A big lie is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler believed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist and antisemitic political leader in the Weimar Republic.
Hitler's use of the expression
The source of the big lie technique is this passage, taken from Chapter 10 of James Murphy's translation of Mein Kampf :
Goebbels's use of the expression
Though the following supposed quotation of Joseph Goebbels has been repeated in numerous books and articles and on thousands of web pages, none of them has cited a primary source. Thus its attribution to anyone must be considered dubious. According to the research and reasoning of Randall Bytwerk, it is an unlikely thing for Goebbels to have said. It is verified that Goebbels did put forth a theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression "big lie". Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler's first use of the phrase. The article, titled Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.
Holocaust
maintains that Goebbels and the Nazis used the big lie to turn long-standing anti-semitism into mass murder. Herf argues that the big lie was a narrative of an innocent, besieged Germany striking back at an "international Jewry", which it said started World War I. The propaganda repeated over and over the claim that a conspiracy of Jews was the real power in Britain, Russia and the United States. It went on to state that the Jews had begun a "war of extermination" against Germany, and so Germany had a duty and a right to "exterminate" and "annihilate" the Jews in self-defense.
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
The above quote appears in the report, A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend, by Walter C. Langer, which is available from the US National Archives. A somewhat similar quote appears in Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behaviour and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany's Surrender, by Henry A. Murray, October 1943:
Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.
