Volume 4, Number 10 · June 17, 1965
Nazis
By Walter Laqueur
Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda 1925-1945
by Ernest K. Bramsted
Michigan State University, 488 pp., $12.50
Himmler
by Roger Manvell, by Heinrich Fraenkel
Putnam's, 285 pp., $5.95
The Track of the Wolf: Essays on National Socialism and its Leader, Adolf Hitler
by James H. McRandle
Northwestern, 261 pp., $4.95
It is surely here to stay, Harold Lasswell wrote in 1934 in his entry on 'propaganda' for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. How right he was. We have all been taught about the origins of the word in its modern sense—Urban VIII, the Jesuits and all that. But if the term is of relatively modern date, propaganda itself surely is not, for what were the Crusades if not a masterfully envisaged (if poorly executed) exercise in propaganda and political warfare? Napoleon, too, was no mean practitioner of the art. On a wide scale propaganda was first used in World War One; in 1917-18 the Entente dropped some 100 million leaflets over the German lines. Their content, their make-up, the means of distribution, were extremely primitive by modern standards, but they had some effect on the morale of the German troops. Above all, they had a profound impact on those Germans who after the end of the war pondered the causes of the defeat. Lord Northcliffe became a magic name in right-wing extremist circles in Munich and Berlin; Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: 'I have learned a tremendous lot (unendlich viel) from enemy propaganda in the first world war.' (He also learned from socialist propaganda and ridiculed the bourgeois parties to whom the 'art of propaganda is almost entirely unknown.') He did not need Le Bon to make him realize that the masses were stirred not by logical argument but by appeals to passion; he also seems to have understood fairly early that a lie that goes undetected for a long time, acts as a truth. Above all, Hitler was firmly convinced that propaganda was a terrible weapon in the hands of the experts. He was thinking primarily of the spoken word; there was always the danger that newspaper articles would be clever and sophisticated, i.e., the very opposite of what effective propaganda should be, the crude and persistent hammering home of a single theme (kill the Jews, destroy Marxism, defeat the enemy).
Review, 2695 words
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