Part I: Building the propaganda machine
The name Joseph Goebbels immediately evokes a number of responses including politician, propagandist and Reich Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. On March 19, 1944, he presciently proclaimed, “We have placed our stamp on this century which will come to bear our name in the annals of history.”
Nazi ascent to power is frequently viewed as a “classic example,” of the success of propaganda, which was attributed to Goebbels, explains historian David Welch. Welch adds that Goebbels believed unrelenting propaganda would be indispensable in order to marshal mass support for the new German state, and to sustain an increased degree of identification, enthusiasm and dedication to its “revolutionary” goals.
The notion of propaganda as the “art of persuasion,” calculated only to transform attitudes and ideas, captures one of its objectives, but frequently a partial and secondary one as Welch claims. He said, “More often, propaganda is concerned with reinforcing existing trends and beliefs, to sharpen and focus them.”
Another fundamental misunderstanding is the belief that propaganda is based primarily on lies and fabrications. In reality, it functions on a variety “of kinds of truth – the outright lie, the half-truth, the truth out of context.” To a certain extent, some view “propaganda as essentially appeasing the irrational instincts of man,” and they are correct. Yet since choices are at least partially the result of one’s “rational decisions, propaganda must appeal to the rational elements in human nature as well.” Thus, propaganda “is ethically neutral – it may be good or bad,” Welch concludes.
Responsibilities of Reich Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment
On January 30, 1933, Hitler decreed the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment would include “all those tasks which have to do with intellectual and spiritual persuasion of the nation; with publicity of the state, about culture, and about the economy; with the instruction of foreign and domestic publics about these things; and with the administration of all those institutions which serves such ends.”
Welch said this included radio, national and foreign press, propaganda, film, music, theater, fine arts, politics; official ceremonies and demonstrations; national emblems; racial questions; Treaty of Versailles; opposing ideologies; youth organizations; public health and sport; eastern and border questions; national travel committee and popular education and culture. The Nazi party, he pointed out, was the first to control the “entire cultural life of a nation.”
Goebbels, he added, understood “A government that wishes to conduct propaganda must gather round it the most able brains in mass public influence and resort to the most modern methods to achieve this mass influence.” German historian Helmut Heiber said that soon after assuming his position, Goebbels wanted, in addition to surrounding himself with the “best brains in the field of mass manipulation,” to foster the ability of “crystallizing confused, complex and structurally involved ideas into a single expressive slogan which the division would then get across to the entire people.”
In frustration with his inability to find the appropriate people to implement his vision, he was alleged to have said he could have used “a dozen Jews,” who would know “how to do the thing with the right nuances.”
In 1933, Reich Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment started with 350 employees according to Heiber. In its prime, the ministry had a staff of approximately 1,000 housed in a palace, and in a five-story building with 500 rooms. Other offices operated in various parts of Berlin from 22 of the ministry’s own buildings and 32 they rented.
“Orchestrating German Public Opinion”
Welch and others have shown how Goebbels was profoundly influenced by Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, that explored how to manipulate the masses in an era of mass democracy. “I learned a lot,”[from Le Bon] Goebbels explained, “especially that the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitive. In the long run basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals.”
In the process of trying to influence the masses, “Hitler and his henchmen did not want to cower the German people as a whole into submission, but to win them over by building on popular images, cherished ideals, and long-held phobias in the country,” observed historian Robert Gellately. “Even as the Nazis ‘cleansed’ the body politic in the name of the future and perfect race, even as they grew more radical and brutal in the war years, they also aimed to create and maintain the broadest possible level of popular backing. They expended an enormous amount of energy and resources to track public opinion and to win over the people.”
In a period of mass movements, Goebbels recognized “it is no longer possible to rule people merely by resorting to a state emergency and nine o’clock curfews,” noted German historian Helmut Heiber. He viewed it naïve to dismiss any form of propaganda because of the strategy it employed: “If it attains its goal, it’s good; if it doesn’t, it’s bad.”
Part II:Restructuring the Means of Communication
If the German press, radio and film industries were going to promote the government’s ideological objectives, they had to be reorganized. Each agency would have to provide the others with government approved themes, so the message could be disseminated through a number of different avenues. To expand the number of German households with radios, the Nazis pressed manufacturers to produce one of the least expensive wireless sets in all of Europe. These significantly subsidized “people’s radios” made it possible for workers to buy one, Welch said. The goal was to have a set in each German home.
In 1933, one-and-a-half million sets were manufactured Welch noted. A year later, the number increased to over six million. By the beginning of the war in Europe in September 1939, more than 70 percent of all homes in Germany possessed a wireless set— “the highest percentage anywhere in the world.” The limited range of the radio meant, German citizens could not listen to foreign broadcasts, which were against the law in any event.
Whenever a Nazi leader was to deliver a speech or an important message was to be made, a network of “radio wardens” arranged loudspeakers in public places, factories, offices, schools and eateries. When sirens were sounded, everyone was expected to cease what they were doing and listen. This was part of an attempt to have each citizen “identify with the nation.”
The press presented different challenges Welch said, which they overcame. Editors had to found who would become censors ensuring the content of the papers were strictly controlled with no editorial independence permitted. This would guarantee the government’s message contained a degree of uniformity throughout the country. Eher Verlag, the Party’s publishing house, had to acquire either directly or indirectly the “vast majority of the German press.” And finally, there was a need for the State-run press agency (Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro), to preside over the daily press briefings and issue media directives.
Goebbels believed propaganda films could shape an individual’s opinions and beliefs, and possibly their behavior, which is why he attached such great importance to controlling German cinema. By 1942, the Third Reich had nationalized the German film industry. Between 1933 and 1945, the Germans produced 1,097 feature films, of which just one-sixth were made for propaganda purposes Welch said. He wanted propaganda, that “reflected the ambience of National Socialism” to be mixed with entertainment. This relatively limited number of clearly propaganda films was augmented with documentary films and newsreels, which “captured the immediacy of events” (Deutsche Wochenschau), and became progressively more essential during the war.
The subjects that reappear in Nazi films are key to their world view (Weltanschauung) and were selectively shown at specific times. To exploit the effectiveness of his prestigious films--- Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), the 1938 Olympiade (Olympia), a four-hour account of the 1938 Olympic Games held in Berlin, “which proved an ideal vehicle for Nazi propaganda to foreign countries,” according to Welch—Goebbels permitted these full-length documentaries to be shown very sparingly.
In 1940, three antisemitic films were produced: Die Rothschilds, who are portrayed as merciless and callous, and who seek financial and political dominance over all of Europe; Jud Süss, which dehumanizes the Jews, shows the danger they pose to the Germany, since their ultimate objective, as part of an international Jewish conspiracy, is achieve control, fortune for themselves and world Jewry. They are a threat to German culture, lust after German women, and can be deceitful in business and by masquerading as a gentile nobility; Der ewige Jude (The Eternal[Wandering] Jew). The Holocaust Encyclopedia described how the film “Compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources. Der ewige Jude is distinctive not only for its crude, vile characterizations made worse with its gruesome footage of a Jewish ritual butcher at work slaughtering cattle, but also for its heavy emphasis on the alien nature of the East European Jew.”
First shown in Berlin at the end of November 1940, the German public had enthusiastically waited to see Der ewige Jude, perhaps because of the enormous publicity campaign launched on radio and in newspapers heralding its screening Hebrew University historian David Bankier speculated. Enthusiastic reviews from moviegoers claimed the film had been more instructive and persuasive than many antisemitic articles. The statistical material and maps exposing the expansion of Jewish influence throughout the world, the scene comparing Jews to rats, and the information about Jewish influence in the US was specifically impressive.
British journalist Kate Connolly noted Jud Süss was conceived by Goebbels in response to the 1934 British film Jew Suss, which was “a thinly veiled plea on behalf” of the persecuted Jews in Germany. The documentary was well received in Britain and the US, but was banned in Vienna because of its “pro-semitic tone.”
Goebel’s film Jud Süss highlighted the Nazi stereotypes of Jews as “crafty, untrustworthy, hooked-nosed beings.” Connolly explained that to ensure the film would be a major propaganda triumph, it premiered in 80 Berlin movie theaters simultaneously. Twenty million people in Germany watched the film. In France and Italy, the film enjoyed enormous success, where it ignited violent attacks against the Jews. SS troops and concentration camp guards were often shown the film to demonstrate the vital importance of their efforts to rid the world, once and for all, of the Jewish plague.
Part III:Quantifying Public Reaction
“Propaganda is widely considered to have been a decisive factor in mobilizing massive support for the [Nazi] regime,” observed Hebrew University historian David Bankier. In his attempt to determine the “practical limitations of Nazi propaganda,” and tracing the Jewish theme within the overall context, he examined an extensive number of resources. They included reports from the Gestapo (German Secret State Police); district governors in Prussia and Bavaria, (which covered most of the Reich); regional and national reports of the SD (the security service of the SS); the German Socialist Party (Sopade) in exile; and many underground publications.
Whether one accepts the reliability of these accounts, Bankier said, does not matter. “This was the picture presented to the regime by officials active in its decision-making process.”
It should not be surprising that the leaders of The Third Reich would be very interested in knowing the public sentiment in the country, in order to assess the effectiveness of their policies. Yet, this did not suggest they would eagerly accept the results of these reports. Bankier said the primary cause for this response was clear: all of the reporting indicated an image which contrasted with the “myth of a ‘total state’ embodying a monolithic ‘racial community.’”
Who Read The Surveys?
There is sufficient proof, Bankier found, that the leaders of the German security apparatus were sufficiently persuaded by this information to base their decisions on the reports. This involved a number of leading figures in the Nazi leadership. One was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Later, he controlled the Gestapo, Criminal Police, and SD. Other government agencies asked for the surveys to create appropriate policies in their own areas. In his role as ideological educator for party members, Alfred Rosenberg was one of those as well. He was particularly interested to gauge how his anti-Church polices were being perceived.
The Ministry of Justice used SD discoveries to determine their own response. When the SD reported that a local court in Klagenfurt, in southern Bavaria, issued a moderate sentence to homosexuals, the Ministry interceded by imposing a harsher penalty. In 1940, when the SD informed the Ministry that the public was displeased that Jews were still permitted to inherit from Germans, they changed the law so that could not happen in the future.
The Ministers of Labor and Economics also read the SD reports to keep apprised of the attitudes in their spheres of influence, in order to know how to respond accordingly. The Ministry of Propaganda evinced the most interest in the surveys. Without honest and objective information about the public’s response to the cinema, radio programs and press, Goebbels knew he could not achieve his goal of influencing the masses.
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler read the surveys, especially those from the SD, with interest, while remaining ambivalent about them, like other Nazi leaders. He rejected the portrayal of the public’s attitude since it clashed with the Nazi “myth of national unity.” After reports from all over the country related how a speech by Hitler received harsh criticism, Himmler claimed that those who penned the statements were exploiting the opportunity to express their own defeatist views and absence of fidelity.
Did Hitler read the SD reports?
Bankier is convinced the information reached Hitler. In 1936, reports from either the Gestapo or the SD stated the current temperament in the country is negative. After Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s military adjutant in the 1930s, read a few lines to Hitler, who had no patience to read the report himself, Hitler responded: “The mood of the public is not negative. I know better. Those reports are what cause the worsening of the mood. I forbid any presentation of this kind to me in the future.”
In March 1942, after receiving information about the decline in morale, he wrote a handwritten comment: “If the situation were what people say, we would have long lost everything. The true mood of the nation lies much deeper and is based on inner strength. If this were not the case, we could not explain the nation’s achievements.”
Despite Hitler’s refusal to acknowledge that he considered public opinion in making decisions, Bankier shows that one of the factors that determined when he would implement his policy initiatives and prompt his resolve “towards radicalization was his perception of this defeatist mood.”
“The Limits of Mass Mobilization”
In order to reenergize the population to ensure they did not lose enthusiasm for the objectives of the Third Reich, the party leadership instituted continuous rallies, marches, indoctrination evenings, and other community wide ceremonies. Instead of galvanizing the masses, the years of “conscious-raising,” produced fatigue and apathy “as early as the summer of 1934,” Bankier discovered. Participation in party assembles resulted in increasing apathy, even in areas where the Nazis enjoyed mass political backing.
A significant amount of material about whom the Nazis called “the better circles”—the bourgeois and intellectuals— was preserved, allowing historians to understand their responses. In August 1934, in Trier, a southwestern German city, the Gestapo reported a substantial decrease in the area of the more comfortable people joining the party. From other Gestapo stations, the author of the report said it would seem this sector of the population and increasingly disengaging themselves from political activity. Similar findings were reported in May 1935.
Part IV: Backlash to Repressive Methods
A Gestapo report about Kiel, a port city on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast, revealed the aversion of the bourgeoise to attend rallies or even greeting each other with “Heil Hitler.” Bankier said this response could have been expected from the educated portions of the German population, who were alienated by Hitler’s repressive and “brutal terror” methods.
The first surge of random and brutal attacks against German Jews by the Nazi party and its affiliates, began at the beginning of the National Socialist regime observed German historian Michael Wildt. Men of the Sturmabteilung (SA) the initial paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, kidnapped the theater director in Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, and beat him to the point where he had to be hospitalized. A Jewish businessman in Straubing, in Lower Bavaria, was seized, and when found, his body was riddled with bullets. In Wiesbaden, in the western German state of Hesse, windows of Jewish shops were broken, and the owners were beaten. Shots were fired injuring a number of guests at a small hotel commonly patronized Jews in Magdeburg, a central German city on the Elbe River.
On March 6 on the Kurfürstendamm, one of the most famous avenues in Berlin, Wildt said disturbances worsened to where the Manchester Guardian reported: “Many Jews were beaten by the brown shirts [SA] until blood ran down their heads and faces. Many fainted and were left to lie in the streets, until they were picked up by friends or passerby and brought to hospitals.”
These vicious attacks represented the end of the government’s observance of legal standards, which had provided a degree of protection during the previous years, Wildt asserted. All basic rights established by the Weimar Constitution were abolished on February 28, 1933, when the Presidential Decree for the Protection of the Nation and the State was issued. Jews were disenfranchised and stigmatized and socially isolated from their friends and former associates. They were subjected to relentless threats, and “daily antisemitic violence” including being robbed of their assets, deprived of their livelihoods. Synagogues were vandalized, Jewish graveyards were desecrated, and Jews were summoned for forced labor.
Wildt said the Presidential Decree meant, “Jews were outlawed, considered free game (vogelfrei), and protected by neither the Code of Civil Law nor criminal law; they were a minority that could be subjected to violence with no threat of punishment to the perpetrators.”
At the end of March 1933, German historian Armin Nolzen said, violence against Jews was started again. Hitler decided to have the Nazi party initiate a nationwide boycott against Jewish businesses, physicians, and lawyers, which would began on Saturday morning, April 1,1933. The goal was to have the US stop its anti-Nazi campaign. German Jews would be held responsible for the alleged Jewish atrocity propaganda by boycotting their businesses. Jews were thus being detained as hostages in order to “fight” this “atrocity propaganda.''
At the same time Nolzen said Hitler decided to suspend the boycott to gauge the response of the foreign press. On Tuesday, April 4, 1933, Hitler finally decided to discontinue the boycott entirely. The Nazi party was primed to resume the violent attacks if the anti-Nazi propaganda restart again. This was not necessary, since the US and other countries immediately stopped the attacks against Germany, which meant the boycott was viewed as a success.
In reality, the boycott against Jewish businesses never ended Nolzen pointed out. Those active in the NS-Hago (Nationalsozialistischer Kampfbund für den gewerblichen Mittelstand/National Socialist League for the Commercial Middle Class), who were for the most part business owners, trades people, or manufacturers, viewed the Jews as their competitors. They attempted to force them out of business by claiming they sold substandard quality merchandise, pressuring suppliers to boycott them, encouraging customers not to buy from them, and accusing Jews of engaging in “unfair business” practices.
Street rallies were organized against Jewish businesses, which were painted with swastikas. Jewish businessmen were mistreated and blackmailed. Sometimes, NS-Hago members or German middle-class businessmen paid Nazi thugs to violently assault Jews.
Many Jews sought refuge outside of Germany, and others were interned in prisons and camps. About the middle of March, the intensity of the of the physical attacks decreased significantly, Bankier said, in response to an appeal by Hitler to his supporters to observe “blind discipline.” The unrest did not stop. German wanted actions to be taken against German Jews because the Jews had “allegedly instigated the reports of outrages which had appeared in the foreign press.”
Appeal to Peasants
Despite serious efforts made to persuade the peasants to take a supportive role in the regime’s activities by promising them extensive agricultural reforms, particularly in northern and eastern Germany, the rural population displayed minimal interest in harvest celebrations. Until the reforms were instituted, there was no reason, they said, to attend the meetings.
Attempts to convince the industrial labor force yielded minimal interest as well. One report cautioned: “the good participation at parades and rallies[by local workers] cannot serve as a true gauge of the public’s mood and we must not be led astray by what appears on the surface.” This reaction was nothing unusual as the reports from other parts of the country presented a comparable picture, “even in the Nazi organizations themselves.” The Berlin Gestapo plainly stated that participation in May Day celebrations could not be a measure of the public attitudes, after detailing the various methods used to force people to attend rallies.
David Bankier concluded from these reports and accounts from other party campaigns that during one year of Hitler’s rule, there was a similar lack of interest, and that “mass- mobilization campaigns” were “declining, producing a growing gap between the regime and the populace.”
Part V: The German churches
On July 20, 1933, Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII, signed the Reichskonkordat (Concordat between the Holy See and the German Reich), which ostensibly secured the rights of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. Not long before signing the Concordat with the Vatican, Hitler attempted to forestall condemnation of his anti-Jewish policies and transfer the responsibility on to the church for its historic treatment of the Jews. As historian Saul Friedländer explained. In a meeting on April 26, 1933, he met with Bishop Hermann Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück (a city in northwest Germany) as a delegate from the Conference of Bishops, which was in session at that point.
The Jewish issue had not been on the agenda, but Hitler took the opportunity to introduce the subject himself. According to the protocols of the meeting prepared by the Bishop’s assistant, Hitler spoke “warmly and quietly, now an again, emotionally, without a word against the church and with recognition of the bishops: ‘I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews a pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc. because it recognized them for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as a pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.” There is no record of any reaction by Bishop Berning.
Friedländer believed Hitler considered the “alliance with the Vatican as being of special significance in this battle.” After the ratification of the Concordat in September 1933, Friedländer said Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli sent a communication to the German chargé d'affaires stating the church’s position of principle: “ The Holy See takes this occasion to add a word on behalf of those German Catholics who themselves have gone over from Judaism to the Christian religion or who are descended in the first generation, or more remotely, from Jews who adopted the Catholic faith, and who for reasons known to the Reich government are likewise suffering from social and economic difficulties.” In principle, this reflected the policy of the Catholic and Protestant churches. In practice, they acquiesced to the Nazi measures against Jews who converted, when racially defined as Jews.
“So powerful was the racial cognitive model of humanity in Germany,” asserts historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “that the German Catholic Church by and large accepted and disseminated it in its own teachings.” The February 1936 official guidelines for religious education of the German episcopate (the collective body of all the bishops of the church) declared: “Race, soil, blood and people are precious natural values which G-d the Lord created and the care of which he entrusted to us Germans.”
With regard to the Protestant Churches, Protestant theologian Franklin Littell said that “each of the established churches in Germany attempted, in its own way, to defend the interests of the institutional church and to ‘winter through’ (durchwinter) the volatile years of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.” Although Bishop Theophil Heinrich Wurm, President of the Protestant Church of the State of Württemberg, and Cardinal Adolf Bertram, the archbishop of Breslau, “intervened vigorously in defense of the elderly and handicapped,” against Hitler’s euthanasia program in August 1940, “no such firm positions had been taken in defense of the Jews.”
During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933), Goldhagen said 70 to 80 percent of the Protestant pastors were associated with the antisemitic German National People’s Party, and their antisemitic positions pervaded the Protestant press, even before the Nazis assumed power. In 1933 there were 40 million Protestants in Germany. The Protestant press, which reached millions, he said, was exceedingly persuasive, in “shaping the collective opinions of the Protestant laity, that composed of almost 63 percent of the German population in 1933.”
Ino Arndt, the author of a survey of the impact of Sonntagsblätter, the Protestant Sunday weekly newspapers, which were the foremost and most persuasive religious media, found the Jews and Jewry were subjects “of great popularity” in the papers. Jews were nearly always portrayed in a negative and hostile manner, Goldhagen said. They were described as “the natural enemies of the Christian-national tradition,” and responsible “for a variety of other evils.”
Arndt concluded that the incessant vilification of the Jews in the Protestant weekly newspapers “blunted” in its audience “the human and finally also the Christian feelings” for the Jewish people. “Small wonder” Goldhagen observed, “that these Christian readers would look with unpitying eyes upon the Jews as they were being attacked, tormented, degraded, and reduced to social lepers during the Nazi period.”
Parts VI-VIII will be posted tomorrow
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of The National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He lives in Jerusalem.