The German Establishment’s Secret Plan Against the Truth

The Federal Republic of Germany is morphing into the German Reich of 1933 through 1945, complete with the propaganda, and the people don't even realise it!

From The European Conservative

By Rafael Pinto Borges

Truth cannot survive in a system where its value is subordinated to political expediency.

For months, the German public has been treated to a media-concocted spectacle of moral panic—manufactured, amplified, and weaponised with surgical precision and malign intent. At its centre stood the now-infamous so-called “Potsdam meeting;” a 2023 gathering in which right-wing figures, including Austrian activist Martin Sellner and figures linked to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and the Werteunion discussed the topic of remigration. The encounter was elevated overnight from an innocent private event into the affirmed locus of a dark, conspiratorial ‘master plan’ to deport millions of people, including legal citizens of the German state. The only problem with the lurid tale? What the media claims to have been discussed never actually was.

The serious allegations were first popularised by the left-wing media outlet Correctiv in the scary-sounding piece “Secret plan against Germany”. From there, they spread like wildfire across the media ecosystem. They ignited vast protests, saturated headlines, and provided Germany’s imploding political establishment with yet another arsenal of pretexts with which to denounce its adversaries as existential threats to democracy and the country’s constitutional order—a dangerous thing to be accused of in a country where authoritarian liberalism has long been the ideology of the ruling classes and where the largest opposition party, Alternative für Deutschland, has for years been facing calls for its prohibition. However, as so often is the case in our post-truth era, reality proved to be far less dramatic than advertised by the left-wing press.

A ruling by the Berlin Regional Court has now destroyed the central claims of this carefully constructed cabal. The court has explicitly prohibited the repetition of assertions that the Potsdam meeting involved plans to strip German citizens of their nationality or to orchestrate mass deportations of lawful residents of Germany. What that means is that the legal system has now confirmed what should have been evident from the outset: the story that convulsed Germany for weeks was, at best, a grotesque distortion; at worst, a deliberate fabrication designed to mobilise public opinion against the right. While the court’s decision is a major victory for those unfairly accused, the affair still raises questions that cut to the very heart of contemporary European politics. How, indeed, does such a narrative come into being? And, no less importantly, how does it achieve such immediate and uncritical acceptance?

Part of the answer can be found in the watertight alignment between segments of the media, activist networks and NGOs, and the political class. Indeed, we now know that the Correctiv report did not emerge in a vacuum. It was launched into an environment primed to receive it, amplified by outlets eager for confirmation of their pre-existing assumptions, and legitimised—concocted?—by a political class that has grown increasingly comfortable governing through naked lies. Particularly appalling is the information that Correctiv’s director Jeanette Gusko met with then German Chancellor Olaf Scholz just eight days before the Potsdam meeting, with it also being known that representatives of the outlet have had no less than 11 undisclosed meetings with government leaders. Additionally, Correctiv has enjoyed enormous support from the German state: at least €2.5 million in taxpayers’ money was transferred to it in the last decade. This is hardly what an “independent investigative outlet” looks like.

Thus, an outlet with close ties to the German state engineered a social movement to oppose a ‘programme’ that never existed. However, this grand deception produced ample effect. Fooled by Correctiv, hundreds of thousands took to the streets. The outlet’s charade specifically attempted to draw an historical parallel between the Potsdam discussions and the horrifying memories of the 1942 Wannsee Conference that led directly to the Holocaust in Europe. The Potsdam meeting was not simply criticised. Rather, it was mythologised, woven into a broader tale suggesting the imminent return of Europe’s darkest past.

But there is more to this story beyond the shocking lies, the cunning manipulation, the high likelihood of the political class concocting it all, or the sheer immorality of ravaging other people’s reputations in the most savage, evil ways. If the press still retained a modicum of bona fide, it would surely now admit to its guilt and rush to restore the truth. Of course, this couldn’t be further from what is actually happening. The media had no qualms about passionately, obsessively disseminating an unconfirmed story that turned out to be fake news, but if you think the same newspapers are now employing comparable energy to revisit the story and clear the names of those falsely accused, you are wrong. The latest ruling by the Berlin court will remain unknown to most Germans, with the majority of outlets either not discussing it or giving it the least possible attention. This is a well-known tactic of these propaganda outlets: they are loud in communicating lies but timid in restoring the truth. 

There’s a reason for that. Ultimately, it shows the changing role of the media in our increasingly managed, authoritarian democracies. Today, the purpose of a story is not really to withstand scrutiny over time; it is not to be truthful. Instead, it is to achieve maximum impact today—to shape and alter perception, mobilise passions, defame and delegitimise opponents. Accuracy doesn’t really matter anymore. Modern journalism is just another weapon to be used and abused in the political fight.

This is what the Potsdam affair was about. It was made up and deployed against a threat perceived by the German establishment as dangerous enough to merit it—the AfD and the rest of the anti-immigration Right. The story served to reframe the political landscape in moral rather than electoral terms and to shift the debate from policy disagreement to questions of legitimacy itself.

There is an irony here that is difficult to ignore. As so often is the case, those who most vocally howl about the dangers presented by ‘disinformation’ to democracy have, in fact, presided over a gigantic campaign that undermined both. Democracy, after all, cannot function without a common ground of truth—a minimally shared reality. But truth cannot survive in a system where its value is subordinated to political expediency.

Ultimately, what the Potsdam affair puts in evidence is not the existence of a grand, scary right-wing plot. That, as has now been amply proven, never really existed. Instead, it once again shows how influential institutions have become willing to construct, propagate, and defend narratives that are wholly made up as long as they serve their interests. When they lose what little credibility they still had left, they will have no one to blame but themselves.

Pictured: David Schraven, founder of CORRECT!V, a hard Left "news" organisation, much like Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda