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  • 2017-06-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Adolf Hitler Say He Would Start World War III After His Death? (en)
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  • In June 2017, a persistent hoax involving a falsified quote, supposedly from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler about how he would start World War III even after his death, began to recirculate in meme form: This passage is frequently shared in defense of Hitler to bolster the argument that he was actually not racist, and, in fact, that he believed black people were the true Hebrews. The first iteration of this text we could uncover was published on a clickbait web site called FMLGoneViral.com on 7 July 2015: Although the clickbait site provided no citation for when Hitler allegedly made these statements, commenters on the page directed those curious about the quote's authenticity to the book The Nazis World War II by Robert Edwin Herstein. Other dubious sites immediately picked up on this claim and uncritically re-shared the completely bogus Adolf Hitler quote along with its alleged source — clearly without doing even the barest minimum of research, such as opening the book in which the quote supposedly appears. Needless to say,, this passage does not appear in Herzstein's book. We could not find this passage in either the digital copy available via Google Books, nor the hard copy we examined. Page 132 of Herzstein's book The Nazis features a photograph of Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and others watching a propaganda film, a description of what this film depicted, as well as a few stills from the production: The page, like the rest of the book, does not contain an argument suggesting that Adolf Hitler was not racist (given his actions in the historical record, a case for his lack of prejudice would be difficult to make indeed) or that he was kind toward black people. (The hoax quote also appears to miss that racism can exist toward different ethnic groups.) Instead, it describes a propaganda film that linked Jewish people to other groups — including black people: The propaganda film described in this book attempted to trace Jewish ancestry to other groups of people, most likely to demonize other cultures outside of the Aryan race — not to absolve any groups or make anti-racist arguments. An article published by the United States Holocaust Museum explained that although black people were not targeted in the same way as Jews, they were still persecuted, and Germany produced propaganda that painted black soldiers as chronic rapists and a threat to the purity of the German race: The rumor that Adolf Hitler said that World War III would begin when the United States realized that black people were the true Hebrews originated in an unsourced article published by a disreputable web site, and which appears to loosely string together an entire ecosystem of impossibly farfetched and completely unsourced conspiracy theories. Although the quote in the meme was attributed to a legitimate publication, the briefest and most cursory research shows that it appears nowhere in the book cited. (en)
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