Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume One: A Reckoning
Chapter VI: War Propaganda
EVER since I have been scrutinizing political events, I havetaken a tremendous interest in propagandist activity. I saw that the Socialist-Marxistorganizations mastered and applied this instrument with astounding skill.And I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art whichhas remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Socialmovement, especially in Lueger's time, achieved a certain virtuosity onthis instrument, to which it owed many of its successes.
But it was not until the War that it became evident what immenseresults could be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. Here again,unfortunately, all our studying had to be done on the enemy side, for theactivity on our side was modest, to say the least. The total miscarriageof the German 'enlightenment ' service stared every soldier in the face,and this spurred me to take up the question of propaganda even more deeplythan before.
There was often more than enough time for thinking, and theenemy offered practical instruction which, to our sorrow, was only too good.
For what we failed to do, the enemy did, with amazing skilland really brilliant calculation. I, myself, learned enormously from thisenemy war propaganda. But time passed and left no trace in the minds ofall those who should have benefited; partly because they considered themselvestoo clever to from the enemy, partly owing to lack of good will.
Did we have anything you could call propaganda?
I regret that I must answer in the negative. Everything thatactually was done in this field was so inadequate and wron
from the very start that it certainly did no good and sometimes did actualharm.
The form was inadequate, the substance was psychologically wrong:a careful examination of German war propaganda ca: lead to no other diagnosis.
There seems to have been no clarity on the very first question:Is propaganda a means or an end?
It is a means and must therefore be judged with regard to itsend. It must consequently take a form calculated to support the aim whichit serves. It is also obvious that its aim can vary in importance from thestandpoint of general need, and that the inner value of the propaganda willvary accordingly. The aim for which we were fighting the War was the loftiest,the most overpowering, that man can conceive: it was the freedom and independenceof our nation, the security of our future food supply, and-our nationalhonor; a thing which, despite all contrary opinions prevailing today, neverthelessexists, or rather should exist, since peoples without honor have sooneror later lost their freedom and independence, which in turn is only theresult of a higher justice, since generations of rabble without honor deserveno freedom. Any man who wants to be a cowardly slave can have no honor)or honor itself would soon fall into general contempt.
The German nation was engaged in a struggle for a human existence,and the purpose of war propaganda should have been to support this struggle;its aim to help bring about victory.
When the nations on this planet fight for existence-when thequestion of destiny, 'to be or not to be,' cries out for a solution-thenall considerations of humanitarianism or aesthetics crumble into nothingness;for all these concepts do not float about in the ether, they arise fromman's imagination and are bound up with man. When he departs from this world,these concepts are again dissolved into nothingness, for Nature does notknow them. And even among mankind, they belong only to a few nations orrather races, and this in proportion as they emanate from the feeling ofthe nation or race in question. Humanitarianism and aesthetics would vanisheven from a world inhabited by man if this world were to lose the racesthat have created and upheld these concepts.
But all such concepts become secondary when a nation is fightingfor its existence; in fact, they become totally irrelevant to the formsof the struggle as soon as a situation arises where they might paralyzea struggling nation's power of selfpreservation. And that has always beentheir only visible result.
As for humanitarianism, Moltke said years ago that in war itlies in the brevity of the operation, and that means that the most aggressivefighting technique is the most humane.
But when people try to approach these questions with drivelabout aesthetics, etc., really only one answer is possible: where the destinyand existence of a people are at stake, all obligation toward beauty ceases.The most unbeautiful thing there can be in human life is and remains theyoke of slavery. Or do these Schwabing 2 decadents view the present lotof the German people as 'aesthetic'? Certainly we don't have to discussthese matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of this culturalperfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aestheticsof the Lord's image.
And since these criteria of humanitarianism and beauty mustbe eliminated from the struggle, they are also inapplicable to propaganda.
Propaganda in the War was a means to an end, and the end wvasthe struggle for the existence of the German people; consequently, propagandacould only be considered in accordance with the principles that were validfor this struggle. In this case the most cruel weapons were humane if theybrought about a quicker victory; and only those methods were beautiful whichhelped the nation to safeguard the dignity of its freedom.
This was the only possible attitude toward war propaganda ina life-and-death struggle like ours.
If the so-called responsible authorities had been clear on thispoint, they would never have fallen into such uncertainty over the formand application of this weapon: for even propaganda is no more than a weapon,though a frightful one in the hand of an expert.
The second really decisive question was this: To whom shouldpropaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia orto the less educated masses?
It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.
What the intelligentsia-or those who today unfortunately oftengo by that name-what they need is not propaganda but scientific instruction.The content of propaganda is not science any more than the object representedin a poster is art. The art of the poster lies in the designer's abilityto attract the attention of the crowd by form and color. A poster advertisingan art exhibit must direct the attention of the public to the art beingexhibited; the better it succeeds in this, the greater is the art of theposter itself. The poster should give the masses an idea of the significanceof the exhibition, it should not be a substitute for the art on display.Anyone who wants to concern himself with the art itself must do more thanstudy the poster; and it will not be enough for him just to saunter throughthe exhibition. We may expect him to examine and immerse himself in theindividual works, and thus little by little form a fair opinion.
A similar situation prevails with what we today call propaganda.
The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific trainingof the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts,processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first timeplaced within their field of vision.
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyonewill be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessitycorrect, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity initself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting theattention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educatedor who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the mostpart must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree atthe so-called intellect.
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level mustbe adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressedto. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lowerits purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propagandafor sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we mustavoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much cautioncannot be exerted in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusivelyit takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effectiveit will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness ofa propaganda campaign, and not success in pleasing a few scholars or youngaesthetes.
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideasof the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form,the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. Thefact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentallylazy and conceited they are.
Once we understand how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligenceis small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of thesefacts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points andmust harp on these in sloans until the last member of the public understandswhat you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrificethis slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for thecrowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way theresult is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.
Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound.
For instance, it was absolutely wrong to make the enemy ridiculous, as the Austrian and German comic papers did. It was absolutely wrong because actual contact with an enemy soldier was bound to arouse an entirely different conviction, and the results were devastating; for now the German soldier, under the direct impression of the enemy's resistance, felt himself swindled by his propaganda service. His desire to fight, or even to stand film, was not strengthened, but the opposite occurred. His courage flagged.
By contrast, the war propaganda of the English and Americanswas psychologically sound. By representing the Germans to their own peopleas barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual soldier for the terrorsof war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. After this,the most terrible weapon that was used against him seemed only to confirmwhat his propagandists had told him; it likewise reinforced his faith inthe truth of his government's assertions, while on the other hand it increasedhis rage and hatred against the vile enemy For the cruel effects of theweapon, whose use by the enemy he now came to know, gradually came to confirmfor him the 'Hunnish' brutality of the barbarous enemy, which he had heardall about; and it never dawned on him for a moment that his own weaponspossibly, if not probably, might be even more terrible in their effects.
And so the English soldier could never feel that he had beenmisinformed by his own countrymen, as unhappily was so much the case withthe German soldier that in the end he rejected everything coming from thissource as 'swindles' and 'bunk.' All this resulted from the idea that anyold simpleton (or even somebody who was intelligent ' in other things ')could be assigned to propaganda work, and the failure to realize that themost brilliant psychologists would have been none too good.
And so the German war propaganda offered an unparalleled exampleof an 'enlightenment' service working in reverse, since any correct psychologywas totally lacking.
There was no end to what could be learned from the enemy bya man who kept his eyes open, refused to let his perceptions be ossified,and for four and a half years privately turned the stormflood of enemy propagandaover in his brain.
What our authorities least of all understood was the very firstaxiom of all propagandist activity: to wit, the basically subjective andone-sided attitude it must take toward every question it deals with. Inthis connection, from the very beginning of the War and from top to bottom,such sins were committed that we were entitled to doubt whether so muchabsurdity could really be attributed to pure stupidity alone.
What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposedto advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as 'good'?
We would only shake our heads.
Exactly the same applies to political advertising.
The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh andponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize theone right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make anobjective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and thenset it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve ourown right, always and unflinchingly.
It was absolutely wrong to discuss war-guilt from the standpointthat Germany alone could not be held responsible for the outbreak of thecatastrophe; it would have been correct to load every bit of the blame onthe shoulders of the enemy, even if this had not really corresponded tothe true facts, as it actually did.
And what was the consequence of this halfheartedness?
The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, oreven professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forminga rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals, wavering and inclinedto doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so much asa glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our ownright has been laid. The masses are then in no position to distinguish whereforeign injustice ends and our own begins. In such a case they become uncertainand suspicious, especially if the enemy refrains from going in for the samenonsense, but unloads every bit of blame on his adversary. Isn't it perfectlyunderstandable that the whole country ends up by lending more credence toenemy propaganda, which is more unified and coherent, than to its own? Andparticularly a people that suffers from the mania of objectivity as muchas the Germans. For, after all this, everyone will take the greatest painsto avoid doing the enemy any injustice, even at the peril of seriously besmirchingand even destroying his own people and country.
Of course, this was not the intent of the responsible authorities,but the people never realize that.
The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine bynature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actionsfar less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated,but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings;it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth orlie never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kindof thing.
English propagandists understood all this most brilliantly-andacted accordingly. They made no half statements that might have given riseto doubts.
Their brilliant knowledge of the primitive sentiments of thebroad masses is shown by their atrocity propaganda, which was adapted tothis condition. As ruthless as it was brilliant, it created the preconditionsfor moral steadfastness at the front, even in the face of the greatest actualdefeats, and just as strikingly it pilloried the German enemy as the soleguilty party for the outbreak of the War: the rabid, impudent bias and persistencewith which this lie was expressed took into account the emotional, alwaysextreme, attitude of the great masses and for this reason was believed.
How effective this type of propaganda was is most strikinglyshown by the fact that after four years of war it not only enabled the enemyto stick to its guns, but even began to nibble at our own people.
It need not surprise us that our propaganda did not enjoy thissuccess. In its inner ambiguity alone, it bore the germ of ineffectualness.And finally its content was such that it was very vunlikely to make thenecessary impression on the masses. Only our feather-brained 'statesmen'could have dared to hope that this insipid pacifistic bilge could fire men'sspirits till they were willing to die.
As a result, their miserable stuff 1 was useless, even harmfulin fact.
But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield nosuccess unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly andwith unfiagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeatthem over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is thefirst and most important requirement for success.
Particularly in the field of propaganda, we must never let ourselvesbe led by aesthetes or people who have grown blase: not by the former, becausethe form and expression of our propaganda would soon, instead of being suitablefor the masses, have drawing power only for literary teas; and of the secondwe must beware, because, lacking in any fresh emotion of their own, theyare always on the lookout for new stimulation. These people are quick toweary of everything; they want variety, and they are never able to feelor understand the needs of their fellow men who are not yet so callous.They are always the first to criticize a propaganda campaign, or ratherits content, which seems to them too old-fashioned, too hackneyed, too out-of-date,etc. They are always after novelty, in search of a change, and this makesthem mortal enemies of any effective political propaganda. For as soon asthe organization and the content of propaganda begin to suit their tastes,it loses all cohesion and evaporates completely.
The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distractionfor blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convincethe masses. But the masses are slowmoving, and they always require a certaintime before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplestideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.
When there is a change, it must not alter the content of whatthe propaganda is driving at, but in the end must always say the same thing.For instance, a slogan must be presented from different angles, but theend of all remarks must always and immutably be the slogan itself. Onlyin this way can the propaganda have a unified and complete effect.
This broadness of outline from which we must never depart, incombination with steady, consistent emphasis, allows our final success tomature. And then, to our amazement, we shall see what tremendous resultssuch perseverance leads to-to results that are almost beyond our understanding.
All advertising, whether in the field of business or politics,achieves success through the continuity and sustained uniformity of itsapplication.
Here, too, the example of enemy war propaganda was typical;limited to a few points, devised exdusively for the masses, carried on withindefatigable persistence. Once the basic ideas and methods of executionwere recognized as correct, they were applied throughout the whole War withoutthe slightest change. At first the claims of the propaganda were so impudentthat people thought it insane; later, it got on people's nerves; and inthe end, it was believed. After four and a half years, a revolution brokeout in Germany; and its slogans originated in the enemy's war propaganda.
And in England they understood one more thing: that this spiritualweapon can succeed only if it is applied on a tremendous scale, but that success amply covers all costs.
There, propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order,while in our country it was the last resort of unemployed politicians anda comfortable haven for slackers.
And, as was to be expected, its results all in all were zero.