Racial Propaganda In The Third Reich Essay

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Racial Propaganda during the Third Reich

One of the most central ideals in Nazi ideology was that of a continual attack against other races deemed inferior by Adolf, more specifically Jews. Racial minorities were used as scapegoats with which the Nazis blamed for what was wrong with the country on. In the speeches to the masses at Nazi rallies, they would start off by bringing up all the problems that they have been having, the depression, the Versailles Treaty, and any other hardship that they had experienced, and make the Jews the architect behind their ruin. The speakers would focus all their anger on the Jewish people and other minorities.

Hate and anger seem to be key points in Nazi ideology. To sustain the kind of anger the Nazis needed to sway the masses over to their side, they needed a common enemy, somebody or something that could be seen everyday. Jews were portrayed as extremists and revolutionaries. They were supposedly different from the average moderate Germans, and even more different than the Nazis. People like Hitler, Goebbels, and Julius Streicher played on this ignorance of other people to instill fear and loathing of the Jews. In general, people don t like what they don t understand. The Nazis exploited this truism by warping, retarding, and creating supposed grievances that the Jews were responsible. During the rallies, the speakers would rant and rave about how they would exact vengeance against their eternal enemy, the Jew (1), and how that Europe will have defeated this threat only when the last Jew has left our part of the planet (1). Hitler himself at the outbreak of The German people will not be destroyed in this war, rather the Jew (1). The Nazi leaders would spout out so-called scientific evidence that the only way to ensure the survival of the Aryan race is that of racial purity. Over and over through their speeches and pamphlets, they emphasized that:

The decline of a people s culture is always the result of race mixing and a decline in racial quality. Any change in the racial makeup of a people leads to a change in its nature and its culture. If the race that gave a people its nature is debased by mixing with foreign and inferior races, the people s culture will perish and can never again be restored to full life. (1)

The Nazis advocated a homogenous society where only the Aryan and Nordic races would exist, while driving out all the other inferior races to protect the purity of the races, even at the cost of genocide towards the Jews. The Nazis referred back to a so-called German golden age, before the Jew began to run the world through finance and trickery. (1)

The propaganda did not stop at speeches and pamphlets. Children s books also spread the Nazi message of hate. The book The Toadstool, is a collection of very short stories where in all of them, the Jews are described as hook-nosed, with shifty eyes, and having the look of a criminal. Their teachers taught these stereotypes in the schools every day. Everyone, from the leaders, down to the children felt the same way about the Jews. Hitler had achieved through his use of propaganda the homogenous society he had dreamed of, albeit for only 5 or 6 years. As disturbing and sick as his methods were, they were nonetheless extremely effective.

Even during the War and after the Final Solution was put into effect, it was still seen as a racial war to the Germans. They contended that Roosevelt and Churchill were just lackeys of the Jewish businessmen. They stated that the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was ruled by his wife, who happened to be Jewish. When the Nazis declared war on the United States, they saw it not just a European cleansing of the Jews, but as a worldwide operation to rid the world of the epidemic of Jewish domination (1). This of course was the Germans undoing, which came to a head on D-Day.

Although there were many facets to Nazi ideology and culture, none were as violent and deceitful as the racial propaganda. It was because of this fundamental hatred towards minorities that the Holocaust was allowed to take place.

Works Cited

1 Racial Policy http://www.calvin.edu/academi/cas/gpa/rassenpo.htm

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