The book in Goebbels’s library

The gravest moral hazard is not the man who knows he is doing wrong. It is the man who has constructed a story in which what he is doing is something else.

Ronn Torossian | Jun 16, 2026

Edward Bernays – widely called the father of modern public relations and Sigmund Freud’s nephew, the most prominent Jewish figure in the American PR industry of his generation – published a book in 1923 called Crystallizing Public Opinion. It was the first serious theoretical treatment of mass persuasion as a discipline.

Bernays later wrote, in his 1965 memoir Biography of an Idea, that at a dinner at his home in 1933 the Hearst foreign correspondent Karl von Wiegand – just returned from Berlin – told him that Joseph Goebbels had shown him his propaganda library, the best Wiegand had ever seen, and that Goebbels was using Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for the regime’s campaign against the Jews of Germany. “This shocked me,” Bernays wrote.

The techniques Bernays had developed to sell cigarettes to American women and bacon to American breakfast tables had been picked up by the propaganda minister of the Third Reich. The techniques were morally neutral instruments. Their author had not built any structural defense into them against being used against Jewish life on an industrial scale, because the techniques themselves were not the kind of thing into which such a defense can be built. They are methods. They have no moral content. The moral content is in the hand that uses them.

This is what evil needs. Evil does not need new techniques. It needs to know the existing ones that work.

What evil needs

The Nazi regime had, by spring 1933, the largest centralized propaganda apparatus in Europe. What that apparatus could not do was operate inside the United States. A regime in Berlin could not place a statement directly in The New York Times. It needed an American intermediary – a domestic voice that would, for compensation, place its material inside the American conversation in a form American readers would accept.

What evil needs from its publicists is access. The firm sells access. The regime pays for it. The Americans who read the placed material do not know they are reading material placed.

The contract

In late 1933, less than a year after Hitler became Chancellor, one of the largest American public relations firms accepted a foreign government contract worth a reported $120,000 a year – the equivalent of nearly $2.9 million today. The contract was paid through the German State Railways and routed through a domestic American entity called the German Tourist Information Office in New York.

The government was Nazi Germany. The firm was Carl Byoir & Associates.

Carl Byoir himself was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1888 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. He had served during the First World War as assistant chairman of George Creel’s Committee on Public Information – the federal propaganda apparatus established under Woodrow Wilson – alongside Edward Bernays. He founded his firm in New York in 1930. Three years later he signed on Nazi Germany. By 1933 Carl Byoir & Associates was one of the two or three largest American PR firms, in the same competitive tier as Ivy Lee & Associates and Hill & Knowlton.

The contract was renewed in 1935. It was renewed again in 1936. The work continued into 1938. By 1938 the regime he was working for had opened Dachau, burned books in public squares, passed the Nuremberg Laws, hosted the Berlin Olympics, annexed Austria, and was eight years from the industrial murder of European Jewry. The contract did not pause. It was renewed.

Bernays refused. Byoir didn’t.

Carl Byoir was not the only American PR pioneer Germany approached. Edward Bernays – the man whose book Goebbels kept in his library – was approached too. He turned the work down. He spent the rest of his life publicly opposed to the regime. During the Second World War he advised the U.S. Office of War Information against the regime that had borrowed his book.

Two Jewish founders of American public relations. Two contracts on the table. Two different answers. Bernays refused. Byoir didn’t. The choice was a choice, made in 1933 by men who knew exactly what they were doing.

The Jewish congressman who came after him

In March 1934, the U.S. House established the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts and Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York. Dickstein, a Jewish congressman from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the son of an Orthodox rabbi, drove the investigation of Nazi propaganda inside the United States.

Carl Byoir & Associates was one of the committee’s two principal targets.

Byoir testified in October 1934. He defended the work on three grounds: that tourism promotion was a legitimate commercial activity; that he himself, as a Jew, would not have served antisemitic ends; that the firm distinguished between promoting Germany as a destination and promoting the German government as a political program.

The committee was not persuaded. The contract continued anyway.

Why the defense is not one

The middle of Byoir’s three defenses is the one that deserves attention. He argued, in effect, that his own Jewishness was evidence of his good faith. He could not have intended antisemitic ends, because no Jew would have done such a thing.

This is not a defense. It is the question. The fact that an American Jewish PR founder accepted the retainer is not exonerating evidence. It is the central problematic fact of the case. The defense Byoir mounted in 1934 is the defense every subsequent American PR firm has mounted, in some form, in every comparable case in the eighty-eight years since. It is the defense in which the firm’s stated identity becomes the substitute for an examination of the work the firm is actually doing.

Ivy Lee, I.G. Farben, and Zyklon B

Carl Byoir & Associates was not the only American PR firm representing German interests during this period. Ivy Lee – the pioneer of corporate public relations, the founder of Ivy Lee & Associates – was retained in 1933 by I.G. Farben, the German chemical conglomerate. Farben was a major industrial backer of the regime. Through its Degesch subsidiary, it would later manufacture the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lee testified before the same congressional committee in July 1934. He died of a brain tumor four months later. His firm dissolved over the course of 1935.

The line from a Madison Avenue PR firm to the gas chambers is not, in the Lee case, a metaphor. It is a corporate organizational chart.

What the law remembered

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee’s final report called for federal registration of foreign agents – a recommendation enacted on June 8, 1938, as the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA is a Byoir law.

The statutory categories track, almost line for line, the activity the committee documented in the Byoir hearings four years earlier. Every American firm that has filed under the Act in the eighty-eight years since has done so under a regulatory apparatus that the Carl Byoir contract directly caused to be built. The firms benefiting from it rarely cite the case that produced it.

What this teaches us about evil

The deepest lesson of the case is not about Byoir. It is about the structure of evil itself.

Evil at industrial scale is not, in the modern period, an event of sudden barbarism. It is a long bureaucratic operation. It requires lawyers, accountants, engineers, manufacturers, transportation officials, and – yes – publicists. The Holocaust was carried out by a regime that, at the moment of its founding, was already commissioning American public relations work to soften its image in the country it knew would eventually oppose it. The publicity contract preceded the Final Solution by eight years. It was a precondition for the regime’s freedom of action in those eight years.

What our tradition teaches, in many places and forms, is that the gravest moral hazard is not the man who knows he is doing wrong. It is the man who has constructed a story in which what he is doing is something else. Carl Byoir, in October 1934, was not a man committing what he understood to be evil. He was a man committing what he understood to be promotion. His defense was a description of his internal experience.

Zachor

The case is taught in a small number of American journalism schools and in almost no American public relations programs. The discipline that descended from it does not, in any consistent way, treat it as part of its founding record. That absence permits the defense to be mounted again, with the same internal sincerity Byoir mustered in 1934.

The American public relations industry was founded by a generation that included Carl Byoir and Edward Bernays. Two Jewish men from immigrant families, working in the same New York, in the same decade, in the same discipline. One took Hitler’s money. The other refused it. Both choices belong in the record. Both men belong in the record. So do we.

The Hebrew word zachor – remember – appears in the Torah as a commandment, not a recommendation. It is binding because forgetting is the precondition for repetition. The case of Carl Byoir & Associates is, in the founding history of the discipline I have spent my career inside, a case the industry has spent ninety years working hard not to remember.

I write this so that, in some small way, that work of forgetting becomes harder.

Meanwhile, Qatar and many of this generation’s Jew-haters similarly use propagandists – including Jews who stand with Zohran Mamdani and other despicable proponents of “Palestine.”

And President Trump, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner seem to have fallen prey to this propaganda with Trump claiming Qatari investments in the United States could surpass $1 trillion in the coming years, seeing Qatar as a great benefactor who invests large sums in America and not for the mind control that has been the fruit of that investment.

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release. He is based in Israel.