Nazi propaganda was the operational tool through which the regime maintained popular acceptance of its policies, including the Holocaust. The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels controlled the press, the radio, the cinema, the theatre, the music industry, and the visual arts across the Reich from 1933 to 1945. The propaganda apparatus did not in itself kill anyone. What it did was produce the cultural environment in which the killing could be conducted with limited public objection.
The Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda
Goebbels was made Reich Minister of Propaganda on 13 March 1933, six weeks after Hitler became Chancellor. The ministry assumed control of the German broadcasting corporation, the major newspapers, the film industry, and the cultural institutions of the Reich within months. Newspapers were either Nazi-owned or were placed under editorial supervision through the Reich Press Chamber. The 1933 Editors Law made all journalists subject to ministerial discipline. Around 1,300 small newspapers were closed in the first year of the regime; the surviving press was subject to daily editorial direction from the ministry.
Radio
Radio was the central new medium of the period and the medium on which the regime placed the most operational emphasis. The People’s Receiver, the Volksempfänger, was a cheap radio set developed in 1933 specifically to put a receiver in every German household. Around 12.5 million sets had been distributed by 1939. The Volksempfänger was deliberately designed with a limited reception range that could not pick up most foreign broadcasts. Listening to foreign radio was made a criminal offence after the war began in 1939, with the death penalty available for serious cases. Around 5,000 Germans were prosecuted for foreign radio listening during the war and several hundred were executed.
Film
The Nazi film industry produced around 1,100 feature films between 1933 and 1945. Most were entertainment rather than overt political propaganda. The exceptions, the explicitly antisemitic propaganda films, are studied as some of the most operationally consequential single propaganda works of the period. The Eternal Jew (1940), directed by Fritz Hippler under Goebbels’ personal supervision, was a pseudo-documentary that compared Jewish populations to rats and presented Jewish religious practice in deliberately repellent staged scenes. Jud Süss (1940), directed by Veit Harlan, was a costume drama presenting the historical figure of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer as a sexual predator on Aryan womanhood. Both films were screened to SS and Wehrmacht personnel before postings to the eastern front and to the Generalgouvernement. The internal propaganda ministry papers indicate that the films were considered tools for hardening the personnel against the Jewish populations they would encounter.
The press
The major German newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s carried daily antisemitic content of varying intensity. The flagship Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter, edited under direct party authority, ran the strongest line. Streicher’s Der Stürmer, with peak circulation around 800,000 in 1936, ran the most extreme line. The mainstream non-Nazi press was progressively brought into line with the Nazi position through the editorial discipline system, the threat of newspaper closure, and the simple departure of Jewish journalists who had been excluded from German journalism by the 1933 legislation.
Visual culture
The propaganda apparatus extended to the visual environment. Antisemitic posters were displayed across German cities. Antisemitic exhibitions, including the touring Der Ewige Jude exhibition of 1937 to 1938, drew millions of visitors. The Reich Chamber of Visual Arts ensured that exhibition art conformed to the Nazi cultural position. The 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, which presented modern art produced by Jewish or non-Aryan artists as evidence of cultural decline, drew over two million visitors and became one of the most popular exhibitions in German museum history. The exhibition was a deliberate political instrument intended to associate aesthetic modernism with Jewish racial decadence in the popular mind.
The wartime escalation
The wartime propaganda escalated the antisemitic content. From 1941 onwards, with the killing programme underway, the propaganda apparatus produced regular reminders of what the regime called the Jewish question. The Goebbels diary entry of 13 December 1941 records his understanding that the killing programme was now underway and his determination to use propaganda to prepare the German population for the news, when it eventually broke, that the Jewish populations of Europe had been eliminated. The Ministry of Propaganda monitored the German population’s reaction through the SD’s Reports from the Reich, the regular internal intelligence assessments of public opinion. The reports indicated through 1942 to 1944 that most of the German population had a general understanding of what was happening to the Jewish populations of Europe and that the level of public objection was limited.
What the propaganda did
The propaganda apparatus did not invent German antisemitism, but it amplified, normalised and operationalised it at a scale that produced the cultural environment in which the killing programme could be conducted. The regime did not need every German to be a committed antisemite. It needed enough Germans to accept that the antisemitic line was the legitimate national position, and enough Germans to look away when the killings began. The propaganda ministry’s twelve years of work produced both. The post-war German cultural and educational reconstruction had to begin from the position that the population had been formed, for a generation, by an information environment in which the killing of Jews could be presented as reasonable national policy. The shift took decades.
See also
Sources
- Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Belknap, 2006
- David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, Routledge, 1993
- Joseph Goebbels diaries, edited Elke Fröhlich, K.G. Saur, 1987-2008
- SD Reports from the Reich (Meldungen aus dem Reich), Heinz Boberach (ed), 1965
- USHMM: Nazi Propaganda