Big Lie - Big Lie and Holocaust

Big Lie and Holocaust

Jeffrey Herf 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 conspiracy theory that Jews were the real powers in Britain, Russia and the U.S. It went 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.