Themes in Nazi propaganda

It promoted the values asserted by the Nazis, including Heldentod (heroic death), Führerprinzip (leader principle), Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), Blut und Boden (blood and soil) and pride in the Germanic Herrenvolk (master race).

[1] After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, he moderated his tone for the trial, centering his defense on his selfless devotion to the good of the Volk and the need for bold action to save them; though his references to the Jews were not eliminated (speaking, for instance, of "racial tuberculosis" in "German lungs"), they were decreased to win support.

"[28] The Nazis described the Jews as Untermenschen (subhumans), this term was utilized repeatedly in writings and speeches directed against them, the most notorious example being a 1942 SS publication with the title "Der Untermensch" which contains an antisemitic tirade.

In the pamphlet "The SS as an Anti-bolshevist Fighting Organization", Himmler wrote in 1936: "We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without."

[31] This time also saw a vast increase in antisemitic popular culture; not bearing the overt stamp of Nazi approval, it was regarded as more objective than Ministry of Propaganda information.

[33] Academics, in view of increasing Nazi pressure, produced reams of "racial science" to demonstrate the differences between Jews and Germans, frequently ignoring all other races.

[42] Hitler made only three overtly antisemitic speeches between seizing power and the war, but included various cryptic comments about Jews that the hardcode Nazis knew meant he had not abandoned the beliefs.

[46] In 1941, when Jews were forced to wear the Star of David, Nazi pamphlets instructed people to remember antisemitic arguments at the sight of it, particularly Kaufman's Germany Must Perish!.

[78] Goebbels, aware of the value of publicity (both positive and negative), deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, including violent attacks on the Communist Party of Germany.

[101] The Katyn massacre was exploited in 1943 to drive a wedge between Poland, Western Allies, and the Soviet Union, and reinforce the Nazi propaganda line about the horrors of Bolshevism and American and British subservience to it.

[121] One popular Munich speaker, declaring biological research boring, called instead on racial emotions; their "healthy ethnic instincts" would reveal the quality of the Aryan type.

[125] Education Minister Rust ordered teachers training colleges to relocate from "too intellectual" university centers to the countryside, where they could be more readily indoctrinated and would also benefit from contact with the pure German peasantry.

[132] He called on the German people to "secure its rightful land on this earth," and announced: We National Socialists consciously draw a line under the direction of our foreign policy war.

[134] Influenced by the guidelines, in a directive sent out to the troops under his command, General Erich Hoepner of the Panzer Group 4 stated: The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence.

These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism, with the task of: having now Russian, half [located] in Asia, parts of Europe, crush Germany and the world.

[145] A sign of the change occurred in 1933 when a German professor published a book that was given much media attention calling for German-Polish friendship, and praised the "particularly close political and cultural relationship" between Germany and Poland that was said to be 1,000 years old.

For us it is a matter of expanding our Lebensraum in the east, adding that there will be no repeat of the Czech situation, and Germany will attack Poland at first opportunity, after isolating the country from its Western Allies.

In the spring of 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, a major anti-Polish campaign was launched, asserting such claims as forced labor of ethnic Germans, persecution of them, Polish disorder, Poles provoking border incidents, and aggressive intentions from its government.

The message to the crowd is a series of simple, basic, memorable words — nation, people, blood, family, comrade, friend, home, soil, bread, work, strength, hope, life, fight, victory, birth, death, honor, beauty.

[172] Leni Riefenstahl's Der Sieg des Glaubens glorified the mass adulation of Adolf Hitler at the Nuremberg rally of 1933, although the propaganda film was later deleted and banned following the murder of Röhm in the Night of the Long Knives.

[210] After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler, on the trial, omitted his usual pre-putsch antisemitism and centered his defense on his selfless devotion to the good of the Volk and the need for bold action to save them.

[230] As soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933 they introduced "racial hygienist" policies such as the July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" which made sterilisation compulsory to the people who were said to have a range of conditions that were said to be hereditary.

One popular Munich speaker, declaring biological research boring, called instead on racial emotions; their "healthy ethnic instincts" would reveal the quality of the Aryan type.

[257] As the theory called only for parents of good blood, propaganda attempts were made to destigmatize illegitimate births, although the Lebensborn homes were presented to the public as places for married women.

[124][262] Propaganda urging that SS members leave an "heir" behind, without regards to whether they were married to the mother, raised a furor, but despite backpedaling, produced a surge in illegitimate births.

"[270] These propaganda appeals effectively persuaded German women because it contained the right mixture of traditional ideas, myths of the past, and the acceptance of the needs of a modern economy and lifestyle.

[285][286] Tobacco and pollutants in the workplace were viewed as a threat to the German race, so for partly ideological reasons the Nazi government chose to conduct propaganda against them, as one of many preventative steps.

Biology textbooks were among the most propagandistic in the Third Reich, owing to their content of eugenic principles and racial theories, including explanations of the Nuremberg Laws, which were claimed to allow the German and Jewish peoples to co-exist without the danger of mixing.

[217] During the euthanasia program, the film Ich klage an was created to depict a woman being mercifully killed by her husband to escape her fatal illness, and his trial afterwards to stage pro-euthanasia arguments.

[297] The Parole der Woche's weekly wall newspaper repeatedly claimed quotations showed that the intent of the Allies was to destroy Germany as a strong, united, and armed country.