Worldview and persuasion: ideology and propaganda

Imagine an explanation that has an answer to every question: why are people unemployed? Why did Germany lose the war? Why do the parties argue? Why is your neighbour richer than you? And every time, the answer is the same. This is exactly how an ideology works: a closed worldview that claims to explain everything and tolerates no disagreement. Within this worldview, anyone who disagrees does not simply hold a different opinion – they are an enemy or someone who has been misled.

This is what distinguishes it from science and democracy: there, you can test, disprove and revise claims. In an ideology, the conclusion is fixed before anyone has examined the evidence.

The most important source of Nazi ideology is Hitler's book ‘Mein Kampf’, which he wrote in prison after his failed attempt to overthrow the government in München (November 1923); volume 1 appeared in 1925, volume 2 in 1926. It is confused and full of hatred – and after 1933 it became the regime's most widely distributed book: registry offices gave it to newly married couples as a wedding gift. Anyone who read it at the time could have known what was to come. Today, there is a scholarly edition with thousands of explanatory notes so that no one reads the book without commentary. We too quote from it only briefly and with context.

Nazi ideology was not a carefully thought-out system. It was a mixture of prejudices, fears and desires for power that had already been circulating in the 19th century. Hitler combined them into a worldview. Its building blocks were:

1. ‘Racial theory’. The Nazis claimed that humanity was divided into ‘races’ of different worth. The ‘Aryans’ – meaning mainly Germans and other Northern Europeans – were supposedly the ‘master race’, destined to rule. Jews were seen as a ‘counter-race’, while Sinti and Roma, Slavs and people with disabilities were labelled ‘inferior’. This was pseudoscientific: it sounded like biology and was even taught in schools and universities, but had no scientific basis. Human ‘races’ in this sense do not exist.
2. Antisemitism. Hatred of Jews was the central belief in this worldview; it extended as far as genocide. In the Nazi worldview, ‘the Jews’ were to blame for everything: defeat in 1918, capitalism and, at the same time, communism. A separate module in this series explains where this hatred came from and where it led.
3. ‘Living space in the East’ (‘Lebensraum im Osten’). The German people supposedly needed more land, which lay in the East – in Poland and the Soviet Union. The population there was to be expelled, enslaved or killed. A war of conquest was the aim from the start, not an accident.
4. ‘National community’ (‘Volksgemeinschaft’). All Germans were supposed to form a community without classes – ‘the common good before self-interest’ was the slogan. This sounded like solidarity, but it meant that the individual had no rights against the community as a whole. Anyone considered ‘alien to the community’ – Jews, political opponents, people with disabilities and those the regime branded ‘asocial’ (a Nazi catch-all term for homeless people, beggars and anyone who did not fit its idea of ‘order’) – was excluded. The term ‘national community’ therefore belongs in quotation marks: it is a term used by the perpetrators.
5. The Führer principle and the cult of the leader. Orders instead of discussion; obedience instead of elections. Hitler was presented as an infallible saviour.
6. Anti-communism. ‘Bolshevism’ (the Nazi term for communism, named after the Bolsheviks, Lenin's party in Russia) was seen as a mortal enemy – and at the same time as ‘Jewish’. This linked antisemitism to the fear of revolution felt by many middle-class people.
7. Rejection of democracy and human rights. Parliaments, parties and equality before the law were seen as weakness and as ‘un-German’.
8. Social Darwinism. The Nazis applied the idea of ‘survival of the strongest’ to peoples: struggle and war were supposedly laws of nature, and compassion for the ‘weak’ was a mistake. This distorted Darwin's ideas: he described adaptation in nature, not a politics of might.

The diagram gives you an overview of these building blocks. They all come together in the Führer principle and the cult of the leader – these hold the worldview together, while antisemitism drives it.

‘Racial theory’ did not remain just a theory. The regime turned it into law in its very first year. In April 1933, Jewish civil servants were removed from their posts under the ‘Aryan paragraph’ (the Nazis' name for a rule dismissing ‘non-Aryan’, meaning Jewish, civil servants); you will learn more about this in a later module in this series. In July, a law targeting people considered ‘hereditarily diseased’ followed – that is our focus here.

The law of 1933

On 14 July 1933 – the same day as the law banning the formation of new parties – the government passed the ‘Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses’ (Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring). It allowed people to be made infertile against their will (forced sterilisation) if a ‘Hereditary Health Court’ ruled that they had a ‘hereditary disease’: for example, an intellectual disability, epilepsy, certain mental illnesses or ‘severe alcoholism’. By 1945, around 400 000 people had been forcibly sterilised. The regime called this ‘racial hygiene’ – as if it were a matter of cleanliness.

The propaganda behind it

Propaganda prepared the ground by presenting people with disabilities as a ‘cost factor’. A well-known Nazi propaganda poster showed a strong young man carrying a pole across his shoulders, with two people with disabilities hanging from it. The headline said, in effect, that a healthy person helped carry this burden. Below it was a calculation of what a ‘hereditarily diseased’ person supposedly cost the state up to the age of 60 – a five-figure sum in Reichsmark. Even school textbooks contained maths problems of this kind: how many homes could be built if the money spent on ‘lunatic asylums’ (a derogatory term used at the time for psychiatric hospitals) were saved? People were thus reduced to numbers.

The ‘T4’ murder programme

When the war began in 1939, the regime moved from sterilisation to killing. Under the code name ‘T4’ (after the Berlin address Tiergartenstrasse 4, where the planning office was based), patients from hospitals and care institutions were taken to six killing centres and murdered. The regime called this ‘euthanasia’ (Greek for ‘beautiful death’) – a cover word for murder. By August 1941, around 70 000 people had died in this way. When protests emerged – most famously the sermon by the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, in August 1941 – Hitler officially halted the central operation. Historians debate how much these protests influenced the decision. However, the killings continued secretly in the institutions, through medication and deliberate starvation; in total, around 200 000 people or more were murdered. The perpetrators and the killing techniques were later used in the extermination camps.

A name behind the numbers: Ernst Lossa

Behind each of these numbers was a person with a name and a family. One of them was Ernst Lossa, born in Augsburg in 1929. His family belonged to the Jenische (Yenish), a minority with a traditionally itinerant way of life that the Nazi state also excluded. After his mother's death, Ernst was placed in children's homes. Because he would not conform, the authorities labelled him ‘difficult to educate’ and sent him to the Kaufbeuren-Irsee institution in 1942. There, he helped other patients, hid bread for them and observed what happened to them. He was murdered there in August 1944. He was 14 years old.

Remember: A claim about ‘races’ had already become law in 1933 – in April against Jewish civil servants, and in July to permit forced sterilisation. During the war, it became a murder programme conducted in secrecy and under cover names. Sterilisation and murder were prepared for in full public view – through posters and maths problems.

An ideology can only have an effect if it reaches people everywhere. To achieve this, on 13 March 1933 the regime created a ministry of its own: the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), headed by Joseph Goebbels. Propaganda means deliberately influencing opinions and emotions – unlike information, which communicates facts. Goebbels' ministry controlled everything people saw, heard and read:

• Radio. The regime had an inexpensive radio produced, the ‘Volksempfänger’ (‘people's receiver’; price: 76 Reichsmark – higher-end sets cost 200 to 400 Reichsmark). The slogan was: ‘All Germany listens to the Führer.’ In 1933, around a quarter of households had a radio; in 1941, about two thirds did. Hitler's speeches were also broadcast over loudspeakers in workplaces, schools and public squares. Listening to foreign stations was banned from 1939.
• The press. Newspapers were banned or taken over. The Schriftleitergesetz (Editors' Law) of 1933 made journalism a state-regulated ‘public duty’: anyone not on the professional register was forbidden to write, and Jews were excluded from the profession. The Propaganda Ministry also issued daily instructions on what newspapers should report and how.
• Film. Before every feature film, cinemas showed the ‘Wochenschau’ newsreel, with staged reports of success. The director Leni Riefenstahl made films about the Nazi Party rally (‘Triumph des Willens’, 1935) and the Olympic Games – technically innovative, but pure glorification in content.
• Posters and celebrations. Posters with a single image and slogan were everywhere. The calendar was full of Nazi celebrations: 30 January, Hitler's birthday on 20 April, 1 May, and the Nazi Party rallies in Nürnberg in September, with hundreds of thousands of participants, seas of flags, torches, marching music and the ‘cathedral of light’ created by anti-aircraft searchlights.
• Everyday life. Portraits of the Führer hung in government offices and classrooms. The Hitler salute (‘Heil Hitler!’ with a raised arm) was compulsory for civil servants from 1933 and became an ever-present declaration of loyalty – anyone who refused stood out.
• The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. For two weeks, the regime presented itself to the world as peaceful and open-minded: antisemitic signs (‘Jews not welcome’) temporarily disappeared, and the hate-filled newspaper ‘Der Stürmer’ was removed from display cases. Many foreign visitors returned home impressed. The African American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals, visibly disproving the claim of a ‘master race’ – despite that claim, the crowd in the stadium cheered him.

Remember: Propaganda was more than advertising for the NSDAP. It was a monopoly: there was almost no other voice left that could be heard in public.

In ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler openly described how he intended to influence people. Read the quotation as a source written by a perpetrator – it reveals what he thought of his audience:

‘The capacity of the great mass of people to absorb information is very limited, their understanding small, but their forgetfulness great. For this reason, all effective propaganda must limit itself to very few points and keep using them as slogans until even the very last person can reliably grasp the intended idea behind such a phrase.’

— Adolf Hitler, «Mein Kampf», Band 1 (1925), Kapitel 6 «Kriegspropaganda»

Two principles appear directly in this quotation; Hitler sets out a third elsewhere in the same chapter. The regime applied all three from 1933:

1. A few slogans, repeated endlessly (in the quotation). ‘One people, one Reich, one Führer’ and ‘national community’ were meant to create an illusion of solidarity. Alongside them stood hatred: ‘The Jews are our misfortune’ – a phrase from 19th-century antisemitism that the hate-filled newspaper ‘Der Stürmer’ printed as its motto on every front page. The same phrases, over and over, until they sounded like truths.
2. The masses as the target (in the quotation). The focus was on the crowd marching along, rather than the individual thinking for themselves.
3. Emotion instead of reason (elsewhere in the chapter). Propaganda is meant to grip people rather than persuade them through argument – using pride, fear, hatred and hope. If the masses supposedly have little ‘understanding’, the appeal is to feelings rather than arguments.

Notice how Hitler talks about the people he wants to win over: their ‘understanding’ is supposedly small, their ‘forgetfulness’ great. Someone who thinks like this wants to control people, not inform them. This is the difference between propaganda and an argument: an argument expects you to examine it and disagree. Propaganda expects you not to.

You can use six questions to take apart any piece of propaganda – a poster from 1938 just as much as a video from today:

Remember – the analysis questions:

1. Who is speaking? (Source: a party, ministry, association, anonymous source?)
2. To whom? (Target audience: young people, workers, women, people abroad?)
3. Which emotions are being appealed to? (Pride, fear, anger, belonging, pity?)
4. Which enemy images are being created? (Who is ‘to blame’?)
5. What simplification or lie does it contain? (What is left out, distorted or invented?)
6. What is the source's aim? (What are you supposed to do, believe or refrain from doing?)

An example described in words (we do not show Nazi posters): before the referendum on 10 April 1938, through which the regime sought approval for the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria (the Nazis' term for Austria's forced annexation), the NSDAP promoted its cause with posters displaying the slogan ‘One people, one Reich, one Führer’ in large letters – often with a portrait of Hitler gazing solemnly into the distance. Imagine such a poster:

• Who is speaking? The NSDAP and the Propaganda Ministry.
• To whom? All Germans and Austrians – as ‘one people’.
• Emotions? Pride, greatness, belonging; the Führer's pose is meant to convey determination and protection.
• Enemy images? None explicitly – but anyone who does not belong to this ‘one people’ is implicitly excluded.
• Simplification/lie? Three slogans replace all discussion. There is no mention that Austria was ‘annexed’ under pressure and threats of violence, that thousands were arrested in the first few days, or that Austria's approximately 190 000 Jewish people were persecuted.
• Aim? Approval without reflection, obedience and the feeling of being on the winning side.

First, you will consolidate your knowledge of the means of propaganda; then you will apply the questions yourself.

The technology has changed; the principles have not. What Goebbels did with the Volksempfänger and posters can now be achieved in seconds with a smartphone – by states, groups or individuals:

• Emotion instead of reason: posts that make people angry or afraid are shared more often. Algorithms reward this.
• Repetition: a meme or slogan shared hundreds of times eventually feels familiar – and we are more likely to believe something familiar is true.
• The masses as the target: reach matters more than accuracy; something that goes viral is not necessarily true.
• Enemy images: ‘those at the top’, ‘the rich’, ‘the corporations’, ‘foreigners’, ‘the media’ – scapegoats used to explain everything, whatever the political direction.
• Simplification and fabrication: quotations stripped of context, fake screenshots, and AI-generated images and videos (deepfakes) in which people say things they never said.

The analysis questions work here too: who is speaking – and who is really behind them? Who is the post aimed at? What feeling does it stir in you? Who is supposed to be to blame? What is left out? What are you supposed to do – share, hate, stop asking questions? Add three rules: check the source before sharing. Notice your own feelings – strong anger is often intentional. Seek out the opposing view – good information can withstand disagreement. You will practise checking news and misinformation in “Media and how opinions are formed” and “Debate preparation: Should the state be allowed to remove false information?”.

Important: this is about techniques, not a particular party or group today. You recognise propaganda by how it is made – whoever uses it.

You explored why so many Germans voted for the NSDAP in “Weimarer Republik, Weltwirtschaftskrise und der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus”: crisis, unemployment, fear and anger. But why did so many join in after 1933 – even when the persecution was visible? Researchers identify several reasons that usually worked together:

1. Jobs and economic recovery. Unemployment fell from around six million (early 1933) to below one million (1938) – through motorway construction, but above all through rearmament, and partly through statistical tricks. People who had work again after years of hardship often did not ask where it came from.
2. Order. No more street fighting or government crises – many accepted that this ‘calm’ rested on terror.
3. Foreign-policy successes – as seen at the time. The return of the Saarland in 1935, rearmament, the entry of troops into the Rheinland in 1936, and the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria in 1938 – each step violated the Treaty of Versailles, met no resistance from the other powers and strengthened the cult of the leader.
4. Fear. Gestapo, denunciations, camps: dissent could cost you your job, your freedom and sometimes your life.
5. Personal gain. Party membership cards, careers, positions, businesses bought cheaply from Jewish neighbours – joining in paid off.
6. Indifference. As long as others were targeted, many looked away.
7. Propaganda. It provided a justification for everything – and no dissenting voice could be heard any more.

There were all shades of behaviour in between: enthusiastic supporters, followers, bystanders, people who made small acts of defiance by refusing the salute or helping the persecuted, and resistance that cost lives. Bishop von Galen's sermon against the ‘euthanasia’ murders in 1941 shows that protest could have an effect: shortly afterwards, the regime halted the central operation – officially. How much the protests contributed is disputed. Most people remained silent nonetheless.

Remember: There was no single response shared by ‘the Germans’ – people made decisions every day. This question will accompany you through the next modules: who could have done something, and at what point?