2 Propaganda and Nazi Germany
Sean Heans
“People were to expect the National-Socialist movement [to] intervene in the economy and in general cultural affairs, and that includes film.” – Joseph Goebbels
Propaganda and Nazi Germany
Film has been used as a tool for many disciplines. Starting from the early scientific attempts to record movement by Muybridge, to the filming or regular life by Lumiere in what is called the cinema of attractions, to the infinite ways in which we use moving images today in microbiology, astronomy, and just the common place ways for us to record our own lives through our camera phones. Contrasting the aforementioned uses, there is perhaps one use for film that is most infamous of all, propaganda. This essay will describe the origin and evolution of propaganda leading up to what is perhaps the most egregious use of propaganda, its use by Nazi Germany. We will also look at some issues of propaganda, particularly its effectiveness and its comparison to what we might today call propaganda. Perhaps, propaganda never went away such as in the way we are bombarded with political Facebook post or political YouTube ads.
Origin and Evolution of Propaganda leading up to the Nazis
Propaganda has a deliberate component; one can test this by asking “Can propaganda be made accidentally?” probably not. Reeves quotes Terrance Quaker’s description of propaganda as “The deliberate attempt by the few to influence the attitudes and behaviour of the many by the manipulation of symbolic communication”. Propaganda has been used over the centuries for many purposes, it started with what may be considered a noble pursuit, then it gained a pejorative connotation (Reeves 11) but in spite of that, Nazi Germany would recognize the value of propaganda, particularly in the film medium. This section describes the origins and evolution of propaganda and attempts to ascertain how the Nazis adopted it and used it.
It is likely that most people think of Nazi Germany when they hear the word “propaganda”, but the word propaganda is much older than the Nazis and began, almost forebodingly, as a way to spread religion. The word propaganda derives from a decision by Pope Gregory XV, who in 1622 issued the Papal Bull Inscrutabili Divinae establishing the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), with a mission of winning back those who had been lost to the Church in the Reformation (Reeves 11). The similarities between a preacher and Hitler are hard to ignore.
Credit: CNS Credit: Keystone/Getty Images
However, Hitler was not the first leader to be filmed, that title goes to Russian Tsar Nicholas II (Reeves 1). According to Reeves, the Tsar showed great interest in film and even built his own cinema in his palace, but it seems he failed to recognize the power of film to influence people. Reeves quotes the Tsar saying: “I consider that the cinema is an empty, totally useless, and even harmful form of entertainme