Pegah Ghassemi English 1 12/11/00

 

Propaganda in Nazi Germany In the period of time around the Second World War, the German people’s heads were infiltered with Nazi Propaganda.. Little by little the German population was stripped away of their judgement and morality by being brainwashed by Hitler and the Nazi party with propaganda. Propaganda played a very big role in controlling and dictating the German population during the Second World War. Hitler used it “to control the press as well as all other means of expression-radio, film, art, and literature�?Rhodes 11). He also used propaganda to hypnotize the German people into believing he and his party were what was best for Germany’s future. “Hitler’s use of propaganda was his most sinister weapon, for it aimed at, and succeeded in persuading the Germans that the Nazi system would restore their country’s greatness�?Rhodes 11). Propaganda was used so much to influence the German masses that “in Nazi Germany it [was] considered worthy of an entire government department�?Rhodes 11). They made propaganda its own section in the government to regulate and monitor what the German people would be hearing for the next several years to come. “On March 13, the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment was founded under the direction of Dr.Josef Goebbels�?Rhodes 11). “Hitler met [Goebbels] in 1926 and quickly appreciating his oratorical power of persuasion, made him head the Party Propaganda department �?Rhodes 13). Goebbels knew exactly how to influence a crowd. He knew what made the masses tick. He also had a great sense for what the German people were looking for in a leader, and so he showed them just that with Hitler through Ghassemi 2 Propaganda. “[He] was to become one of history’s greatest political propagandists�?Rhodes 12). Hitler and Goebbels knew that Propaganda would work best with those less educated. Educated individuals question and interrogate what they hear. Most will not just follow the crowd or follow some dictator, because they know better. It is for that reason that Hitler did not like the intellectuals. He knew they might someday come in his way. Hitler worked around the fact that “propaganda consists in attracting the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated�?Rhodes12). Early on in their quest to rule the world, Hitler and Goebbels realized that “propaganda must be addressed to the emotions and not to the intelligence�?Rhodes 12). So the Nazi Party terrorized professors and known savants out of the country before they began brainwashing the rest of the population. “Most writers and dramatists of any merit had left the country or were proscribed when the Nazis came to power: men like Thomas Mann, Remarque, Zweig, Reinhardt, Toller, Brecht, Franz Werfel�?Rhodes 29). Nazi writer Schunzel wrote, “In this land we do not read books. We swim, we wrestle, we lift weights�?Rhodes 29). The Nazis did not want people to think for themselves. They wanted everyone to use their physical skills instead of their mental skills. Aside from knowing that propaganda does not work with the intellectuals, Goebbels also knew that the people want an all around good leader. “The modern dictator must be at once a superman and a man of the people, remote yet accessible, wise yet simple, lonely on his olympian height, yet ready to mix with the crowd�?Rhodes 13). He has to be everything at once so that the people believe that their leader is some kind of a hero. Goebbels believed that “the masses love a commander�?Rhodes 12). He did everything he could to make Hitler look fierce yet reasonable at the same time. Ghassemi 3 Goebbels used propaganda to trick the people into believing whatever he wanted them to believe, therefore he did not believe that the German population was too intelligent. It was his assumption that the people were not very smart because they were able to be swayed so easily. “Although he said that in the future the man who controlled the masses would control the State, he made no attempt to hide his contempt for the masses�?Winkler 32). Goebbels knew that if the same message was portrayed enough repeatedly to the people, then they would have no choice but to believe it. He once said that “nothing is easier than leading the people on a leash. I just hold up a dazzling campaign poster and they jump through it�?Rhodes 10). Goebbels had no doubt in his mind that within no time, the German people would be eating out of the Nazi Party’s hand because they would have been fed so much propaganda. Hitler’s Party started their propaganda schemes several years before World War Two even started because they needed that much time to slowly control the population. Half a decade before the War, “the Nazis were already skillfully using all the new 20th-century media- press, radio, film, and posters- to control, direct, and coordinate the masses�?Rhodes 11). The Nazi Party filtered their ideals into the people’s brains in every form possible. “By the outbreak of the Second World War, Goebbels�?Propaganda Ministry had complete control of the press, radio, theater, cinema, the creative arts, music, writing, and art exhibitions�?Rhodes 18). They controlled pretty much everything that reached the public in any way. Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry realized that when everything the people heard or saw portrayed the same message, then the people would not think on their own, they would just automatically believe whatever was being portrayed to them. “When every contemporary book people read, every newspaper, every film they see, every broadcast they hear for years on end is permeated with the same spirit, the same propaganda, they are no longer to relate what they see and hear to alternative reports; they lose their judgement�?Winkler 18). Every where looked there was a Nazi message being shown somehow. “The very streets of the cities were transformed into propaganda�?(Baird 43). Propaganda was used in many media covering methods. One of the ways the Nazis used propaganda was through newspapers and the press. Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry almost completely took over the press. “At the height of its power during the Second World War, the Propaganda Ministry was issuing daily directives to the editors of newspapers all over Germany about what to print, in such detail that the papers were virtually written for the editors�?Rhodes 11). No journalist could write freely about daily events. Everything was monetered and supervised in detail by the Propaganda Ministry. Goebbels wanted everything in the newspapers to be for the Nazi Party’s benefit. “When the Nazis came to power, there were four thousand five hundred newspapers reflecting a variety of political persuasion. By 1939, the number had been reduced to one thousand, all of which were following the Party Line�?Rhodes 29). They shut down every newspaper that would not let the Nazi Party review their work. Hitler wanted Goebbels to control everything that would eventually reach the people. In addition to the newspapers, the film industry was also very closely supervised. “Because the Nazis considered the cinema such a powerful medium, its personnel- actors, directors, electricians, cameramen, etc.- were immediately forced to take the oath of loyalty to the Fuhrer�?Rhodes 19). All scripts were reviewed by the Propaganda Ministry before being produced and made into a movie. Most of the movies not only had to be approved by the Propaganda Ministry, but they also had to have a Nazi theme to them. Most movies were war stories depicting a heroic soldier fighting the bad guys and either wining the war or losing Ghassemi 5 honorably in combat. They used movies to show the people how war is used for good and how it is okay to die in combat. The film industry was a great means to depict the Nazi belief to the public by encoding it into a pretty story that the people would surely enjoy. “Another way in which the Propaganda Ministry interfered was in the censorship of foreign films�?Rhodes 20). The movie “Jud Suss�?Rhodes 20) was used to personify how crooked jews were. It was an anti-Semitic film set in the Middle Ages about a “crooked-nosed�?Jew who forces a German woman to sleep with him or he’ll hurt her husband. At the end of the movie, the woman kills herself like a good German and the Jew is hanged (Rhodes 20). “The hanging of the Jew at the end of the movie was described by a German critic as a ‘joyous crescendo”�?Rhodes 20). By showing movies with such a message, the Nazi Party makes people believe that Jews are bad people and that it is okay to hurt them. They slowly demoralized the Jewish population by trashing their name and dignity in every way possible. Another way the Propaganda Ministry used the Cinema industry was by targetting their movies towards the youth of Germany. “Goebbels�?propagandists found the youth an easy prey�?Baird 22). They believed that the younger generation of Germans would be the easiest to take over mentally. “One of the most important uses of the cinema was for the indoctrination of the young�?Rhodes 21). They brought the children by the masses to the movie theaters to watch propaganda filled films about war. Karl Ritter, a fanatical Nazi, film director, glorified death in battle in his films (Rhodes 21). They tried to teach the kids that the individual does not matter. What matters is the country as a unit. “As Ritter himself said, ‘my films all deal with the unimportance of the individual... all that is personal is as nothing compared with the Cause’�?Rhodes 21). The Cause meaning the unity of Germany, and its goal to control the Ghassemi 6 world. “The effect of these films was inordinate. Many of the Hitler Youth who had been herded by the thousands into the cinemas to see them were taken prisoner during the war. Under Allied interrogation, they revealed the influence these films had had on them�?Rhodes 21). These children had been so brainwashed that when war time came no one asked any questions, they just followed their leader blindly. “Had Germany won the Second World War, these young people could have spent their entire lives under the spell of a system invented and perfected by Goebbels�?Rhodes 30). They would never have realized that these thoughts they were having had been planted into their heads many years ago by some movie producer. “Concurrently with the cinema as a means of visual propaganda appeared the poster. This apparently simple form of advertisement played a greater part in the Nazis�?rise to power than is generally realized�?Rhodes 22). They used the poster to give a swift quick message to the people. Everywhere around the cities of Germany were plenty of full size posters of Hitler looking strong and powerful. There were posters of young German boys in Nazi uniform helping Hitler build up newer better Germany. “Goebbels�?propagandists knew that visual impressions are extremely strong, that people may forget a newspaper article, but not a picture- if they see it often and its message is obvious�?Rhodes 22). That’s why they made their posters as simple as possible. The point was for everyone to understand the message the poster was portraying right away. “A pamphlet or a newspaper could be thrown away, unread; the radio turned off; political meetings not attended; likewise the cinema. But everyone at some time or other walked in the streets. The poster could not be avoided�?Rhodes 22). Goebbels wanted the people to be so exposed to the Nazi way of life that they would forget about their own thoughts and morals. Another form of propaganda used by Goebbels in Germany was the radio. “The radio Ghassemi 7 soon came to be regarded as the principle propaganda medium�?Rhodes 28). It was a way of speaking to the people directly and making them believe they were apart of something big. Broadcasts on Nazi rallies were aired live on the radio so that if you were not at the rally then you could still be apart of it at home. “[Goebbels] once said that radio would do for the 20th Century what newspapers had done for the 19th �?Rhodes 26). Every night they would air Nazi filled propaganda in the homes of hundreds of Germans. Hitler made over fifty major broadcasts in his first year. They were speeches at meetings and rallies rather than studio broadcasts (Rhodes 26). That way the people listening at home felt like they too were at the rallies. The Propaganda Ministry took the radio very seriously as a means of propaganda. They even issued a “radio warden for each block of houses or apartment buildings. This Party member would encourage his neighbors who did not own a radio to buy one (sometimes he would lend them the money to do so); otherwise, to listen to important speeches in his or a friends�?house�?Rhodes 27). The warden would also send in “regular reports on the peoples�?reactions to the broadcasts�?(Rhodes 27). That way Hitler and the Nazis got imediate feedback on their rallies. Goebbels would be able to find out what the people at home cheered and what they did not approve of. “The radio warden became of special importance during the war when he reported those listening to foreign broadcasts�?Rhodes 27). Since all radio broadcasts were monitered by Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry, they did not want the people listening to foreign radio programs because they might hear what was really going on in the world. Hitler had completley secluded Germany’s people from the rest of the world. The news they heard was very different than the news other countries heard. Their version of the war was almost one hundred percent changed by propaganda. Ghassemi 8 Other forms of propaganda were less similar then the ones listed above. Propaganda through literature, for example, was not very popular. Literature is a form of expression that is more for the intellects of the country. “Literature is addressed primarily to the intellect and has little mass appeal�?(Rhodes 29). So Goebbels did not really need to focus on changing German literature so much. Literature did not reach as many people as a radio broadcast, a newspaper article, a movie, or a poster on the street would have. Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry used propaganda very wisely to brainwash the German people. They made sure that Propaganda would somehow reach everyone in someway shape or form. Wether it be through newspapers, radio broadcasts, movies , or posters, Goebbels made sure that everyone saw and heard his messages. They did everything in their power to make sure that they were reaching people through their propaganda.