German propaganda posters extra notes

Question 1

Who wrote Manufacturing a Consensus: Nazi Propaganda and the Building of a “National Community”:

Answer 1

Welch

Question 2

What does Manufacturing a Consensus: Nazi Propaganda and the Building of a “National Community” say:

Answer 2

• Nevertheless, to that public opinion in the Third Reich ceased to exist is not strictly true. After the Nazi ‘seizure of power’ in 1933, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels stressed the importance of co-ordinating propaganda with other activities. In a dictatorship, propaganda must address itself to large masses of people and attempt to move them to a uniformity of opinion and action. But the Nazis also understood that propaganda is of little value in isolation. To some extent this explains why Goebbels impressed on all his staff at the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda the imperative necessity constantly to gauge public moods. Goebbels therefore regularly received (as did all the ruling elites) extraordinarily detailed reports from the Secret Police (SD reports) about the mood of the people and would frequently quote these in his diary
• The Nazis saw their Machtergreifung of power) as more than simply a change of government: it represented the start of the revolution which would transform German society in accordance with their ideology. The so-called Nazi revolution was essentially a compound of all three elements. First, the Nazis utilised the legal authority of the state and its machinery to legitimise their control over the civil service, policy, judiciary and armed forces
• Secondly, there was the widespread use made of terror and coercion in the absence of law and order that allowed Nazi stormtroopers to seize persons and property at will. The pervasive fear of violence should not be under-estimated for it undoubtedly inhibited the forces of opposition. The menace of violence was, to some extent, counterbalanced by the positive image of Nazi society presented in the mass media on an unprecedented scale. Propaganda is thus the third element. A society that was still suffering from a deep sense of national humiliation and weakened by inflation, economic depression and mass unemployment, was perhaps not surprisingly attracted to a National Socialist revival that proclaimed that it could integrate disparate elements under the banner of national rebirth for Germany
• The ‘revolutionary’ aims of the Nazi regime highlight the remarkably ambitious nature of its propaganda. From the moment that the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda was established it set itself the task of re-educating the population for a new society based on National Socialist values. Although Nazism is often thought of as a temporary aberration in the history of a nation, it was in fact based upon various strands of intellectual thought that go back at least a century. This was the volkisch doctrine, which was essentially a product of late eighteenth-century romanticism. The major themes that recur in Nazi propaganda during this period reflect the roots and antecedents of volkisch thought: 1) appeal to national unity based upon the principle ‘The community before the individual’ (Volksgemeinschaft); 2) the need for racial purity; 3) a hatred of enemies which increasingly centred on Jews and Bolsheviks; and 4) charismatic leadership (Fuhrer prinzip). Both the original doctrine and the manner in which it was disseminated by Nazi propaganda led inexorably to the mobilisation of the German people for a future war. Once in war, these propaganda aims could then be extended in order to maintain the fighting morale of the military and the civil population
• In August 1914 it seemed that the war had created a new sense of solidarity in which class antagonisms were transcended by some entirely fictitious ‘national community
• Nevertheless, the nationalist fervour of 1914, the spirit of a united nation ready and eager for a justifiable war, remained a potent force for the German Right throughout the interwar period and appeared to have found fruition in the ‘fighting community’ of 1933
• Propaganda presented an image of a society that had successfully manufactured ‘national community’ by transcending social and class
• Writing in 1937, the historian Stephen Roberts, who had spent over a year in Germany
  observing the system, referred to the ‘triumph of Nazi propaganda over teaching’

Question 3

What does Harvard blog on propaganda posters say:

Answer 3

• There are broad categories of biases namely:
• Social & Attributional Biases: These are biases that affect our social perception and the means through which we determine who or what was responsible for a particular action or situation.
• Memory Biases: These are biases that can either enhance or impair the recollection of a memory, either near-term or long-term.
• Decision-Making Biases: These are biases that impair our ability to make rational decisions despite evidence to the contrary. This includes biases in probability and belief that impact decision-making.
• Hitler talked about the aims of a propagandist in indoctrinating a population and the importance of ensuring the continued propagation of the propaganda: “The first duty of the propagandist is to win over people who can subsequently be taken into the organization. And the first duty of the organization is to select and train men who will be capable of carrying on the propaganda. The second duty of the organization is to disrupt the existing order of things and thus make room for the penetration of the new teaching which it represents, while the duty of the organizer must be to fight for the purpose of securing power, so that the doctrine may finally triumph.”
• On October 4, 1933, the Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich helped formulate and pass the Editorial Control Law, which placed all remaining press under government control, and banned any “non-Aryan” undesirable from participating in journalistic activities
• By picking only relatively unpleasant looking Jewish attributes, and by choosing to portray Jews in only an unpleasant manner, the Nazis applied Selection Bias to elicit several other cascading biases. By taking advantage of the Negativity Bias inherent
  human nature, wherein we pay more attention to negative images, the Nazis succeeded in associating Jews with those unpleasant mental images. This created a Clustering Illusion, where people were conditioned to see unpleasantness in the Jewish population when there was none present. Doing so, particularly in combination with the Nazi portrayal of the non-Jewish, “Aryan” German as a superior individual helped perpetuate just that – a Superiority Bias. This, in turn, created an environment of Self-Serving Bias of behavioral confirmation, where all responsibility for the success of Nazi Germany was claimed by the Germans, and the blame for all failures were laid on the Jewish population
• Bandwagon Effect in an “Us vs. Them” portrayal of an unpleasant looking Jewish caricature, sometimes associated with Bolsheviks and/or the US/UK
• When the Nazi party came out with the anti-semitic propaganda film that posed as a documentary, The Eternal Jew, they also began using Jewish elements – such as the Star of David and fonts that resembled Hebrew (Artifact 17) – to portray the Jews as a single, culturally distinct population separate from the Germans. This practice can be seen
  elsewhere, as well, and continued to be used to distinguish the Jewish cultural identity as being separate from the German national identity

Question 4

What does the antisemitism article say:

Answer 4

• The Octopus is a common antisemitic image found in anti-Jewish images and cartoons, representing the antisemitic canard of Jewish control. In 1903, the antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alleged, among many other falsities, that Jewish leaders were conspiring to control the world, including global politics, the world economy, and the media. The image of an octopus, with its tentacles wrapped around the world, or penetrating the globe, is an antisemitic representation of this canard. The Octopus is comparable to the puppet master, pulling the strings of control
• Victims of zoomorphism
• Throughout Medieval Europe until today, the antisemitic canard of the Blood Libel has permeated society. The Libel alleges that Jews murder non-Jewish children, typically Christian children, in order to use their blood in religious or other rituals. Many of these murdered children in pre-modern and early modern Christian Europe were then sanctified as martyrs and saints. Allegations persisted that Jews used the blood in the unleavened bread, matzahs, which are eaten during the Jewish festival of Passover. Other rumours contended that periodically Jews would need to draw blood through a child sacrifice. This allegation is patently untrue. Jewish kashrut, dietary laws, prohibit any consumption of blood. Therefore, the depiction of Jews murdering children, consuming their blood or depicted as covered in blood, is antisemitic. Today the use of blood in antisemitic imagery is not as obvious as murdering and eating children but is used to the same effect, echoing the Libel - links to witchcraft from my cousework
• The concept of the Jewish banker is often depicted as a grotesque fat man, with a cigar and hooked nosed. This antisemitic image emanates largely from the forgery. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which solidified the anti-Jewish canard of the Jew, as a
  homogenous group, as rich and all powerful though there are other historic primers. This image can be found throughout antisemitic propaganda and cartoons, from Nazi imagery blaming Jewish bankers for the fall of Germany, to modern cartoons depicting Jewish bankers as causing economies to fail and creating poverty. Portrayals of the Jewish banking dynasty, the Rothschild family, are often used to show this form of antisemitic trope, creating a perceived tangible controller of global wealth. Images of Jews cheating non-Jews, of being stingy, of using money as power to benefit their own or controlling global business, all symbolise this form of antisemitism
• As the antisemitic German historian Heinrich von Treitschke put it, “the Jews are our misfortune”.