Nazi Propaganda Analysis

Nazi Propaganda Techniques

In examining the events leading up to the Holocaust and how such a crime of epic proportions could have occurred, it is important to analyze the role that Nazi propaganda played in bringing the German people’s ideals in line with the Nazi party. Widespread and extremely effective, Nazi propaganda manipulated the entire German state by appealing to three basic biases: social and attribution bias, memory bias, and decision-making bias. While the breadth and scope of Nazi propaganda was inexhaustible, this essay will focus on the Nazi’s use of posters in achieving their malicious intents. Nazi propaganda can be grouped into three main categories: those that appealed to the deification of Hitler, those that
Jews were either illustrated as either seedy, degenerate, ugly, masses associated with vermin, or they were portrayed as greedy, fat, and unpleasant elements who sided with the enemy. By taking advantage of the Negativity Bias inherent human nature, the fact that pay more attention to negative images, the Nazis succeeded in associating Jews with those unpleasant mental images. This in turn created a Clustering Illusion, where people were conditioned to see unpleasantness in the Jewish population when there was none present. Eventually, this culminated in creating a Superiority Bias amongst the German people, a state where all responsibility for the success of Nazi Germany was claimed by the Germans and the blame for all failures was laid on the Jewish people. The frequent association of the Jews with the Bolsheviks or the US only heightened a sense of Us. vs. Them, and further alienated the Jewish population within the minds of the German populace. No matter what propaganda technique used, all were eventually aimed at separating the German people from the "others", people who were portrayed as the inferior enemy or agents
Given the unfairness of the treaty of Versailles and the tumultuous economic times, along with the basis laid down in defining the “undesirables”, the Nazi’s propaganda machine found a surfeit of listening ears. Their portrayal of the hard working “Aryan” German family, punished unfairly by the cost of reparations from World War I, succeeded in propagating the Ingroup Bias, the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to other people they perceive as being members of their own group. Many common German citizens, their livelihoods strained and shattered by the incompetence of the Weimar Republic, could relate to the message broadcasted by the Nazi party and found refuge in their sharply patriotic ideals. When the Nazi party starting gaining more and more followers, the Ingroup Bias helped lead to the creation of an overwhelming Bandwagon effect, in which those who felt differently about Hitler 's policies stayed silent and adopted the behaviors of the majority in order to protect their safety. This, in turn, created a Projection Bias, where people subconsciously assumed that all others shared similar values and positions as themselves, further reducing opposition to Nazi beliefs. This vicious cycle effectively led to a totalitarian state where Nazi ideals reigned supreme with little to no opposition, and certainly no