HOW EFFECTIVE WERE INDOCTRINATION AND PROPAGANDA?

Authors Avatar

ANALYSIS: HOW EFFECTIVE WERE INDOCTRINATION AND PROPAGANDA?

Goebbels said at a press conference establishing the Ministry of People's Enlightenment and Propaganda on 15

March 1933: 'it is not enough for people to be more or less reconciled to our regime, to be persuaded to adopt a

neutral attitude towards us; rather we want to work on people until they have capitulated to us, until they grasp

ideologically that what is happening in Germany today not only must be accepted but also can be accepted." He

also emphasised the need to take full advantage of the latest technology in order to achieve maximum saturation

to create complete loyalty and subservience.

Such a programme clearly required a considerable administrative infrastructure. The main requirement was the

overall co-ordination of the transmission of ideology and influences. This was accomplished by two changes. The

first was an increase in the power of an existing institution, the Ministry of Education. This was fully centralised

to remove the initia tive from the individual Lander; particularism, after all, was likely to be the main threat to

achieving educational conformity. The second was the establishment of the Ministry for People's Enlightenment

and Propaganda. In theory this was all-embracing. With additions made during the course of 1933, it eventually

comprised a series of Chambers, including those for press, radio, theatre, music, creative arts and film. In theory

the regime had the power to apply negative censorship in whatever form it considered necessary and, more

constructively, to shape the development of culture at all levels.

In assessing the impact of these institutions, a distinction needs to be made between propaganda and

indoctrination. To an extent these were connected, since the long-term indoctrination of the population involved

regular exposure to official propaganda. Yet propaganda was on the whole more directly related to the use of

channels such as the radio, cinema and press, while indoctrination was a process carried out in education, the

youth movements, the work place and the armed forces. Propaganda provided the highlights, indoctrination the

main body.

Indoctrination as a long-term process could be most effectively applied to Germany's youth. The methods used of

indoctrinating youth were nothing if not thorough. Schools experienced a radlicalisation of the curriculum which

saw the introduction of race study, eugenics and health biology, all used as vehicles for imparting Nazi ideology.

Conventional subjects, such as History and even Mathematics were given a twist: they were geared at every

possible opportunity to enhancing Nazism. For example, twenty-two out of the seventy-six pages of the official

Mathematics textbook contained ideological references such as calculations of the cost to produce lunatic asylums

as opposed to workers' housing. Another radical departure was the preparation of boys and girls for separate and

Join now!

obviously stereotyped roles. The teaching profession was also carefully organised, the Nazi Teachers' League

(NSLB) accounting for 97 per cent of the total teaching force by 1937.

And yet the process was in many ways badly flawed. Education experienced the sort of overlapping between

administrative and party organs. For example, the Ministry of Education continued to use the guidelines of the

Weimar Republic largely because it argued interminably with the Party headquarters about the shape to be taken

by their replacement. The conflict between Ley and Rust on the one hand and Bormann and Hess on the other

meant that ...

This is a preview of the whole essay