Nazi Propaganda In Elie Wiesel's Night

The Holocaust 'officially' began in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor (prime minister) of Germany and the Nazi party took over the country. There were more than forty-thousand concentration camps throughout Europe between 1933 and 1945 when World War II ended. Hitler wrote in his book Mein Kampf (1926), "Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people... Propaganda works on the general public from the standpoint of an idea and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea," expressing that Hitler and the Nazis' were able to take the Holocaust to such a dramatic point was because of the use of propaganda not only in Germany, but also throughout Europe. Hitler and the Nazis used media such as film, posters, books, music etc. to …show more content…
The Nazi government and Hitler called the acts against Jews, such as the Nuremburg Laws, "restoring order" to convince the public that the Anti-Semitic laws benefitted the country and the population. In Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, at the beginning of the book, the Jewish people of Sighet have not yet been affected by the Anti-Semitic laws in 1941. But in 1944, their government is overcome by Fascists and the German soldiers proceed to occupy Sighet. The fifteen year old Eliezel "had heard about the Fascists, but they were still just an abstraction to [him]" (6), demonstrating that the propaganda of Anti-Semitism and Fascist views traveled to Transylvania (present day Romania). The most effective use of propaganda for the Nazis and Hitler was media, which reached out to all of Europe. But not only did they want to exhibit their messages through media, they also wanted to censor media to Germans which went against the Nazi regime. In 1933, the Nazis raided book stores and libraries to burn the books of Jewish writers and writers whose ideas where different from Hitler and the Nazis. For example, they disregarded authors such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemmingway, Jack London,