Cited in Facebook’s efforts to curb the online dissemination of disinformation, reports claim that they are offering an authentic quote from Hermann Goering, a chief architect of the German Nazi police state under the Third Reich, which contains the phrase: ‘The only thing that needs to be done to enslave people is to scare them. ”
While the posts implicitly compare the brutal repression of the Nazi regime with mandates, guidelines for social distance, and other efforts made by governments around the world to contain the new coronavirus, there is no evidence that Goering made this statement.
The alleged quote, shared here by American musician and conservative activist Ted Nugent, says that during the testimony before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946, Goering was asked how he got the German people to accept Nazism.
He allegedly replied: ‘It was very easy, it has nothing to do with Nazism, it has something to do with human nature. You can do that in a Nazi, socialist, communist regime, in a monarchy and even in a democracy. The only thing that needs to be done to enslave people is to scare them. If you find a way to scare people, you can make them do what you want. ‘
Comments suggesting an understandable comparison between Nazism and COVID-19 restrictions include “And then comes the” Vaccine “????? What predictable BS,” “Masks are a perfect example,” and “Are we “Does the government’s response to the Wuhan flu make sense now?”
Other posts that make this claim can be found here, here and here.
Simone Paulmichl, a spokeswoman for the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and Berlin (here), told Reuters in an email that none of the institute’s experts had seen Goering’s alleged citation in historical sources.
Paulmichl also said the institute saw the same alleged Goering quote last year among followers of the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory (here).
Paulmichl said the quote is probably a manipulated excerpt from the 1947 book ‘Nuremberg Diary’ by Gustave M. Gilbert (here), a psychologist who had access to the prisoners during the trials.
In the book, Gilbert describes a discussion with Goering about how a government can force people to go to war, to which Goering responded: ‘… It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter of bringing the people together, whether it be a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. ‘
By Gilbert recalling that “in a democracy the people, through their elected representatives, have something in the matter,” Goering told him that “the people can always or without a vote lead to the bid of the leaders. It’s easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked and expose the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and expose the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. ”
Although in part similar to the alleged citation circulating on social media, it is not a direct transcript.
“The intended link between COVID-19 measures and any ‘Nazi ways’ to ‘scare’ and ‘enslave’ people is nonsense,” Paulmichl said. “The quote is false and in my opinion it is very likely that whoever invented it did it on purpose.”
Peter Fritzsche, a professor of history and Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (here), also emailed Reuters that Goering did not say so in Nuremberg and the implicit links of the reports to the novel coronavirus described as ‘Trendy and simple.’
Transcripts of Goering’s testimony in Nuremberg are presented here by the Cornov Law School’s Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection, here by the Harvard Law School’s Nuremberg Trials Project and here by the Yale Law School’s Avalon Project.
Goering was convicted as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946 and was sentenced to death, but poisoned himself the night his execution was ordered (here).
VERDICT
Untrue. This quote from Nazi leader Hermann Goering is probably an edited version of a quote in the 1947 book “Nuremberg Diaries”.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.