Hi, I'm Michael Moynihan for Reason TV, and today we are at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with Steve Lookert, the curator of State of Deception The Power of Nazi Propaganda. We wanted to examine the role of Nazi propaganda, how they used it to facilitate persecution, mass murder, and war. When you think about how quick that Nazi rise to power.
For most of the period of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Party was largely a joke. In 1928, the Nazi Party only had 12 seats in the German parliament out of almost 600. But 1930 gets 107 seats. Then in 1932, it more than doubles that.
They learn how to simplify a message, how to play upon voters'emotions, how to reduce very complicated issues to slogans. This is a braille copy of Mein Kampf. A braille copy of Mein Kampf, contemporaneously.
Were people reading this? Yeah, particularly those that were the propagandists. This was kind of the Bible for them. that they would draw on what was said in there and of course excerpts from Mein Kampf were used everywhere to justify various policies. But this became a bestseller and Hitler made a fortune off the royalties from this.
It was published in 16, 17 different languages. These posters inform us a great deal about Nazi thinking and the ways in which they presented images to the public, whether it's of this kind of... strong heroic figure breaking the chains of slavery, this playing upon dissatisfaction with the status quo, the ways in which they engaged in what today we would call niche marketing.
So it's women who work in the home, farmers, workers. They don't tend to associate the Nazis with the word freedom but they used it endlessly. What was the methodology behind choosing these bright red colors? Hitler talked about how in the early 20s he would create posters for his meetings in red because he understood the way it could provoke people, that it was a way to engage an audience, to get them into those beer halls. So are they consciously drawing from the Bolshevik example?
When Goebbels talked about the power of film, one of the films that he always cited was Battleship Potemkin. What's happening now after 1933-1934? The Nazis saw the importance of controlling the media, this Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
It was created as a cabinet-level post for Joseph Goebbels, who also was in charge of the Nazi Party's propaganda apparatus. So in the state this means newsreels, films, books, radio, libraries. Here we have the great, the big... political show of national socialists, the two attacks on Jews as both being capitalist and communist and Bolsheviks, confused and silly but apparently effective.
So how does one prepare the population for this kind of machinery of destruction? There is an effort made to both present the Jews as a real physical threat to Germany. And also to identify Jews as being the powers behind the enemy.
They would show these Soviet atrocities against the local population and then identify the Jews as the perpetrators of that. In this particular poster dealing with the discovery of a Soviet crime in Vinica to identify Jewish Bolshevik as the perpetrator of that crime. Is this the original painting?
Yes. It is. Yeah. Now the title comes from the New Testament book of John, but instead of having Jesus as a messianic figure, we have Adolf Hitler.
And you can see in the painting the way the light emanates off Adolf Hitler's face over the audience. The audience is portrayed as a kind of a microcosm of German society, but it also emphasizes the importance that Hitler and the Nazis placed on the spoken word. That Adolf Hitler believed that the spoken word far more than the written word was responsible for all the great events in history. It allowed you direct contact with your audience. That is, you could play upon their hopes, fears, and frustrations.
You could get immediate feedback about what worked and what didn't work. And all that became important as you tailored your message. How do you see this as relevant to today?
I mean, what does this tell us about? Today is political propaganda, if anything. An exhibition like this raises questions about how we address propaganda.
Is it through restricting speech, or is it more of the American marketplace of ideas that is the best way to address what one might consider offensive speech? And also, how to evaluate all the information that we're bombarded with today, and how to make educated, informed decisions.