Big lie

“	Make the lie big, make it simple, keep repeating it, and eventually the people will believe it.	„
	~ Joseph Goebbels detailing the original concept of the big lie.

A big lie (German: große Lüge; often "the big lie") is a propaganda technique used for political purposes, defined as "a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the facts, especially when used as a propaganda device by a politician or official body.

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 Nazi Party 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 anti-semitism in Europe into mass murder and genocide. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at an "international Jewry", which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I. Nazi propaganda repeated over and over the claim 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.

In 1943, The New York Times contributor Edwin James asserted that Hitler's biggest lie was his revisionist claim that Germany was not defeated in war in 1918, but rather was betrayed by internal groups. This stab-in-the-back myth was spread by extreme right-wing groups, including the Nazis.

In the 21st century, the term was applied to Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. "The big lie" in this instance was the false claim that the election was stolen from him through massive fraud. Trump's propagation of this lie would give rise to the Stop the Steal movement and also lead to the storming of the United States Capitol Building by right-wing extremists on January 6, 2021.