Hitler: War Propaganda

US war poster, 1917.

“War Propaganda” is Chapter 6 of “Mein Kampf” (1924), written by Adolf Hitler nine years before he took over Germany. In this chapter he learns from the success of US and British war propaganda during the First World War (1914-18) and the failure of German propaganda. Towards the end of the war, Germans were believing the enemy over their own government!

War propaganda must:

1. Appeal to the masses.
2. Appeal to the heart, not the head.
3. Be baked down to a few simple slogans.
4. Be consistent.
5. Be one-sided.
6. Show no doubt.
7. Make men want to die for their country.
8. Hold up under battlefield conditions.
9. Be repeated over and over so that it is pounded into everyone’s head.

Anglo (US and British) propaganda was all of that. German propaganda was none of it – and wound up doing more harm than good.

Important qualities:

One-sided:

“it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favorable to its own side.”

Repetitive:

“only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.”

Consistent:

“[Anglo propaganda] confined itself to a few themes, which were meant exclusively for mass consumption, and it repeated these themes with untiring perseverance. …

“At first all of it appeared to be idiotic in its impudent assertiveness. Later on it was looked upon as disturbing, but finally it was believed.”

Which shows how repeating a message enough times will make it believable.

Win hearts, not minds:

“it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning powers. All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed.”

Show no doubt:

“The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another.”

Slogans:

“The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula.”

Battlefield conditions: German propaganda painted Anglos as easy to beat. Anglo propaganda painted Germans as “Huns” and “barbarians”. So while Anglo soldiers found their picture of Germans confirmed on the battlefield, German soldiers found they had been misled, losing trust in German propaganda and losing heart.

The Big Lie is not in this chapter but in Chapter 10, where Jewish propaganda comes up:

“the broad masses of a nation … more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, … they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

– Abagond, 2019.

See also:

• Hitler
  • Race and People – also from “Mein Kampf”
  • The rise of Hitler
  • Learning from Vienna in the 1930s
• Putin/Trump
  • firehose of falsehood
  • Russian trolls
  • Autocracy: Rules for Survival
• US media
  • The propaganda model
  • advertisement
• Greek
  • Aristotle – rhetoric

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