Joseph Goebbels proved you don’t need to persuade a society to become evil; you need only shift its moral compass, train it to look away, and eventually condition it to participate.
That is why Holocaust language matters. When “kapo," “Judenrat," and Nazi comparisons become political slang-used by non-Jews against Israel or by Jews against other Jews-we don’t just offend. We trivialize the Shoah, distort history, and-ironically-feed the propaganda logic that made it possible.
Stop Turning Shoah Vocabulary into Political Slang
There is often a visceral desire to react to self-righteous “leaders or envoys" by calling them kapos, members of the Judenräte (Jewish councils), or some other highly offensive term. Aside from trivializing the Holocaust, these labels are inaccurate.
Kapos were appointed by the SS to supervise prisoners. Failure to comply would have resulted either in harsh retribution or death. Some Jewish kapos were very cruel and sadistic. After the war, a number were killed by their fellow inmates. Kapos faced life-and-death moral decisions-dilemmas that their detractors fortunately do not have to confront.
Members of the Judenrät were viewed as Nazi collaborators for allegedly assisting in the murder of European Jewry. Yet the history is more complex. In Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation, Isaiah Trunk concluded no general statement could be made either about the members involved, or their activities, motivation, or culpability. The actions of each Jewish council and its members have to be examined separately.
If we wish to preserve the memory of the Shoah, it is imperative to be vigilant in accurately describing Holocaust terminology. Not everyone is an Adolph Hitler or Heinrich Himmler.
The Goebbels Temptation-and the Real Lesson
If a public figure skillfully manipulates the media to malign Israel, that person might be compared-methodologically-to Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda. But the point is not to spray Nazi labels. The point is to understand the mechanism: propaganda is moral engineering. Goebbels’ influence endures because he mastered narrative control in mass society.
As historian Robert J. Evans notes, his propaganda was widely derided and jokes about him were common. A German saying, “lies have short legs," was replaced with “lies have one leg too short," just as Goebbels did-he walked with a limp due to osteomyelitis. Evans adds that party members did not fear or respect him; his arrogance, acerbic tongue, and “even sharper pen endeared him to few." He depended on Hitler’s backing.
Yet his method worked. Historian David Welch calls the Nazi rise a “classic example" of propaganda’s success. Evans said Hitler rewarded Goebbels for helping the Nazis win 107 seats in the 1930 Reichstag election by making him chief of propaganda. In July 1932 the Nazis became the largest party.
Welch and others show Goebbels was profoundly influenced by Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd. Goebbels explained: “I learned a lot" [from Le Bon], “especially that the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitive… only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them…"
That quote is not just history. It’s the social media playbook.
Social Media: Goebbels’ Method at Scale
Evans notes Goebbels borrowed techniques from commercial advertising-simple messages, hard-hitting slogans, “striking images." Social platforms now industrialize this: speed, repetition, emotional certainty, viral imagery. The soft underbelly is obvious: young audiences with weak historical literacy.
When education collapses into slogans, propaganda doesn’t need depth-it needs reach.
Goebbels did not make key strategic decisions (Rhineland 1936, Austria 1938), Evans notes. His job was to justify aggression-and later the annihilation of the Jews-to Germans and the world. He was “not merely subservient…; he thought it important to divine [Hitler’s] intentions and then strengthen them and prompt him to put them into effect."
That is the danger: propaganda doesn’t argue; it recalibrates conscience.
The Core Lie: Jews as the Global Threat
Goebbels and other Nazis viewed propaganda as an absolute necessity to counter a supposed global threat from world Jewry. Saul Friedländer explains Jews were cast as spreading racial pollution and destabilizing the state, allegedly leading the destructive forces of modernity: “Bolshevism, plutocracy, democracy, internationalism, and pacifism."
Jeffrey Herf cites Goebbels’ essay “The Jews Are Guilty" (Die Juden sind Schuld): “In this historical dispute every Jew is our enemy… Owing to their birth and race, all Jews belong to an international conspiracy… They wish for [Germany’s] defeat and annihilation…" Herf adds that the anti-Hitler coalition-Roosevelt and Churchill allied with Stalin-was taken as proof of this “international conspiracy."
This is how propaganda turns persecution into “self-defense": the victim becomes the aggressor; violence becomes “necessity."
From Words to Action
With Hitler’s approval, Goebbels initiated the nationwide pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938 (the “November Pogrom," commonly called Kristallnacht). As Gauleiter of Berlin he helped arrange Jewish expulsions in 1940-1941. Propaganda wasn’t commentary-it prepared the psychological ground for persecution and then helped operationalize it.
The Anecdote We Should Not Ignore
A few years before October 7, a close friend of mine-a physician, a decent man-approached me in frustration about Israel’s failures in hasbara. Then he said something that stunned me: we need to “learn from Hitler-he understood marketing… we need a Goebbels for our side."
That sentence is morally wrong as stated. There is no “Goebbels for our side." The Jewish people do not need a propaganda minister. We need truth, clarity, and competence. But the outburst reveals how desperate even good people can feel-and how quickly desperation reaches for the most powerful example of narrative domination.
That is exactly why words matter.
Hard Conclusion
Goebbels didn’t win by “better arguments." He won by breaking the public’s ability to think clearly, flooding society with simplified lies until repetition felt like truth and moral inversion felt like virtue.
And here is the punchline: when we cheapen Holocaust language-when we throw around “kapo," “Judenrat," or Nazi labels as everyday weapons-we are not defending Jewish honor. We are doing propaganda’s work for it. We turn the Shoah into slang, dilute the public’s grasp that the Nazi assault on the Jews was uniquely ideological, racial, and industrial, and make Jewish suffering feel interchangeable.
That is historically false-and strategically suicidal.
If we want to fight propaganda in 2026, we don’t need a Jewish Goebbels. We need disciplined language, historical literacy, and the refusal to let the Shoah be reduced to a meme.
Precision is not pedantry. In an age of narrative warfare, it is defense.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of The National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI).