Mein Kampf
energy and will-power to prevent the catastrophe he had foreseen, and to spare the nation the time of its deepest degradation and shame. Ludendorff was branded with the guilt for the defeat, and thus the weapon of moral right was snatched from the hand of the only dangerous accuser who could have risen up against the betrayers of the Fatherland. Here they were acting on the true principle that the greatness of the lie is always a certain factor in being believed; at the bottom of their hearts the great masses of a people are more likely to be misled than to be consciously and deliberately bad, and in the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves, but would be ashamed to tell too great ones. An untruth of that sort would never come into their heads, and they cannot believe possible so vast an impudence in infamous distortion on the part of others; even after being enlightened they will long continue to doubt and waver, and will still believe there must be some truth behind it somewhere. For this reason some part of even the boldest lie is sure to stick—a fact which all the great liars and liars’ societies in this world know only too well, and make base use of.
But those who have best known this truth about the possibilities of using untruths and slander have always been the Jews; after all, their whole existence is built up on one great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community, whereas in fact they are a race—and what a race! And as such they were pilloried forever by one of the greatest minds of humanity in an eternally true sentence of fundamental validity: he called them “The great masters of the lie.” He who does not see or will not believe this can never help truth to victory in the world.
We may almost consider it a stroke of good fortune for the German people that the span of its creeping disease was suddenly shortened by so fearful a catastrophe; otherwise the nation would have gone to destruction more slowly, perhaps, but all the more surely. The disease would have become chronic, whereas in the acute form of the collapse it is at least recognizable to the eyes of the crowd. It is not by chance that man mastered the plague more
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