Daily Inspiration Quote by Julius Streicher

Streicher’s line is propaganda doing what propaganda does best: laundering a violent accusation through the language of “common knowledge.” “Open secret” is the tell. It’s a rhetorical cheat that skips evidence, pressures the listener to nod along, and frames disagreement as naive or complicit. The claim isn’t meant to be argued; it’s meant to be socially enforced.

The intent is to recode a diverse minority into a single parasitic type. “Do not work” doesn’t describe employment; it defines belonging. In Nazi antisemitic mythology, Jews are cast as the people who don’t build, don’t sweat, don’t sacrifice, and therefore don’t deserve rights. The second half sharpens the blade: “let others work for them” is envy turned into moral indictment, converting economic complexity (middlemen roles, urban professions, historical restrictions on landownership and guild access) into a story of deliberate exploitation. It primes the audience to feel cheated, then offers a target.

Subtext: resentment is permission. If “they” are freeloaders, then stripping them of jobs, property, citizenship, and eventually life can be sold not as cruelty but as “justice” and “restoration.” That’s the key mechanism: moral inversion, where persecution becomes self-defense.

Context matters. Streicher wasn’t a soldierly truth-teller; he was the publisher of Der Sturmer, one of the Third Reich’s most vicious antisemitic outlets, later convicted at Nuremberg for incitement. This sentence sits inside a wider Nazi project of turning stereotypes into policy, and policy into annihilation. The banality of the wording is part of its threat: a casual slur engineered to make catastrophe feel normal.