The Rise of Hitler and 20th Century anti-Semitism For the holocaust to work not only was anti-Semitism essential but the Nazis also needed to change and reinforce the cognitive aspect of German culture, because
The Rise of Hitler and 20th Century anti-Semitism
For the holocaust to work not only was anti-Semitism essential but the Nazis also needed to change and reinforce the cognitive aspect of German culture, because although it was already slightly anti-Semitic it was still not strong enough to allow for a Holocaust. To do this Hitler employed Josef Goebbels as minister of "Propaganda and Enlightenment", he was soon to become synonymous with the Nazi party.
Adolf Hitler himself was born in Austria to a civil servant, he was a slow learner and did poorly in school, and due to this his very strict farther would often beat his son. When he was old enough he went to Vienna and tried to get into to art school but was rejected, whilst Jewish painters got in (this was one of the starting blocks for his hatred). Hitler then joined the army in the First World War and was injured during a gas attack, earning him the Iron Cross. He was then commissioned to carry out spy projects to gain information on political parties who may have been a threat to the German government. One of these parties was a German Workers Party, he found himself joining this group, drawn in by the appeal of the secrecy and anti-Semitism. Hitler became the speaker for the party in 1919 and renamed the party the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP/NAZI). One year later he declared himself the Fuhrer of the party. In 1923 Hitler attempted a coop against the Bavarian government, but he failed and was jailed for several months where he wrote "Mein Kampf" or "My Struggle" in English. The Nazis regrouped and by January 1933 Hitler was Chancellor of Germany. One month later a fire mysteriously destroyed the German parliament building Hitler passed bill after bill giving the Chancellor more and more power. In March of 1933 he passed the Enabling Act which gave the Chancellor more power than the president. He soon set to work destroying other political parties and by the end of 1933 the Nazi party was the only one left. In August 1933, after having had his oldest allies the SA executed in June because he felt them a threat, and after the old president dying he abolished the presidents office and effectively made himself both head of government and head of state. Giving Germany no way out if they grew tired of him. So what that means is if they wanted rid of him they couldn't turn to say, the king, as Italy would do when they were to grow tired of Mussolini.
Josef Goebbels was an undisputed master of propaganda, he was born into a strict Catholic, working-class family from Rheydt, in the Rhineland, on 29 October 1897. A very intelligent man he went on to study History and Literature at the University of Heidelberg, studying under a Jewish professor, Friedrich Gundolf.
Propaganda was to play a major part in the Nazi's rise, and the rise of anti-Semitism in the 20th century. Throughout his life Goebbels suffered from a mental torment about a crippled foot due to contracting Polio as a child, due to this he was rejected from the army to fight in World War I. As the great depression hit Germany in
927 Goebbels capitalised on this with the skill of a master propagandist and played on the nations psyche with "ice cold calculation", at this point he was still only in charge of one wing, the Berlin wing, of the Nazi party. Hitler was deeply impressed with his ability to turn the small Berlin section of the Nazi party into the great power in the north of Germany it had become, Hitler appointed Goebbels the leader of Nazi propaganda in 1929, years later, in 1942 he observed of Goebbels, "Dr. Goebbels was gifted with the two things without which the situation in Berlin could not have been mastered: verbal facility and intellect.. . . For Dr. Goebbels, who had not found much in the way of a political organization when he started, had won Berlin in the truest sense of the word."
I mentioned earlier very briefly why Hitler had such hatred of the Jews, but to help clear up any cloudiness on this aspect I will now go into more detail on it. Hitler's parents both died before his sixteenth birthday, in the last months of his mother's illness he had gone to Vienna to take the entrance examination for "The Academy" in Vienna. Hitler was a very self assured man even a this young age and was supremely confident of his own talents as a painter as he comments in Mein Kampf, "I had set out with a ...
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I mentioned earlier very briefly why Hitler had such hatred of the Jews, but to help clear up any cloudiness on this aspect I will now go into more detail on it. Hitler's parents both died before his sixteenth birthday, in the last months of his mother's illness he had gone to Vienna to take the entrance examination for "The Academy" in Vienna. Hitler was a very self assured man even a this young age and was supremely confident of his own talents as a painter as he comments in Mein Kampf, "I had set out with a pile of drawings convinced that it would be child's play to pass the examination. At the Realschule I had been by far the best in my class at drawing, and since then my talent had developed amazingly; my own satisfaction caused me to take a joyful pride in hoping for the best." So it is no surprise that when he was rejected it shocked him to his very core, as he described it "it struck me like a bolt from the blue." He was told that his skills as a drawer lay not in painting but in architecture, he left the school extremely downhearted. When he returned to Vienna to join the Academy's school of architecture he discovered Marxism and Jewry, he describes this period of time as "...my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names, and whose terrible importance for the existence of the German people I certainly did not understand..." even before he had joined the Nazi party his anti-Semitic views it seems were already well on there way to developing without the aide of any political parties encouragement, but what really started to annoy Hitler was the fact that whilst he starved and led a deprived and impoverished life some Jewish painters whom had managed to get into the Academy's art school were becoming rich and powerful men, he describes these men as "...the stream of unleashed slaves who pour forth..." Purely because of Hitler's bitterness at being rejected from one art school and some Jewish painters being accepted, then the Jews were to become Hitler's scapegoat for everything whilst he was in power, he began to truly believe that the Jews were to blame for literally all of Germany's problems to come, from loosing the First World War to hyperinflation to the plague! To sum up his feeling of Jews at the age of fifteen before the majority of us have managed to make any moral decisions that will truly last us this was his description of just the word "Jew" not the religion just this word on hearing it, "Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word 'Jew' with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions. This filled me with a mild distaste, and I could not rid myself of that unpleasant feeling..." So from reading just a few brief extracts from Mein Kampf it is possible to get an overview of what his general feelings about Jews were, needless to say they were not good feelings.
Hitler had very good reason to be so full of praise for his propaganda leader, for it was he who was almost single handily responsible for changing the cognitive aspect of the German people. He delicately, although not very often subtly it has to be said, weaved anti-Semitic propaganda into the every day lives of Germans. His methods were often very public and hardly ever just on a small scale, he very quickly set to work "cleansing" the arts, forcing editors, authors and journalist to state control, he eliminated all Jewish and political opponents from any positions of power and made his first major public breakthrough on May the 10th, 1933 where he co-ordinated the "burning of the books" where the works of Jewish, Marxist and other "subversive" authors were burned in huge public bonfires.
Goebbels was also responsible for lower key, though no less public, propaganda methods. It was he who was responsible for the re-popularisation of the medieval myths, he also produced countless numbers of films and posters portraying the Jews as rats, this could be tied in with the Black Death myth; after it was proved it was rats that spread the plague, Goebbels also handed out cheap radio sets to all German families so that he could bombard them with his radio propaganda more easily, he also erected loudspeakers in the streets so there really was no escape from the broadcasts. To give you an idea of the amount of propaganda Goebbels used here is a shortened list; all media became state controlled, books couldn't be published without Goebbels say so, artists had to paint Aryan families, papers had to print pro-Nazi messages, cinema movies all had to carry pro-Nazi messages, news reels all talked about the greatness of Hitler, all foreign films were censored, jazz was banned because it was "black" music and "the blacks" were inferior to Aryans, all radio stations became state owned, posters were everywhere proclaiming Hitler's greatness and finally, the SS and Gestapo kept a watchful eye for Goebbels checking no one was producing, playing any anti-Hitler propaganda etc.
Hitler had a particular favourite when it came to making propaganda movies, Leni Riefenstahl, she was born in Berlin in 1902 and during the war her movies on the Nuremberg rallies and the 1936 Olympics were classed as some of the best documentary films in the world, but after the war her career fell in to disrepute after her movies became no longer classed as factual documentaries but as Nazi propaganda films. Leni Riefenstahl died on Monday the 8th of September 2003; she died just a few weeks after her 101st birthday.
The Nazi party was a specialist, not only in propaganda of any type, but particularly in propaganda of immense scale. He played an enormous role in helping organise the 1936 Olympics, which was a perfect opportunity for Germany to showcase its ability to outdo the rest of the world and a great chance to prove Aryan superiority. The German's built the world's largest stadium at the time; holding up to 100,000 people, the world's largest and most accurate stop clock ever built at that time, they were also the first country to televise the Olympics. Only a few things went wrong at the Olympics. Firstly, Jessie Owens beating the Aryan race fairly easily, and four times, not just once (a black American beating Hitler's Aryans, It could only have been more insulting to Hitler if he had been Jewish) and the second, although the rest of the world already knew that the Nazi party were not keen on Jews the Olympics showed just how bad things were and people went back to their home countries with considerably more knowledge on the anti-Semitism than they had had before.
Even bigger than the Olympics were the Nuremburg Rallies which were possibly the biggest single piece of propaganda, or demonstration of a nation's strength ever seen, ever! The Nuremberg Rallies were a way for Germany to show off its Military and planning power. They were quite a sight to behold, literally hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out for the events, where there would be Luftwaffe flyovers, constant speeches by Hitler and other members of the Nazi party declaring Aryan superiority, at night there were torch lit marches and processions, with immense lighting known as the "cathedral of lights" because the lights shot into the sky like cathedral pillars, and could be seen for miles around. The aim of the Nuremberg Rallies was to make the people feel more a group and display the country in a united front and not just as millions of individuals.
There was also extensive propaganda in schools, Jewish children would be made to stand up in front of the class and would be humiliated in front of their peers. If you were in a purely Aryan school you would be taught how Jews wrecked Germany and were responsible for loosing World War One, and you would be praised for being Aryan and would be told how much better you were than everyone else.
If you're wondering why Goebbels had such a hatred of the Jews it was stemmed from a deep-rooted sense of inferiority; at the same time it was also opportunist and tactical, based on the need to create a common enemy, to feed popular resentment and to mobilize the masses. It was also easy for him to do this because the Jews were a distinct minority and were easy to target, they had also experienced phases of anti-Semitism in the past and may have though it would soon pass.
All of this propaganda and showboating was to bring excitement to people's lives and to give people a sense of belonging, Goebbels attractions gave, in a sense, ordered chaos to encourage the people's hatred of the Jews. The people in Europe already had a slight anti-Semitic cognitive aspect to their culture already but the amounts of Nazi propaganda changed this slight aspect into a major aspect of German culture by "brainwashing" the people and constantly bombarding people with the propaganda. This sense of belonging also helps explain why normal people stood by and did nothing, they would have felt that if they stood up then they would be betraying the people who had put all these spectacles on just for them and made efforts just to please them.
Not only were the Jews were subjected to large amounts of propaganda depicting them as many things including rats and the cause of all Germany's problems, but they were also to suffer laws which would worsen their already, for most of them, unpleasant living conditions.
The Nuremberg Laws were passed on September 15th, October 18th and November 15th 1935. These laws were to forbid, at first, only Jews in certain professions. At first Jewish doctors and lawyers could only serve other Jewish people. Teachers and professors were forced out of their positions. Shop owners had to sell their businesses to Aryans for a fraction of their worth. As time passed, Jews were eventually excluded from society altogether and forced into ghettos where most would eventually die of starvation, disease or would be killed off, or sent to death camps like Auschwitz. During the Holocaust, a ghetto was a special section of a city in which Jewish people were forced to live. The conditions of the Nazi created ghettos were horrible and unhealthy - usually cramped, dirty, and with little food or no food. There were many ghettos throughout Europe during the Holocaust period. Some of these were the Amsterdam Ghetto, the Lodz Ghetto, and the Minsk Ghetto. However, the largest was the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, with about 400,000 people crammed into an area of about 2.5miles², if my maths is right that makes it 10m² per person. The laws also removed Jewish citizenship from the Jews, they were also not allowed marry or have sex with pure blooded Germans, this meant that all children in a Jewish-German marriage were now illegitimate. All of this made the Jews lives a living hell and removed any pleasantries from their lives and made living for them very, very tough, as well as this they would be forced to carry identity papers with them at a;; times with "Israel" stamped on them if you were male and "Sara" if you were female. The Nuremburg Laws were discrimination which is the third rung of Allport's ladder, the ghettos were both avoidance and Discrimination so became both rung one and three of the ladder.
Goebbels had been looking for some time to make his propaganda globally recognised and on the 9th-10th of November 1938 he got his chance, he carefully orchestrated the Kristallnacht (night of broken glass) pogrom, he gave a speech to party leaders that night which was responsible for the spark that caused the pogrom. Kristallnacht was the first government backed pogrom in the Nazi's campaign, Jewish stores, homes and synagogues were destroyed. Thousands of Jews died and over 30,000 were sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht was a physical attack on the Jews, thus making it the fourth rung of Allport's ladder of discrimination.
All of this propaganda and showboating was to bring excitement to people's lives and to give people a sense of belonging, Goebbels attractions gave, in a sense, ordered chaos to encourage the people's hatred of the Jews. The people in Europe already had a slight anti-Semitic cognitive aspect to their culture already but the amounts of Nazi propaganda changed this slight aspect into a major aspect of German culture by "brainwashing" the people and constantly bombarding people with the propaganda.
In brief Hitler and 20th century anti-Semitism rose due to huge amounts of propaganda and public showboating, displaying the "superiority" of the Aryan race, for which Josef Goebbels was primarily responsible for creating. Jews were also forced into worsening living conditions due to laws which were tolerated by ordinary citizens because of the propaganda changing their cognitive and also slightly out of self-preservation.
Frazer Shaw 10B1 17/05/2007
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