The Third Reich

Politics and Propaganda

David Welch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134477500
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Published in the year 1994, The Third Reich is a valuable contribution to the field of History.

1

THE CONQUEST OF THE
MASSES

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

The title of this chapter is somewhat misleading, implying as it does the manipulation or seduction of millions into voting for the Nazi Party in apparent disregard of their own best interests. The assumption being that these voters, who might otherwise have resisted Nazism, were ‘mesmerised’ by a well-functioning propaganda machine. The danger of such an approach is that it concentrates on the ‘techniques of persuasion’ at the expense of a detached analysis of the programme put forward by the NSDAP to solve fundamental economic and social problems. Such an approach leads to the inevitable conclusion that to vote for the Nazi manifesto was an ‘irrational’ act. This does not solve the question of why millions of Germans acted in such an apparently irrational way. It seems clear that many groups, rather than being ‘seduced’ by Nazi propaganda, perceived voting for the NSDAP as being in their own interests and that Nazi propaganda served to reinforce such beliefs. Similarly, other groups remained stubbornly resistant to the Nazi message, and no amount of skilful propaganda could persuade them otherwise. To over-emphasise the importance of propaganda would be to diminish the failure of the Weimar system to solve prevailing economic and social problems and of political opponents of the NSDAP to provide viable alternatives. If, as seems likely, many Germans reluctantly voted for the Nazi Party because there seemed to be little credible alternative, then that is not necessarily the outcome of propaganda alone, but the failure of the Weimar system.¹ It is therefore imperative to re-examine the manner in which propaganda disseminated the Nazi programme and to distinguish between, on the one hand, supporters and opponents of the NSDAP and, on the other, those who remained indifferent.

The basic contention of this book is that propaganda played an important part in mobilising support for the NSDAP in opposition and maintaining the party once in power. But propaganda alone could not have sustained the Nazi Party and its ideology over a period of twelve years. There is now considerable evidence to suggest that Nazi policies and propaganda reflected (many of) the aspirations of large sections of the population. Propaganda in Nazi Germany was not, as is often believed, a ‘catch-all’ process. The ‘revolutionary’ aim of the Nazi regime to bring about the Volksgemeinschaft, the true harmony of classes, highlights the remarkably ambitious nature of its propaganda. Nevertheless, the ‘success’ of propaganda should not be measured purely in terms of its ability radically to change opinions and attitudes. Propaganda is as much about confirming as about converting public opinion. Propaganda, if it is to be effective, must in a sense preach to those who are already partially converted. Writing before the Second World War, Aldous Huxley observed:

Propaganda gives force and direction to the successive movements of popular feeling and desire; but it does not do much to create these movements. The propagandist is a man who canalises an already existing stream. In a land where there is no water, he digs in vain.²

If we look at propaganda as a means of reinforcing existing attitudes and beliefs, then the continuing ‘success’ of propaganda during the Third Reich in creating a largely acquiescent public points to the conclusion that a ‘consensus’ of sorts had been achieved. In this sense, the regime's propaganda was pragmatic enough to recognise that its policies could be maintained provided sections of the community who were opposed to Nazism remained quiescent. Coercion and terror would play an important restraining role here. But, nevertheless, it is my contention that, once in power, the economic programme put forward by the Nazis and the insidious use made of propaganda in a ‘closed’ environment were enough to ensure at least ‘passive’ support for the regime.

Before discussing the nature of Nazi propaganda in opposition, it might be useful to begin with a brief outline of the political performance of the Nazi Party during the final years of the Weimar Republic. In 1928, a mere 810,127 electors voted for the NSDAP; four years later, in 1932, this figure had increased to a staggering 13,765,781. Support for the Nazis in national elections between May 1928 and September 1930 rose from 810,127 (2.6 per cent of the total) to 6,379,672 votes (18.3 per cent). By July 1932 the NSDAP was the largest party in the Reichstag, with 37.3 per cent of the total vote, and this was to help pave the way for Hitler's assumption of the Chancellorship in January 1933. As economic and social conditions deteriorated between 1928 and 1930, membership of the NSDAP also continued to grow, although not to the same extent as the explosion of the Nazi vote. In October 1928 Nazi Party membership had reached 100,000; in September 1930, 300,000 and by the end of 1931, membership exceeded 800,000. One can see therefore that the most rapid increase in membership occurred after the election victories of 1930 and was thus the result, not the cause, of the Party's electoral breakthrough.

The appeal of National Socialism is understandably one of the most closely studied issues in European history. Historians have been concerned to explain why millions of Germans voted for the NSDAP in free elections. As we have seen, their success has been attributed in large measure to successful manipulation by a well-functioning propaganda machine. The skilful exploitation of propaganda techniques has been cited by historians of widely different political persuasions and approaches as having played a crucial role in mobilising support for the Nazis. In this context, attention has by and large been focused on the dynamics of the Nazi Party, its parades, its symbols, the uniforms and banners, the bands, the marching columns of the SA, etc., which ‘captured the imagination’ of the masses. In the light of such consensus, it would appear that one of the most important factors contributing to the Nazis’ rise to power was the cumulative effect of their propaganda; certainly the Nazis themselves were convinced of its effectiveness. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler devoted two chapters to the study and practice of propaganda. Although Hitler regarded the First World War as the starting-point for an examination of propaganda, he had become aware of its importance while still a student in Vienna in the years before 1914. Hitler was not an original theorist of propaganda techniques, but he was quick to learn the art of stimulating the hopes and fears of his audience into positive action. To this end he acknowledged his debt to the Austrian ‘Socialist-Marxist’ organisations. ‘And I soon realised’, Hitler wrote, ‘that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties.’ Profoundly influenced by the Allies’ propaganda in the First World War, Hitler was firmly convinced that propaganda was a ‘frightful weapon in the hands of experts’, and he was scathing in his condemnation of the failure of German war propaganda. During the war, he declared, ‘what we failed to do, the enemy did with amazing skill and really brilliant calculation. I, myself, learned enormously from this enemy war propaganda.’³ Hitler therefore resolved, early in his political career, ‘to fight poison gas by poison gas’.

Hitler could not have anticipated being offered the opportunity to practise his propaganda skills so soon after the end of the war. During the war Hitler had been wounded twice and in October 1918 he was badly gassed and spent three months recuperating in Pasewalk hospital in Pomerania. At the end of the war, amid considerable revolutionary fervour in Germany, he returned to a Munich undergoing violent political upheavals and was eventually, in the summer of 1919, assigned by the Reichswehr (army) to inform on extremist groups in Munich. It is supremely ironic that the German army should turn Hitler into a propagandist by giving him the task of inculcating nationalist and anti-Bolshevik sentiments into the troops. Making the most of the conditions in which he found himself, Hitler discovered that he was a talented demagogue:

I started out with the greatest enthusiasm and love. For all at once I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a large audience; and the thing that I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated; I could ‘speak’…And I could boast of some success: in the course of my lectures I led many hundred, indeed thousands, of comrades back to their people and fatherland. I ‘nationalized’ the troops …⁴

In 1925, when Mein Kampf was first published, Hitler's thoughts on war propaganda were largely a reflection of the prevailing nationalist claims that Allied propaganda was responsible for the collapse of the German empire in 1918. In fact the evidence does not support this; in many respects German propaganda during the First World War was more advanced than that of the British.⁵ However, Hitler's account of the German débâcle in 1918 and the failure of German counter-propaganda throughout the war became the ‘official’ truth and was subsequently repeated by the younger generation of National Socialists and by right-wing politicians in general. According to this view, ‘in the Wilhelmine age the German intelligentsia had lived in complete ignorance about the nature of propaganda’.⁶

Convinced of the essential role of propaganda for any movement set on obtaining power, Hitler saw propaganda as a vehicle of political salesmanship in a mass market; he argued that the consumers of propaganda were the masses and not the intellectuals. In answer to his own question, ‘To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses?’, he answered emphatically: ‘It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.’ Hitler made no attempt to hide his contempt for the masses; they were malleable and corrupt, they were ‘overwhelmingly feminine by nature and attitude’ and as such their sentiment was not complicated ‘but very simple and consistent’. In Mein Kampf, where Hitler laid down the broad lines along which Nazi propaganda was to operate, he assessed his audience as follows:

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.⁷

The function of propaganda, Hitler argued, was ‘to see that an idea wins supporters…it tries to force a doctrine on the whole people’. To achieve this, propaganda was to bring the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., ‘whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision’. Accordingly, propaganda for the masses had to be simple, it had to concentrate on as few points as possible, which then had to be repeated many times, with emphasis on such emotional elements as love and hatred. ‘Persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.’ Through the continuity and sustained uniformity of its application, propaganda, Hitler concluded, would lead to results ‘that are almost beyond our understanding’.⁸ Therefore unlike the Bolsheviks, Hitler did not make a distinction between agitation and propaganda. In Soviet Russia agitation was concerned with influencing the masses through ideas and slogans, while propaganda served to spread the Communist ideology of Marxist-Leninism. The distinction dates back to Plekhanov's famous definition, written in 1892: ‘A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but presents them to a whole mass of people.’ Hitler, on the other hand, did not regard propaganda as merely an instrument for reaching the party elite, but rather as a means for the persuasion and indoctrination of all Germans. This distinction led E. K. Bramsted to conclude that propaganda for the Nazis ‘had not a specific, but a total validity’.⁹

Hitler's theories on propaganda were first put into practice in 1925 in the NSDAP newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. The Nazis had bought the newspaper in 1920 with a small circulation in and around the Munich area, but following the failure of the Putsch in 1923, the newspaper had disappeared from newspaper stands until 26 February 1925 — the official date of the ‘re-establishment’ of the Party. Within two months of its re-launch it had become a daily newspaper, and its circulation began to rise until in 1929 it had reached a figure of 26,715. Unlike the long, detailed articles and academic discussion of economic and social problems which characterised the political presses of the Weimar Republic, the Völkischer Beobachter went in for short hyperboles on typical National Socialist themes; the evil of Jewry and Bolshevism, the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, the weakness of Weimar parliamentarianism, all of which were contrasted with Nazi patriotic slogans such as Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (‘One people, one nation, one leader’) — later to be used to great effect in 1938 with the Anschluss (the union of Austria with Germany). Convinced more than that propaganda was a powerful weapon in the hands of an expert, Hitler appointed Joseph Goebbels head of party propaganda in April 1930 with the mission to centralise the Party's propaganda machinery and present the Nazi's remorseless march to electoral victory under the leadership of the Führer. In many respects propaganda is easier in opposition than in power, and Goebbels proved a skilled orchestrator of the Party's propaganda resources. However, until 1929, the technical facilities at Goebbels' disposal were rather limited and the Party still relied heavily on Hitler and a few other Party figures, speaking at public meetings. The instruments of mass communication which are commonly associated with authoritarian police states — mass-circulation press, radio, film and television — were largely absent from the Nazis’ initial rise to prominence. Under Goebbels' direction, however, the Party showed an increasing opportunism as regards learning and adapting new propaganda techniques.

The situation began to change, albeit slowly, in 1927. It is probably no coincidence that this is when Goebbels first revealed his skill as a propagandist. In November 1926 Goebbels had been appointed Gauleiter of Berlin and began immediately to reshape the Party organisation in the German capital. Although nationally the NSDAP's paid-up membership was only 72,590, in July Goebbels launched a weekly newspaper, Der Angriff (The Attack), which, as the title suggests, was set up to attack political opponents and exploit anti-Semitic feelings by claiming that Jews were responsible for most of the ills of the Weimar ‘system’. Its challenging motto on the front page read: ‘For the Oppressed! Against the Exploiters!’ Towards the end of 1930, Der Angriff was appearing daily and had become closely associated with a relentless campaign of personal abuse and criticism levelled by Goebbels at ‘establishment’ figures (invariably Jewish) associated with the Weimar Republic. A recurring slogan was Deutschland erwache, Jude verrecke! (‘Germany awake, Jewry be dammed!’)

Violent anti-Semitism permeated the pages of the newspaper, and the Jews became the scapegoats for all of Germany's and the world's, problems. The vehemently anti-Semitic cartoons of Hans Schweitzer (‘Mjölnir’) were a striking feature of the paper, which often read more like an agitational pamphlet. Some of the most important propaganda motifs of the Third Reich first appeared in the pages of Der Angriff. Horst Wessel murdered by the German Communist Party in 1930 and the subject of a major Nazi feature film (Hans Westmar, 1933) became the archetypal Nazi hero; much of his legend, a major plank of Nazi mythology, began on the pages of Der Angriff. Other Nazi propaganda themes — the ‘Unknown SA man’ and the ‘myth of resurrection and return’ — also feature regularly in the newspaper.¹⁰

The essentially negative anti-parliamentarianism and anti-Semitism of National Socialist propaganda allowed Goebbels to use the paper as a vehicle for the dissemination of one of the most important positive themes in Nazi propaganda, namely the projection of the ‘Führer-myth’, which depicted Hitler as both charismatic superman and man of the people. Der Angriff's circulation, however, was limited to Berlin, and the Party still lacked a national newspaper network. In the September 1930 elections, for example, the Nazis had six daily newspapers, and only the Völkischer Beobachter could claim to be a national newspaper with a Munich and Berlin edition. To some extent, this was offset by the fact that it was in 1927 that Alfred Hugenberg, the press baron and leader of the right-wing Conservative National People's Party (DNVP), bought the largest and most prestigious German film company, Ufa (Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft). From now on the social and political activities of the NSDAP were captured more regularly by Ufa newsreels and shown to the German public on the large national network of Ufa cinemas. Until this time National Socialist propaganda had been characterised by the comparatively skilful use of rhetoric and by controlled manipulation of meetings, which depended for its success on the organisational skills of local Party cells to stage its own meetings and dis...