Nazi Propaganda Themes from The 1930s
Propaganda is the dissemination of biased or misleading information. It is a tool used to influence large groups of people so as to promote a political cause. The Nazi regime, which was an authoritarian regime, used propaganda to ensure that power was consolidated in the party. One of the main themes of Nazi propaganda was the theme of appeal to national unity. This was based upon the principle ‘The community before the individual’. It allowed the Nazis to consolidate power and ensure that their aims were coordinated with those of the German people. The propaganda of national unity was to help break down social and class divisions among the people and unite them behind the state (Welch, 2007).
Another theme of Nazi propaganda is the theme of racial struggle and German pride. This was so that racial purity and superiority of the Aryan race could be accentuated. It allowed the Nazis to dehumanize the Jews and Slavs in Germany. Racial propaganda was intended to bring the nation to a shared awareness of its ethnic unity (Welch, 2007). In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that racial purity would safeguard the future cultural progress of the German people.
The hatred of enemies was a major theme of propaganda in the 1930s that the Nazis employed. This hatred became centered on Jews and the Bolsheviks. This enabled the Nazis to place the blame for the humiliating defeat of the First World War on the Jews, along with the economic woes that followed. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels fanned anti-Semitism through the press and all forms of media which had been forced to submit to the regime in power. The aim of the propaganda machinery wielded by Goebbels was to bring the German people together in support of the Nazi regime in the quest for total power in Germany. Hitler needed the propaganda messages to get to the uninformed masses so as to gain support from them in his endeavors to turn Germany into the utopian country he envisioned. Eventually propaganda was used to whip up support for the Second World War.
References
Welch, D. (2007). The Third Reich: politics and propaganda (Second ed.). London: Routledge.
