The Nazi regime used language and media with care, and often to great effect. The terms they coined to describe their various practices are not only deceptive. They are chilling. Nazis never used the words ‘kill’ or ‘murder’ in their official communications. Mass killings were termed special treatment, final solution (for the Jews), enthanasia (for the disabled), selection and disinfections. ‘Evacuation’ meant deporting people to gas chambers. Do you know what the So gas chambers were called? They were labelled ‘disinfection-areas’, and looked like bathrooms equipped with fake showerheads.
Media was carefully used to win support for the regime and popularise its worldview. Nazi ideas were spread through visual images, films, radio, posters, catchy slogans and leaflets. In posters, groups identified as the ‘enemies’ of Germans were stereotyped, mocked, abused and described as evil. Socialists and liberals were represented as weak and degenerate. They were attacked as malicious foreign agents. Propaganda films were made to create hatred for Jews. The most infamous film was The Eternal Jew. Orthodox Jews were stereotyped and marked. They were shown
Source E.
In an address to women at the Nuremberg Party Rally, 8 September 1934, Hitler said:
We do not consider it correct for the woman to interfere in the world of the man, in his main sphere. We consider it natural that these two worlds remain distinct… What the man gives in courage on the battlefield, the woman gives in eternal self-sacrifice, in eternal pain and suffering. Every child that women bring to the world is a battle, a battle waged for the existence of her people.
Source F
Hitler at the Nuremberg party, 8 September 1934, also said:
The woman is the most stable element in the preservation of a folk…she has the most unerring sense of everything that is important to not let a race disappear because it is her children who would be affected by all this suffering in the first place…That is why we have integrated the woman in the struggle of the racial community just as nature and providence have determined so.”
with flowing beards wearing kaftans, whereas in reality it was difficult to distinguish German Jews by their outward appearance because they were a highly assimilated community. They were referred to as vermin, rats and pests. Their movements were compared to those of rodents. Nazism worked on the minds of the people, tapped their emotions, and turned their hatred and anger at those marked as ‘undesirable”.
Activity
How would you have reacted to Hilter’s ideas if you were:
➤ A Jewish woman
➤ A non-Jewish German woman
GERMAN FARMER
YOU BELONG TO HITLER!
WHY?
The German farmer stands in between two great dangers
today:
The one danger American economic system
Big Capitalism!
The other is the Marxist economic system of Bolshevism.
Big Capitalism and Bolshevism work hand in hand:
they are born of Jewish thought
and serve the master plan of world Jewery.
Who alone can rescue the farmer from these dangers?
NATIONAL SOCIALISM.
From: a Nazi leaflet, 1932.
Activity
Look at Figs. 29 and 30 and answer the following:
What do they tell us about Nazi propaganda? How are the Nazis trying to mobilise different sections of the population?
Language: English
Language: English
Science, MCQs