And You Really Want to Vote for Me?

by Joseph Goebbels

A citizen second class, with four convictions and eight pending cases? What a dreamer!

In an essay I wrote that each National Socialist should obey the states attorney “when there isn’t any way around it,” regardless of whether it was right or wrong. For that a court in Elberfeld fined me a hundred marks for inciting resistance against the states attorney.

When Hans Hustert, in jail for trying to kill Scheidemann [Chancellor in 1922], had his teeth ruined by lousy prison food, I started a collection so that this fiend could get his teeth fixed. A court in Munich fined me 50 marks for an illegal collection.

As one of my wounded comrades was going to be trephined by the Jewish doctor Levi, I organized a collection to bring this poor worker to a German doctor. A court in Munich fined me 150 marks, once again for an illegal collection.

At a mass meeting of the NSDAP, I suggested keeping an editor of Der Tag under close watch, since he had called a Hitler meeting a monkey house. The filthy fink Carlotto Graetz, who slandered the front soldier Adolf Hitler in the worst ways and tried to connect him with pimps and prostitutes, I called a Jewish pig, in order to force him to bring suit. He didn’t sue, but I got six weeks in prison anyway because of “incitement to violence without result.”

A case is pending against me because I am supposed to have called police chief Dr. Weiss “Isidor,” though his name is Bernhard.

A second case is pending because I caricatured the above named Bernhard Weiss as Nero in Der Angriff, with the caption “Bernhard only plays thankless roles.”

Then there is a third case, because the Angriff printed a cartoon of Bernhard Weiss behind the mask of a donkey, “clearly recognizable,” with the text that “In the state of emergency, any ass can govern.”

A fourth case is pending to force me to say who Orje is [Orje was the star of an Angriff satirical column].

A fifth pending case alleges that I drove over the leg of a poor worker. Now that was a year ago. I’ve never driven a car in my life, and on the day in question wasn’t even in Berlin. But the state’s attorney thinks that the car had the number I A 2637, and I’m just the type to do something like that. My reply that I don’t know how to drive and have never had a license only made the charge more serious.

I informed a red bigwig, who by irrelevant heckling was trying to break up a meeting, that he was at a NSDAP meeting, and that if he didn’t shut up we would forgive the S.A. if, under the law, they threw him out. That led to a sixth pending case, for “incitement to violence.”

Then I am supposed to have said that the [Weimar] Republic is only a junk shop, in which the bidders, auctioneers, and politicians bitched. That led to the seventh case, for “endangering the Republic.”

The eighth case resulted because I said the day would come when the goal-conscious, decisive minority would march against this state of cowardly majorities, to put an end by force to usury and exploitation. This one was for “attempted treason.” (!!)

As I learn from reliable sources, four new cases are in the works. What they concern I don’t yet know. But that doesn’t make much difference. I only need to open my mouth or use my pen to give a state’s attorney of the Republic a month’s work.

I have never gotten a golden toothpick from Barmat [a Jew involved in a major financial scandal].

I don’t wear a silk bathrobe from him.

During the great inflation I didn’t get any guilders or dollars from him.

I have never trampled on the German people or their honor. But I have always fought those cowards who left our common fatherland in need.

The subway system will not give me a villa costing 120,000 marks in the foreseeable future.

No one has my signed photograph on his desk.

Under the conditions existing since 1918, I therefore have no chance of getting anything done.

And you really want to vote for me?

The source: “Kütemeyer,” Der Angriff. Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1935), pp. 256-259. The illustration is the book’s dust jacket.