Adolf Hitler's Propaganda

Adolf Hitler once said, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it” (Hitler 172). This essential belief became the basis of the Nazi Party’s regime and rise to power. The size of the Nazi Party at its formation was infinitesimal in comparison to the powerhouse it grew into. Its surge to power was not a result of simply violence and hard-power utilization, but rather due to effective strategy and a great deal of luck. The economic and socio-political devastation that stemmed from World War I incited the collapse of German society and the Weimar Republic, allowing Hitler to effectively craft propaganda to promote his policies to a highly receptive German public that ended up bearing the stigma of his …show more content…
The Nazis “developed propaganda to a very high state, so that it pervaded all aspects of German popular culture beginning in the 1930’s and extending throughout the war years” (Axelrod). Hitler and the Nazis effectively utilized this propaganda to gain the unwavering support for their diplomatic and economic policies. Hitler put Minister Joseph Goebbels in charge of the Ministry of Propaganda, and he “ordered Nazi-controlled newspapers to print exaggerated stories about the threat of communism while sympathetic radio commentators espoused Nazi doctrine as well” (Marcovitz 39). Whether in the form of printed media, radio, or film, Minister Goebbels was the mastermind behind the propaganda. He was able to appeal to the hardships and complaints of the general people during the time of the depression. In Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf, he claims that “The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses” (Hitler 180). Hitler perceived propaganda as not intended to scientifically train the individual, but rather to appeal to the greater masses of people. With a keen understanding of mass psychology, Hitler centered the Nazi propaganda around the greater public’s emotions and criticisms of the Weimar Republic. Through an emphasis on anti-Semitism and anticommunism, the Nazi Party “very largely won support in the upper and upper middle classes, which, as far as can be determined today, voted Nazi more readily than did all other segments of German society” (Hartmann). Hitler utilized his platform to also gain the support of the working class and industrialists in general. The nucleus of Hitler’s propaganda was connecting the economic and moral devastation of the