From the print edition of The New American

“In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.”

— Oath taken by new members of the Jungvolk, the junior division of the Hitler Youth

Through 1939, the Hitler Youth counted among its membership as much as 63 percent of all 10- to 18-year-old children in Germany. After membership became compulsory in 1939, membership reached approximately 90 percent of those that age. Structuring the daily lives — and taking advantage — of the nation’s children through the Hitler Youth organization was no accidental development, but was, in fact, a key strategy of the regime.

The Hitler government understood that capturing and using the youth of the nation was central to its goal of a total state, and ultimately, to a thousand-year Reich. Properly indoctrinated, rather than provided with a classical education, the German youth would be prepared to be obedient subjects, rather than independent citizens, in the future dystopia. Secondarily, a fawning cadre of children, easily manipulated into worshipping the state and its leader, was a potent source of propaganda that could be used to mold and manipulate public opinion at home and abroad. Who could fear and oppose Hitler as a tyrant if millions of innocent children loved him as a father? Who could oppose the state, when the nation’s children had evidently spurned their parents to embrace the party and state as the new family?

“In their desire to establish a total state,” wrote Pennsylvania State University historian Jackson Spielvogel in Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, “the Nazis understood the importance of winning over the youth to their ideology. The future was theirs if they succeeded.”

In a great many areas, the Nazis, i.e., National Socialists, were pioneers in the systematization and industrialization of evil, elevating to a demonic “art” the total state’s engines of destruction. The scholar Anthony Rhodes, a veteran of the British Expeditionary Force who was at Dunkirk for the evacuation and went on after the war to a career as a teacher, novelist, and foreign correspondent for the British press, began his 1987 study of wartime propaganda by noting the pioneering role of the Nazi state.

“When on February 28, 1933, the Reichstag building in Berlin was set on fire, Chancellor Adolf Hitler obtained an emergency decree from President Paul von Hindenburg placing restrictions on personal liberty, including freedom of the press,” Rhodes noted in Propaganda, The Art of Persuasion: World War II. “Thirteen days later, on March 13, the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda was founded under the direction of Dr. Josef Goebbels, to control the press as well as all other means of expression — radio, film, art, and literature. It is most appropriate that propaganda in Nazi Germany should have been considered worthy of an entire government department. No ‘Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda’ had ever existed before, in Germany or in any other country.”

To many, Rhodes included, it seems reasonable to view the Nazis as innovators in the use of new forms of propaganda. This, however, is not entirely true. The Nazis did, in fact, employ prop-aganda on an “industrial scale” not previously seen elsewhere, something that foreshadowed our own present age of “post-truth” and “fake news.” But in this, they merely refined and extended prop-aganda tactics that had been developed years earlier, including both the use of children in propaganda and the targeting of children with propaganda. And much of this was developed in the Western liberal “democracies,” including  the United States, years before the Nazi takeover of Germany.

Nazi “Strength” and “Protection”

The growth of the Nazi state was built on the notion, firmly believed by Hitler, that the “masses” desired strength and protection. The demon meditated upon this in the pages of Mein Kampf and later expanded upon the theme in comments to Herman Rauschnigg, according to Rhodes. “Haven’t you ever seen a crowd collecting to watch a street brawl?” Rhodes quotes Hitler as having told Rauschnigg. “Brutality and physical strength is what they respect. The man in the street respects nothing more than strength and ruthlessness — women too, for that matter.”

Early Nazi propaganda posters played off this theme of the German people — women and children in particular — needing a strong leader to save them from the threats surrounding them. One such poster shows a German mother, fist clutched to her lips in distress, her eyes downcast with fear, while a frightened child — a girl — clutches at her breast, gazing at her in a desperate plea for help. Meanwhile, a boy, younger, holds tight to her leg, head turned away and down, fearful to look up. “Deutscher Frauen,” proclaims the poster in bold Teutonic text, “Denkt an Eure Kinder; wählt HITLER” (“German women, think of your children, vote Hitler”).

The idea that Hitler was the great champion who would save the people was carefully cultivated by Goebbels in his prop-aganda efforts. “The simplest people,” Goebbels wrote of Hitler in his newspaper, Der Angriff, “approach him with confidence, because they feel he is their friend and protector.”

This theme was carried through most Nazi propaganda, whether it employed children as a motif or not. Another Nazi poster supporting the 1932 election depicted a mass of workmen, sketched in ink to gritty effect, their eyes hooded and brows wrinkled. The overall impression of the workmen in the piece is despondency and despair. “Unsere letzte Hoffnung: Hitler” the text of the poster proclaims. “Our last hope, Hitler.” Only the National Socialist strongman could save the women, the children, and the workers, at least according to party propaganda.

It is easy to scoff at this propaganda from the perspective of the present. The manipulation is so transparently ridiculous that it is difficult to imagine anyone giving it credence. Yet it was incredibly successful. “When every contemporary book people read, every newspaper, every film they see, every broadcast they hear for years on end is permeated with the same spirit, the same propaganda, they are no longer able to relate what they see and hear to alternative reports,” Rhodes noted in describing the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda. In fact, the impact of the Nazi propaganda effort was underscored by even William Shirer, the American foreign correspondent who covered Germany in the 1930s for the Hearst newspapers and for CBS. In his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer recounted how the incessant propaganda even disturbed his own thinking.

“I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press,” Shirer recalled. “Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich … and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often mislead it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.”

Propaganda in the Free World

An American reading about propaganda in Nazi Germany will be predisposed to a certain: more here