining that the German translation ‘Mass Media’ is a post-war term that the Nazis never used.
Like Snyder, Evans said Goebbels “would never have insulted the German people by calling them pigs, not even privately.”
VERDICT
Untrue. The Reuters Fact Check team could find no evidence that Joseph Goebbels ever said, “Let me control the media, and I will make every nation a herd of pigs.” Having never encountered the alleged quote, Third Reich historians say it is unlikely that Goebbels ever said these words.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to actually check social media posts.