The big lie (German: Große Lügege) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth, used especially as a propaganda technique.[1][2] The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, to describe 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 claimed 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 political leader in the Weimar Republic. Historian Jeffrey Herf says the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and bring about the Holocaust.
Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie propaganda technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.[3] Herf further argues that the Nazis’ big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at international Jewry, which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It spread claims that the Jews had begun a war of extermination against Germany, and it used these claims to assert that Germany had a right to annihilate the Jews as self-defense.[4]
In the 21st century, the term has been applied to Donald Trump‘s attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. The big lie in this instance is the false claim that the election was stolen from him through massive electoral fraud and voter fraud, and the scale of the claim’s proponents eventually culminated with Trump supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol.[5][6]
