Of all the propaganda weapons that the Nazi held at their disposal, perhaps the most effective

and enduring was the cult of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself. Praised by contemporaries, allies
and foes alike as a charismatic and powerful speaker, Hitler had an ability to break down
arguments to their most simple terms and could move crowds on a level of emotion rather than
intellect. He also cultivated his public image to an obsessive degree, ensuring that it lay at the
heart of all things in the Nazi state. It is difficult, almost impossible, to imagine the Nazi tragedy
without Adolf Hitler at its core.
According to Hitler, the three good composers that represented everything admirable about
German music were Ludvig van Beethoven, Anton Bruckner and Richard Wagner. Of these,
Wagners is the music most inextricably linked with Nazi Germany. While Wagner clearly held
some contentious views, in particular towards Jews (he published an essay in 1850 entitled
Judaism in Music, accusing Jews of poisoning popular culture), the Nazis took the parts of his
work that they liked and suppressed the rest. In particular, they appropriated the romanticism and
stirring essence for an idealized German past in Parsifal, and Der Ring das Nibelungen figured
strongly in the Nazis' propaganda plans, reinforcing the national myth they had manufactured,
and opening a whole new propaganda front.
Mythology and folktales were extremely important to the Nazis idea of volk and tradition. The
partys views on religion were complex, and in Hitlers case, fairly confused, but they recognized
the power of religious imagery and occultist symbology. Christian imagery was often evoked in
the artwork of propaganda, as were Teutonic gods and goddesses. These efforts were intended to
reinforce the idea of an ancient German national culture, bolstering the Nazis' extreme
nationalism. More peculiarly, eastern spirituality also interested senior officials, and in 1938 the
Nazis made an official visit to Tibet. This may have been prompted by the Nazi's belief in Thule
a sort of Nazi Atlantis, which was purported to be the starting point for the Aryan peoples.
The Communist Party and international Marxism were seen as dangerous opponents to Nazi
Germany, both at home and abroad. Once again propaganda was an effective means of attacking
communist ideology and the Soviet state. Films often portrayed communists as vulnerable and
brainwashed, while posters declared the supremacy of the German people over their Soviet
counterparts. Early on in his career Hitler equated Jews with Communists and loathed them with
almost equal fervor.
Adolf Hitler began work on his sprawling semi auto-biography Mein Kampf (My Struggle)
while imprisoned after the failed Munich Putsch. Combining elements of his own life with
political ideology and violent racial arguments, the book was unsurprisingly (and still is) a
controversial work. Playing on the death of 16 party members in the failed coup, the Nazis
invented a myth around the event which they would continue to play on throughout their time in
power. From the publication of Mein Kampf in 1925 and especially during Hitler's time in
power, the book was incredibly successful, and 10 million copies had been produced by the end
of the war. However, not everyone was enthused. One of Hitlers closest foreign political allies,
Benito Mussolini, described it as a boring tome that I have never been able to read.

Newspapers have always been a powerful means of influencing thought and opinion. The most
notorious of the Nazi newspapers was Der Sturmer (The Attacker). Although separate from the
official party regime and Goerings own departments (he actually forbade it from his offices), it
was a major part of the propaganda war. Published by Julius Streicher, its tabloid style, rabid
anti-semitism and obscene content won it favor with other party officials. Hitler himself praised
its effectiveness in speaking to the man on the street and was said to read it with pleasure, from
first page to last.
While the party entered German homes, it also entered the social sphere, controlling what people
would pay to go and see. A Department of Film was set up in 1933 with the expressed aim of
spreading the National Socialist world view to the entire German people. Primarily it did this
by holding film shows, a frequent and popular occurrence in German cities and towns. Hitler and
Goebbels were both fascinated by the medium and regularly showed films in their own homes.
Two of the most famous examples of Nazi cinema are Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will,
which documents the Nuremburg rally of 1934, and 1940s The Wandering Jew, a documentary
style attack on the Jewish people.
The radio broadcast was recognized by the Nazis as one of the most important propaganda tools
in their arsenal. In 1933, their Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, called radio the eighth
great power and predicted that it will be for the 20th century what the press was to the
nineteenth. He initiated a scheme whereby the German government subsidized the production
and sale of cheap radio sets the Volksempfanger, or peoples receiver' limited in range to
local German and Austrian stations. This placed the party's voice in every home in the country.
By the start of the war, nearly the entire nation had fallen under the radios spell and was
bombarded with speeches and news designed to brainwash the population.
Following the devastating outcome of WWI and the Wall Street of Crash of 1929, Germany was
in a precarious economic position, with hundreds of thousands out of work. To explain this, the
Nazis blamed the Jews. The Nazi Party accused them of being a parasitic race that attached itself
to capitalist nations to destabilize the economy and culture of their host nation. Hitlers own
fanatical anti-semitism became even more pronounced in party policy after the Nazi's rise to
power in 1933. By blaming a minority racial group for all of the country's ills, the Nazis created
a set of scapegoats who could be blamed at every opportunity for almost anything. In posters, art,
cartoons and film, the Jews were equated with rats and caricatured as hook nosed misers, stealing
money from the honest Aryan German workers.
Hitler and his leaders understood the power of propaganda in conveying the party line, and
poster art was often at the heart of the publicity machine. Both at home and in occupied territory,
posters were a powerful means to simply communicate the main Nazi policies, through
simplified and metaphorical imagery. At home, posters often focused on boosting the morale of
production workers, telling them You are the Front! Abroad, the posters offered a romanticized

ideal of the Nazi Party as a force for good, often employing religious imagery which represented
Hitler as a liberating hero.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (or National Socialist German Workers Party) created in the
Third Reich the most extreme and terrifying example of a totalitarian regime the world has ever
seen. It is often wondered quite how a sophisticated and highly developed 20th century nation
was politically overpowered by the Nazis. One answer, and a major factor in the Nazis
effectiveness as a political force, was that not only did they ruthlessly deploy violence against
dissidence, but they also utterly mastered the art of propaganda, fabricating a national ideology
around their twisted beliefs. Here we take a look at some of their most evil and insidiously
effective propaganda techniques.