Rhetorical Analysis Of Richard Wagner's Speech

Largely dominating the conversation on the Holocaust and concentration camps is the experience which took place in the abhorrent, despicable walls and barbed wire. However, the events that took place to put this “final solution” into motion are just as important if not more, especially if one desires to be watchful of future repetitions of this rhetoric for preventative measures. I would like to argue that unless it can be undoubtedly proven that the general German population was feverishly loyal to the Nazi party, the legitimate governmental dehumanization of Jews was likely facilitated mostly through constant, numbing propaganda campaigns which especially emphasized the battle between the pure and impure, victim and perpetrator, and worthy
Complimenting this solution is the method to communicate the solution to the people in Goebbels’s speech. Wagner dispels myths of the National Socialist party’s views on race. Firstly, he draws upon the idea that the German population has been a victim of racial impurity and perpetration by the Jewish. As he artfully stated, he wants “to rescue a dying people from the edge of the abyss and bring it back to the paths that will lead, according to human reason, to a future in the coming millennium” (Bytwerk 69). The fact that Wagner states “from the edge of the abyss” gives a sense of urgency and desperation to cure the Jewish ‘parasitical disease.’ Moreover, Wagner goes on to proclaim that they aim to carry out God’s work by having each race maintain purity and develop itself to its maximums (Bytwerk 71). To sufficiently communicate this battle between the pure and the impure to the public, Goebbels argues that propaganda as an art must not lie and must be digestible enough for the consumer to be able to readily remember it. Because the population in the streets are not as unreasonable as thought to be, the population would take it to be a general truth, thus allowing the government to “eliminate the Jewish danger in [their] culture because the people had recognized it as the result of [their] propaganda” (Bytwerk 49). These speeches thus show the importance of creating a victim,
Bytwerk analyzed genocidal propaganda in his 2005 article “The Argument for Genocide in Nazi Propaganda.” He argues that the most significant way to argue a “final solution” for the Jews is by convincing the population that it was a matter of life or death. This victim-perpetrator complex had to be communicated effectively enough so that a maximum amount of people would consume this information and be able to take it as an irrefutable, imminent danger. As Kim Wunschman stated in her article on Jewish discrimination, the SS had to transform “German Jews from a heterogeneous minority group within society to outsiders regarded as a homogeneous group of enemies to be excluded from any form of communal life” (Wunschmann 599). They created one enemy that needed to be eliminated from society. In accordance with this goal, propaganda desperately expressed that the “Jews were serious about exterminating Germans, and (less often) that they in turn were grimly serious about exterminating Jews” (Bytwerk 38). One example of this was Theodore N. Kaufman’s strong anti-German rhetoric in USA as a Jewish man which German propagandists used as evidence of Jewish intent (Bytwerk 42). The next step to furthering this message was by rigorous campaigning. As Goebbels stated, propaganda’s effectiveness could only be achieved when there is a concentrated and unified effort of all government entities (Geobbels 6). Naturally, outcome of consistent, near incessant campaigning led to