Jews racial division, which is the basis of racial policies of Nazi Germany. Only people with four German grandparents (four white circles – the first table on the left) were considered to be "full-blooded" Germans. German nationals with three or four Jewish ancestors in their
family tree (fourth and fifth column from the left) were designated by as Jews. The center column shows the people of "mixed blood" (
Mischlinge), depending on the amount of Jewish ancestry. All Jewish grandparents were automatically defined as members of the Jewish religious community, regardless of the extent to which they identified with this group.
Antisemitic propaganda was a common theme in Nazi propaganda. However, it was occasionally reduced for tactical reasons, such as for the
1936 Olympic Games. It was a recurring topic in Hitler's book
Mein Kampf (1925–26), which was a key component of
Nazi ideology. Early in his membership in the Nazi Party, Hitler presented the Jews as behind all of Germany's moral and economic problems, as featuring in both communism and international capitalism. He blamed "money-grubbing Jews" for all of Weimar Germany's economic problems. He also drew upon the antisemitic elements of the
stab-in-the-back myth to explain the defeat in World War I and to justify Nazi views as self-defense. In one speech, when Hitler asked who was behind Germany's failed war efforts, the audience erupted with "The Jews". Some Nazis feared their movement lost its antisemitic edge, and Hitler privately assured them that he regarded his previous views as mild. Hitler in
Mein Kampf describes Jews as "a dangerous bacillus". Afterwards, Hitler publicly muted his antisemitism; speeches would contain references to Jews, but ceased to be purely antisemitic fulminations, unless such language would appeal to the audience. Still, the antisemitic planks remained in the Nazi Party platform. Even before they ascended to power, Nazi essays and slogans would call for boycotts of Jews. Jews were associated with money-lenders,
usury and banks, and were portrayed as the enemy of small shopkeepers, small farmers and artisans. Jews were blamed for the
League of Nations, for pacifism, for
Marxism, for international capitalism, for homosexuality, for prostitution, and for the cultural changes of the 1920s. In 1933, Hitler's speeches spoke of serving Germany and defending it from its foes: hostile countries, Communism, liberals, and culture decay, but not Jews. A propaganda poster supporting the boycott declared that "in Paris, London, and New York German businesses were destroyed by the Jews, German men and women were attacked in the streets and beaten, German children were tortured and defiled by Jewish sadists", and called on Germans to "do to the Jews in Germany what they are doing to Germans abroad." The actual effect, of apathy outside Nazi strongholds, caused Nazis to turn to more incremental and subtle effects. In 1935 the first set of antisemitic laws went into effect in Nazi Germany; the Nuremberg Laws forbid the Jews and political opponents from civil service. They classified people with four German grandparents as "German or kindred blood", while people were classified as Jews if they descended from three or four Jewish grandparents. A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a crossbreed, of "mixed blood". These laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and prohibited sexual relations and marriages between Jews and other Germans. A further decree of the laws in November 1935 extended those prohibitions to "Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring" as well. The
Aryan Paragraph, which excluded Jews and other "non-Aryans" from many jobs and public offices, was officially justified with overt antisemitism, depicting Jews as have undue representation in the professions. Anti-Jewish measures were presented as defensive. Nazi speakers were instructed to say that Jews were being treated gently. Stock answers to counter-arguments were provided for them. Jews were attacked as the embodiment of capitalism. After six issues devoted to ethnic pride,
Neues Volk featured an article on the types of the "Criminal Jew"; Goebbels defended Nazi racial policies, even claiming that the bad publicity was a mistake for Jews, because it brought forward the topic for discussion. At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels declared that "
Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself." The Nazis described the Jews as
Untermenschen (subhumans); this term was utilized repeatedly in writings and speeches directed against them, the most notorious example being a 1942 SS publication with the title "
Der Untermensch" which contains an antisemitic tirade. In the pamphlet "The SS as an Anti-bolshevist Fighting Organization", Himmler wrote in 1936: "We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without." By the mid-1930s, textbooks with more antisemitic content were used in the class room. (This sometimes backfired, with antisemitic caricatures being so crude that the children were unable to recognize their Jewish classmates in them.) "The Jewish Question in Education" assured teachers that children were not only capable of understanding it, but that their sound racial instincts were better than their parents', as witness that the children would run and hide when a Jewish cattle dealer came to deal with their parents. Even children's books such as
Der Giftpilz promoted antisemitism. Academics, in view of increasing Nazi pressure, produced reams of "racial science" to demonstrate the differences between Jews and Germans, frequently ignoring all other races. In books, the measures were presented as reasonable and even self-defense. This element could also appear in other propaganda in which it was not the centerpiece. The villains of
Hans Westmar were not only Communists but Jews as well. Goebbels, despite his personal racism, approved only two comedies and one historical drama with overt antisemitism.
Gerhard Wagner, at the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, discussed the racial law more in terms of the pure and growing race than the evil of the Jews. This reflected a desire to subtly present their racial doctrines, as apparently objective science. The ground was laid for later antisemitic works by heavy emphasis on the ethnic chauvinism. Antisemitic propaganda was in particularly suppressed during the Olympics, when
Der Stürmer was not allowed to be sold on the streets. Hitler gave a speech on January 30 1939 which opened with praise for the flowering of the German people, but went on to declare
his prophecy, “If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
The Holocaust In 1941, when Jews were forced to wear the
Star of David, Nazi pamphlets instructed people to remember antisemitic arguments at the sight of it, particularly Kaufman's
Germany Must Perish!. This book was also heavily relied on for the pamphlet "The War Goal of World Plutocracy".
The Holocaust was not a topic even for discussion in ministerial meetings; the one time the question was raised it was dismissed as being of no use in propaganda. Even officials in the Propaganda Ministry were told atrocities against Jews were enemy propaganda. But with the Holocaust, aggressive antisemitic propaganda was therefore implemented. The alleged documentary
The Eternal Jew purported to show the wretched lives and destruction wrought by Jews, who were lower than vermin, and the historical drama
Jud Süß depicted a Jew as gaining power over the Duke by lending him money and using the power to oppress his subjects and enable himself to rape a pure German woman, by having her husband arrested and tortured. Wartime posters frequently described the Jews as responsible for the war, and being behind the Allies. Fervently antisemitic pamphlets were published, including alleged citations from Jewish writing, which were generally poor translations, out of context, or invented. An attack on "Americanism" asserted that the Jews were behind it. The difficulty of simultaneously maintaining anti-Communist propaganda, and propaganda against Great Britain as a plutocracy also led to increased emphasis on antisemitism, describing Jews as being behind both.
Outside Germany Antisemitic propaganda was also spread outside Germany. Ukrainians were told that they had acted against Jews many times in the past for their "high-handedness" and would now demand full payment for all injuries.
in 1935. Above the display there are the antisemitic slogans "With Der Stürmer'' against Judah" and "The Jews are our misfortune".
In Der Stürmer The propaganda periodical
Der Stürmer always made antisemitic material a mainstay, throughout its run before and during Nazi power. It exemplified the crude antisemitism that Hitler concealed to win popular and foreign support, but its circulation increased throughout the Nazi regime. Even after Streicher was under house arrest for gross misuse of office, Hitler provided him with resources to continue his propaganda. Salacious accounts of sexual offenses featured in nearly every issue. The
Reichstag fire was attributed to a Jewish conspiracy. It supported an early plan to transport all Jews to Madagascar, but this prospect was dropped as soon as it became an actual possibility. Later, taking
Theodore N. Kaufman with the importance that the Nazis generally attributed to him, urged that Jews intended to exterminate Germany, and urged that only with the destruction of Jews would Germany be safe. Its "Letter Box" encouraged the reporting of Jewish acts; the unofficial style helped prevent suspicion of propaganda, and lent it authenticity. A textbook written by Elvira Bauer in 1936, entitled
Trust No Fox on his Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath, was designed to show Germans that the Jews could not be trusted. It portrayed the Jews as inferior, untrustworthy and parasitic. A further antisemitic children's book entitled
The Poisonous Mushroom, written by Ernst Hiemer, was handed out in 1938. Again it portrayed the Jews as worthless subhumans and through a text containing seventeen short stories, as the antithesis of Aryan humanity. The Jew was dehumanized and was seen as a poisonous mushroom. The book included encompassed strands of both religious and racial antisemitism towards the Jews. The contents of this book were following themes "How to Tell a Jew", "How Jewish Traders Cheat", "How Jews Torment Animals", "Are there Decent Jews?" and finally "Without Solving the Jewish Question, No Salvation for Mankind". Two years later by the same author another textbook which attacked the Jews through racial antisemitism and decrying the evils of
racial miscegenation. In this text, Jews were portrayed as bloodsuckers. He claimed Jews were equal to tapeworms, claiming that "Tapeworm and Jew are parasites of the worst kind. We want their elimination. We want to become healthy and strong again. Then only one thing will help: Their extermination." The aim of such texts was to try and justify the Nazis racial policy on Jews. Der Stürmer was frequently used in schools as part of Nazi "education" to the German youth. Despite its overly antisemitic status, the paper published letters from teachers and children approving of it.
Communists Adolf Hitler's anti-communism was already a central feature of his book
Mein Kampf. Nazi propaganda depicted Communism as an enemy both within Germany and all of Europe. Communists were the first group attacked as enemies of the state when Nazis ascended to power. In a speech in 1927 to the Bavarian regional parliament the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, publisher of
Der Stürmer, used the term "Untermensch" referring to the communists of the German
Bavarian Soviet Republic: "It happened at the time of the [Bavarian] Soviet Republic: When the unleashed subhumans rambled murdering through the streets, the deputies hid behind a chimney in the Bavarian parliament." Prior to their seizure of powers, conflicts with Communists, and attempts to win them over, featured frequently in Nazi propaganda. Newspaper articles presented Nazis as innocent victims of Communist assaults. An election flyer aimed at converting Communists. Articles advising Nazi propagandist discussed winning over the workers from the Marxists. Election slogans urged that if you wanted Bolshevism, to vote Communist, but to remain free Germans, to vote Nazi. Goebbels, aware of the value of publicity (both positive and negative), deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, including violent attacks on the
Communist Party of Germany. He used the death of
Horst Wessel who was killed in 1930 by two members of the Communist Party of Germany as a propaganda tool against "Communist subhumans". , according to Goebbels, would "destroy all social order, destroy all culture and all ethnic life, creating chaos in which humanity threatens to collapse." A later illustration emphasised
Judeo-Bolshevism The spectre of Communism was used to win dictatorial powers. The
Reichstag fire was presented by Nazi newspaper as the first step in a Communist seizure of power. Hitler made use of it to portray Nazis as the only alternative to the Communists, fears of which he whipped up. This propaganda resulted in an acceptance of anti-Communist violence at the time, though antisemitic violence was less approved of. When the Pope attacked the errors of Nazism, the government's official response was a note accusing the Pope of endangering the defense against world Bolshevism. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Communists were among the first people that were sent to concentration camps. They were sent because of their ties with the Soviet Union and because Nazism greatly opposed Communism. The
Spanish Civil War began the propaganda of portraying Germany as a protector against "
Jewish Bolshevism", making heavy use of atrocity stories. Before the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, from 1936 to 1938, substantial anti-Bolshevist campaigns were conducted. In 1937 the
Reichspropagandaleitung had an anti-Bolshevist exhibit travel to major cities. The first declaration of the Pact presented it as a genuine change, but this was unpalatable to the Nazi faithful and the line was soon watered down even before its violation. A weekly propaganda poster declared that the soldiers would liberate Europe from Bolshevism. Anti-Communist films were re-issued, Guidelines issued to the army described the Soviet commissars as inhuman and hate-filled. The term
Iron Curtain was invented to describe this state. This was supplemented with a pamphlet and "documentary film" of the same title. Also in 1942, the Nazi government believed Churchill's fall was possible, which Goebbels chose to spin as England surrendering Europe to Bolshevism. In 1943, the defeat at Stalingrad led to a serious Anti-Bolshevist campaign in view of the possibility of defeat. The
Katyn massacre was exploited in 1943 to drive a wedge between Poland, Western Allies, and the Soviet Union, and reinforce the Nazi propaganda line about the horrors of Bolshevism and American and British subservience to it. The negative impact of Soviet policies implemented in the 1930s were still fresh in the memory of Ukrainians. These included the Holodomor of 1933, the Great Terror, the persecution of intellectuals during the Great Purge of 1937–38, the massacre of Ukrainian intellectuals after the annexation of Western Ukraine from Poland in 1939, the introduction and implementation of Collectivisation. As a result, the population of whole towns, cities and villages, greeted the Germans as liberators which helps explain the unprecedented rapid progress of the German forces in the occupation of Ukraine. The Ukrainians at first had been told it was being freed from Communism;—as, indeed, potential Nazis. Literature, too, depicted heroic German workers who were taken in by international Marxism, but whose Aryan nature revolted on learning more of it.
Der Giftpilz had a man tell
Hitler Youth members that once he had been a Communist, but he had realized that they were led by Jews who were trying to sacrifice Germany for Russia's benefit. From very early on after the invasion of the Soviet Union, permission was given to eliminate all communists:
Capitalists Capitalism was also attacked as morally inferior to German values In that speech, Goebbels claimed that "English capitalists want to destroy Hitlerism" to retain its imperial status and harmful economic policies. This was portrayed as part of a Jewish conspiracy that supposedly promoted both
Communism and plutocracy, so the Nazis described Jews as being behind both. as opposed to plutocratic England, a political divide that Goebbels described as "England is a capitalist democracy" and "Germany is a socialist people's state." Initially, Hitler wanted to have an alliance with the United Kingdom; however, after the war started, they were denounced as "the Jew among the Aryan peoples" and as plutocrats fighting for money. Another major theme was the difference between British "plutocracy" and Nazi Germany. German newspapers and newsreels often pictured photos and footage of British unemployed and slums together with unfavourable commentary about the differences in living standards of the working class of Nazi Germany vs that of the working class living under British "plutocracy". Simultaneously, propaganda presented them as tools of the Communists. A German parody of a stamp depicting King George and Queen Elizabeth replaced the queen with Stalin and added a hammer, sickle, and stars of David. The
Parole der Woche weekly wall newspaper declared that the United States and Britain had agreed to let Stalin take Europe. Using propaganda to present the Jews as being behind both helped juggle the issues of opposing "plutocracy" and Communism at once. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, propaganda resumed, quickly linking the attack with British forces, which simplified the task of attacking both Communism and "plutocracy" at once. It preferred such "non-intellectual" virtues as loyalty, patriotism, duty, purity, and blood, and allegedly produced a pervasive contempt for intellectuals. Both overt statements and propaganda in books favored sincere feeling over thought, because such feelings, stemming from nature, would be simple and direct. In
Mein Kampf, Hitler complained of biased over-education, brainwashing, and a lack of instinct and will and in many other passages made his anti-intellectual bent clear. Intellectuals were frequently the butts of Hitler's jokes.
Hitler Youth and the
League of German Girls were overtly instructed to aim for character-building rather than education. The theory offered for Nazism was developed only after practice, which had denigrated expert thinking, only to seek out intellectuals who could be brought to support it.
Sturmabteilung speakers were used, though reliance on them sometimes offended well-educated audiences, but their blunt and folksy manner often had their own appeal. One popular Munich speaker, declaring biological research boring, called instead on racial emotions; their "healthy ethnic instincts" would reveal the quality of the Aryan type. This included an unrelentingly optimistic view. Education Minister Rust ordered teachers training colleges to relocate from "too intellectual" university centers to the countryside, where they could be more readily indoctrinated and would also benefit from contact with the pure German peasantry. An SS paper declared that IQ varied inversely with male infertility, and medical papers declared that the spread of educational pursuits had brought down the birth rate. This frequently related to the
blood and soil doctrines and an organic view of the German people. "Blood and soil" plays, for instance, depicted a woman rejecting her bookish fiancé in order to marry an estate owner. It also related to antisemitism, as Jews were often accused of being intellectual and having a destructive "critical spirit". The
book burnings were hailed by Goebbels as ending "the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism."
Russians hanged by German forces in January 1943 Russia was the primary target of Hitler's expansionist foreign policy. In his book,
Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler dedicated a chapter to Eastern policy and detailed his plans for gaining "living space" (
Lebensraum) in the East. He called on the German people to "secure its rightful land on this earth," and announced: Because the Russian people were Slavic, not Germanic, the Soviet Union was also attacked on racial grounds for "living space" as Nazi ideology believed that
only the Nordic people (referred to as the Germanic people) represented the
Herrenvolk (
master race) which was to expand to the East (
Drang nach Osten). To Hitler,
Operation Barbarossa was a "war of annihilation", being both an ideological war between German Nazism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the Germans and the Bolshevik, Jewish, Gypsies and Slavic
Untermenschen (
Generalplan Ost). Influenced by the guidelines, in a directive sent out to the troops under his command, General Erich Hoepner of the Panzer Group 4 stated: Heinrich Himmler in a speech to the Eastern Front Battle Group "Nord" declared: During the war, Himmler published the pamphlet "Der Untermensch" (The Subhuman) which featured photographs of ideal Aryans contrasted with photographs of the ravages of barbarian races (Jews) from the days of Attila and Genghis Khan to massacres in the Jewish-dominated
Soviet Union. Hitler believed that after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the war in the East was to destroy
Bolshevism, as well as aiming to ruin the Great Russian Empire, and a war for German expansion and economic exploitation. Russians were termed "Asiatic" and the Red Army as "Asiatic Hordes". The troops were told that in World War I, the Russian troops had often feigned death or surrender, or donned German uniforms, in order to kill German soldiers. Events such as the
Nemmersdorf massacre and
Metgethen massacre were also used by German propaganda to strengthen the fighting spirit on the eastern front towards the end of the war.
Czechs and Slovaks Until the end of
Czechoslovakia in March 1939, that state was a major target of abuse. Czechoslovakia was represented as an "abomination" created by the
Treaty of Versailles, an artificial state that should never had been created. Moreover, Czechoslovakia was frequently accused of engaging in some sort of genocide against the ethnic Germans of the
Sudetenland with German media making recurrent and false claims of massacres of Sudetenlanders. In addition, the Czechoslovak-Soviet treaty of 1935 was represented as an aggressive move aimed at Germany. A particular favourite claim was that Czechoslovakia was a "Soviet air-craft carrier" in Central Europe, namely that were secret
Red Air Force bases in Czechoslovakia that would allow the Soviets to bomb and destroy German cities. Eventually in January 1934 the
German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact was signed and all attacks against Poland ceased. A sign of the change occurred in 1933 when a German professor published a book that was given much media attention calling for German-Polish friendship, and praised the "particularly close political and cultural relationship" between Germany and Poland that was said to be 1,000 years old. For many years, it was forbidden to discuss the German minority in Poland, and this continued through into early 1939, even while newspapers were asked to press the matter of Danzig. The reasons for this lay with the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934, an attempt on the part of Germany to split the
Cordon sanitaire as the French alliance system in Eastern Europe was known. Propaganda attacks on Poland would inspire the Poles to doubt the sincerity of Germany's policy of rapprochement with Poland. In 1935, when two secretaries at the German War Ministry were caught providing state secrets to their lover, a Polish diplomat, the two women were beheaded for high treason while the diplomat was declared
persona non grata. The American historian
Gerhard Weinberg observed that for many Germans in the Weimar Republic, Poland was an abomination, whose people were seen as "an East European species of cockroach". Nazi propaganda demanded that
Danzig should be returned to Germany. Since the
Treaty of Versailles separated Danzig (Polish: Gdańsk) from Germany and it became part of the semi-autonomous city-state
Free City of Danzig. The population rose from 357,000 (1919) to 408,000 in 1929, according to the official census 95% of whom were Germans. Germans who favored reincorporation into Germany received political and financial support from the Nazi regime. Nazi Germany officially demanded the return of Danzig to Germany along with an extraterritorial (meaning under German
jurisdiction) highway through the area of the Polish Corridor for land-based access between those parts of Germany. There was a lot of German pro-Nazi supporters in Danzig, in the early 1930s the local Nazi Party capitalized on pro-German sentiments and in 1933 garnered 50% of vote in the parliament. Hitler used the issue of the status of the city as a pretext for attacking Poland and in May 1939, during a high-level meeting of German military officials explained to them:
It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our Lebensraum in the east, adding that there will be no repeat of the Czech situation, and Germany will attack Poland at first opportunity, after isolating the country from its Western Allies. As the Nazi demands increased, German-Polish relations rapidly deteriorated. In the spring of 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, a major anti-Polish campaign was launched, asserting such claims as forced labor of ethnic Germans, persecution of them, Polish disorder, Poles provoking border incidents, and aggressive intentions from its government. Newspapers wrote copiously on the issue. In attempts to try and justify the Nazis invasion of Poland,
Goebbels produced photographs and other evidence for allegations that ethnic Germans had been massacred by Poles.
Bloody Sunday was presented in the manner most favorable to Nazi propaganda. The nazis used the
Gleiwitz incident to justify their invasion of Poland, although the incident was set up by
Himmler and
Heydrich using
concentration camp inmates dressed in Polish uniforms' It was alleged that the Poles had attacked a German radio station using the prisoners, who were all murdered at the scene. today. It was where the Germans staged the
Gleiwitz incident to justify invasion of Poland in 1939. Germany
invaded Poland on September 1 after having signed a
non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in late August. The German attack began in Danzig, with a bombardment of Polish positions at
Westerplatte by the German battleship
Schleswig-Holstein, and the landing of German infantry on the peninsula. Outnumbered Polish defenders at Westerplatte resisted for seven days before running out of ammunition. Meanwhile, after a fierce day-long
fight (1 September 1939), defenders of the Polish Post office were tried and executed then buried on the spot in the Danzig quarter of
Zaspa in October 1939. In 1998 a German court overturned their conviction and sentence. The city was officially annexed by Nazi Germany and incorporated into the
Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia. The death of some Polish cavalry soldiers, caused by tanks, created a myth that they had attacked the tanks, which German propaganda used to promote German superiority. Nazi propaganda in October 1939 told Germans to view all ethnic Poles, Gypsies (Romani) and Jews on the same level as
Untermenschen. They were referred to as "
Polonized German children" or "Children of German descent" or even "German orphans". Germans were informed that the children's birth certificates had been falsified, to show them as Poles and rob them of their German heritage.
Americans Anti-American propaganda dealt heavily with a lack of "ethnic unity" in the United States. American culture was portrayed as childish, and Americans as unable to appreciate European culture. This drew on a long tradition, from the time of German Romanticism, that America was
kulturlose Gesellschaft, a society incapable of culture. Goebbels gave a speech on American negative reactions to anti-Jewish campaigns in 1938, to call for their stopping their criticism. Hitler declared America as a "mongrel nation", grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews and the Americans were a "mongrel people" incapable of higher culture or great creative achievements. Newspapers were warned, soon after war broke out, to avoid portraying news in a manner that would embarrass American isolationists, and that the United States was considerably more hostile than it had been before World War I. ==Values==