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Mass media: Political propaganda and persuasion

Political propaganda and persuasion

Introduction

Telex: Warsaw no. 663/43 May 24 1943 to SS and Police Leader Ost
Point 1: Of the total of 56,065 Jews counted, approx. 7,000 were destroyed in the former Jewish quarter itself during the action. During transport to T.II 6,929 Jews were destroyed, giving a total of 13,929 Jews destroyed. Over and above the figure of 56,065, some 5 - 6,00 Jews were destroyed by explosions and fire.

- SS and Police Leader in the Warsaw District: signed: Stroop
quoted in Enzensberger (1967)

How can you take any pleasure in shooting from in hiding at poor animals, which graze so innocently, defenceless and unsuspecting, at the edge of the wood. For that is, if you think about it, sheer murder .... Nature is so wonderfully beautiful and, after all, every animal has a right to life.

- Heinrich Himmler (supreme SS leader) in conversation with his masseur
quoted in Enzensberger (1967)

Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying together, when 300 lie there or when a thousand lie there. To have borne that and nevertheless - apart from some exceptions of human weakness - to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of fame in our history which has never been written and never will be written.

-Heinrich Himmler, speech to SS-Gruppenführer in Posen October 1943
quoted in Enzensberger (1967)

 

The prisoners are told that they are to be cleansed and disinfected. They must therefore completely undress to be bathed. To avoid panic, they are instructed to arrange their clothing neatly ... Everything proceeds in a perfectly orderly fashion. They enter a large cellar room that resembles a shower bath. The doors are shut and containers dropped down into the pilalrs. As soon as the containers touch the base of the pillars, they release substances that put people to sleep. A few minutes later a door opens on the other side and the corpses are loaded into elevators and brought up to the first floor where large crematoria are situated.

Official SS report on extermination procedures at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

It still continues to puzzle and trouble me that I can recall not a single instance when we were marching though villages and towns and suburbs in the midst of civilian people going to and from work and leading ordinary lives that no one ever said 'Hello' or 'Good luck' or whatever. And no one ever threw an apple or an onion or a potato or a piece of bread at us; we were - consciously or otherwise - ignored and we actually marched through - if there is such a thing - physical indifference.

Hugo Gryn, survivor of Auschwitz Birkenau, describing his experience of being marched form one concentration camp to another from A Painful Reminder by Granada Television based on film footage shot and directed by Sidney Bernstein

 

The SS, when we arrived, were very arrogant, very smug, very satisfied. They had no compassion for these people at all. They could see nothing wrong in what they had done.

- Bill Lawrie, British army cameraman, describing the liberation of Belsen concentration camp
from A Painful Reminder by Granada Television based on film footage shot and directed by Sidney Bernstein

In Hitler's Third Reich Germany, there were around 5,000 concentration camps. Some ten million were exterminated, four million of them in Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, where they were brought by a never-ending supply of train transports from all corners of the Reich. After the selection of small numbers who were to be used as slave labour in and around the camp, the rest were marched off into the gas chambers. When the corpses were removed, their false teeth, rings, spectacles, shoes and clothing were carefully sorted and pacakaged. Even their hair was shaved off and stored in bags after sorting.

Germany and German-speaking countries had been one of the motor forces behind the development of European culture. In the twentieth century they had produced some of the finest and most challengingly innovative composers, novelists, dramatists, philosophers and scientists. How did such a highly cultured people come to commit the unspeakable atrocities of the Third Reich? I suppose there are three possible explanations:

I tend towards the second of these explanations. Wherever we look in history we see rivers of blood. Almost inconceivably depraved cruelty accompanies the development of the exalted civilized values of which we Europeans are so proud, from the Roman gladiatorial games, through the Spanish genocide of South Americans to the British repression of the Irish (and most of the rest of the world too). The Holocaust was hardly unique in twentieth century history, a century dominated by homicidal maniacs - the Soviet Union, Italy in Abyssinia, the People's Republic of China, Kamputchea, Rwanda - yet it is the Nazi state to which most commentators seem to have turned their attention, in part perhaps because Nazi bureaucracy documented the régime's crimes so fully, perhaps also because the newsreels which emerged from the defeated Germany so horrified us, but perhaps mainly because we in the West felt that the Germans were so 'like us' and because German culture has had such a formative influence on the development of European civilization.

Bearing those last thoughts in mind, then we have to suppose that 'something happened' to the Germans that did not happen to other European nations, though it is as well to remember that it is the scale of the Nazi state's crimes rather perhaps than their nature that makes them unique amongst Western European nations. The Italians murdered Abyssinians, the British tortured suspected Indian 'terrorists' until well into the 1930s, French paratroopers were torturing and murdering Algerian 'terrorists' during the 1960s, British paratroopers were torturing Irish 'terrorists' until the 1970s. Nevertheless, it does seem that many researchers and commentators have assumed that there was something unique in the German experience, which may explain the conversion of a nation committed to civilized values into a nation of criminals. Hence a great deal of attention has been paid by media and communication researchers and social psychologists to Nazi propaganda, though, clearly, a focus on propaganda techniques should not lead us to disregard the social, political and historical circumstances which enabled that propaganda to be effective. In what follows, we shall be examining propaganda and persuasion in general terms. We shall, though, often look at Nazi propaganda more closely, because it is often supposed to have been amongst the most effective propaganda this century. Hopefully, you will then be able to see how some of the techniques of Nazi propaganda relate to propaganda today.

You may find also that the sections on memetics, social influence, persuasion and advertising are of some relevance

Related Articles:

Propaganda links at Andrew Johnson's Mania Web
Phillip Taylor's links to Information Warfare resources
Propaganda and Psychological Warfare Studies
Propaganda Analysis Home Page
Propaganda posters, Radio propaganda etc. at Earthstation 1
memetics
consistency theory
social influence
persuasion
advertising

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