Criminal
03-04-2004, 02:05 PM
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Anti-semitism was well established in Germany and Austria (as indeed in other European countries) before Hitler was even born. There had been various political parties whose main policy had been anti-semitism, such as the Antisemitische Volkspartei (Anti-semitic People's Party) which had even won five seats in the Reichstag (the German parliament) election of 1890. In Austria Georg Ritter von Schönerer had accused the Jews of all the evils he identified in modern society. Austrian anti-semites in the parliament even went so far as to ask that a reward be paid to anyone who murdered a Jew and that the property of the victim be awarded to the murderer. Anti-semitism had flared up with great intensity in 1873-95 and 1918-23, both periods of economic and political crisis. When Hitler returned to Munich after the First World War to the chaos left behind by the collapse of the Hohenzollern Reich and the Bavarian Wittelsbach monarchy, where Social Democrats and Communists were competing for power, he claimed he could no longer recognize the city, which was under the control of 'the Hebrew corrupters of the people', as he wrote in Mein Kampf. The city was in fact under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, a Prussian Jew, who had proclaimed the Bavarian Socialist Republic at the end of the war. Eisner was shot dead in February 1919 by a right-wing aristocrat Count Anton von Arco Valley, who wrote in his diary that Eisner deserved to die because he was a Jew. At von Arco Valley's trial the State Prosecutor said of him, 'If the whole German youth were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm we could face the future with confidence.' (Gilbert (1997): 545). Not all that different from the State Prosecutor's view of Hitler at his later trial. The count was sentenced to death, a sentence which was later commuted to life imprisonment, of which he served four years. The sentence is not dissimilar from Hitler's own sentence to imprisonment, which was actually a fairly comfortable enforced holiday which gave him time to write Mein Kampf.. As you can see, Hitler appears to have had deep wells of anti-semitism to draw on.
Daniel Goldhagen's hotly disputed argument in Hitler's Willing Executioners (1997) is that we do not need the panoply of research methods into social influence to explain the success of Nazi anti-semitism. In his view (which he backs with a wealth of evidence) we are fundamentally mistaken if we see Germany in the 1930s and 1940s as essentially an 'ordinary', 'normal' society which had the misfortune to be ruled by evil politicians who were adept at using the modern mass media and other propaganda tools to pervert the 'ordinary decent' German. We do not need to explain how the Nazis persuaded the people to accept behaviour which they initially found abhorrent, since they did not in fact find it abhorrent. Goldhagen produces much evidence to show that, where 'ordinary decent' Germans stood up to the Nazis and openly expressed disapproval (for example of the euthanasia programme or of Nazi attacks on the Christian churches), the government backed down. Although much evidence has come to light over the years since the III Reich of discontent and resistance,
virtually nothing has come to light to lend credence to, let alone substantiate, the belief that Germans departed from the essential features of the Nazi conception of Jews, viewed the persecution of the Jews as immoral, and judged the regime as a consequence to be criminal.
(441)
Goldhagen's research seems to demonstrate quite convincingly that it is unlikely that most Germans were unaware of the atrocities being committed. He also maintains that it is inadequate even to claim that the majority of Germans were indifferent to the fate of the Jews; rather, the majority of Germans, including the Christian churches, supported the extermination of the Jews and many thousands of them actively and enthusiastically participated in it. This was not the case in Mussolini's Italy, where the military routinely disobeyed orders to deport the Jews, nor indeed was it the case in many other countries occupied and tightly controlled by the Nazis. This is a particularly important argument with regard to the explanations which conventionally come from research into social influence, since they depend on the assumption of a 'universal' (or at least 'universally' Western) human psychology which can be moulded and manipulated in similar ways in similar environments. In showing that Germans themselves were rarely harshly punished, or punished at all, for open criticism of the regime's policies and in demonstrating that under roughly similar conditions other nationalities did not behave roughly similarly, Goldhagen presents a serious challenge to the 'social influence' explanations of the Holocaust. He maintains that it is not feasible to maintain that people in general and Germans in particular are inclined to obey authority (see the section on Milgram), citing the evidence of Germans' open defiance of the authority of the Weimar regime and Germans' frequent open criticism of Nazi policies. Goldhagen further maintains that the argument that people are strongly motivated to conform and to comply with peer pressure (see the section on Asch) is also unsustainable with regard to the Germans' anti-semitism. Although Goldhagen does find evidence of such pressure, for example in reports of certain SS men hitting or feigning to hit Jews only when other SS men were present, he considers it to apply only to a tiny number of individuals. The wealth of detail which Goldhagen presents in his book to undermine these arguments from social psychology (see esp. pp.379+) is impressive and should certainly needs to be taken into account when reading through the sections on social influence.
We have seen in the section on persuasion that group norms play an important rôle in the rejection or acceptance of persuasive messages. In appealing to anti-semitism, Hitler was appealing to just such group norms. In anchoring his messages firmly in such norms, Hitler increased his chances of his other messages being accepted. A group's norms appear to be strengthened by real or imagined attack from other groups. Hitler set about blaming the Jews for the ills that had befallen the great German nation. Whether the apportioning of blame conforms to any kind of objective reality probably doesn't matter a great deal, as long as the group identified can be singled out for blame. For example, in Hitler's case the portrayal of the Jews as cowardly anti-German subversives who were active conspirators in bringing Germany to its knees flew in the face of the fact that very many Jews had fought bravely for Germany in the First World War and had been highly decorated for valour. In fact, Captain Guttman, who had recommended Hitler for the Iron Cross in World War I and pinned it on his chest, was a Jew. The accusation that the Jews were both in cahoots with bloated plutocrats around the world and that they were the agents of Bolshevism (signified presumably in the poster by the hand full of gold and the hammer and sickle) seems oddly self-contradictory, but logic doesn't matter too much either, as what Hitler is drawing on is an elemental and ages-old hatred.
It would appear to be an advantage in this tactic if the out-group can be accused of subversive and clandestine activities, possibly linked with some group abroad. Thus, the Jews, though frequently the subject of gross caricatures like that in the poster above (so very different from the firm-jawed Waffen-SS Aryan with his limpid gaze firmly fixed on the Nazi future), were also to be feared because, as one of Hitler's later propaganda films 'demonstrated', they could so easily assume a 'European' appearance, blending in with the 'true' Germans and subverting Germany from within. This ability was particularly fearful because the Jews were allegedly members of an international Jewish conspiracy, whether something cooked up by Zionists, or Bolsheviks or bloated plutocrats like the Rothschilds, or a mixture of all three - Nazi propaganda was none too choosy.
In 1937, the US Institute for Propaganda Analysis was created. They identified seven basic propaganda devices: Name-Calling
Plain Folks
The first of these, name-calling, is clearly what we see in operation here. As communication students, you will be keenly aware of the positive and negative connotations attaching to certain words, what Hayakawa calls 'purr words' and 'snarl words'. Hitler drew extensively upon the already existing 'snarl words' to define the Jews, and thereby, by contrast, to strengthen the positive connotations of the 'purr words' he used to describe the Germans.
http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html
Anti-semitism was well established in Germany and Austria (as indeed in other European countries) before Hitler was even born. There had been various political parties whose main policy had been anti-semitism, such as the Antisemitische Volkspartei (Anti-semitic People's Party) which had even won five seats in the Reichstag (the German parliament) election of 1890. In Austria Georg Ritter von Schönerer had accused the Jews of all the evils he identified in modern society. Austrian anti-semites in the parliament even went so far as to ask that a reward be paid to anyone who murdered a Jew and that the property of the victim be awarded to the murderer. Anti-semitism had flared up with great intensity in 1873-95 and 1918-23, both periods of economic and political crisis. When Hitler returned to Munich after the First World War to the chaos left behind by the collapse of the Hohenzollern Reich and the Bavarian Wittelsbach monarchy, where Social Democrats and Communists were competing for power, he claimed he could no longer recognize the city, which was under the control of 'the Hebrew corrupters of the people', as he wrote in Mein Kampf. The city was in fact under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, a Prussian Jew, who had proclaimed the Bavarian Socialist Republic at the end of the war. Eisner was shot dead in February 1919 by a right-wing aristocrat Count Anton von Arco Valley, who wrote in his diary that Eisner deserved to die because he was a Jew. At von Arco Valley's trial the State Prosecutor said of him, 'If the whole German youth were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm we could face the future with confidence.' (Gilbert (1997): 545). Not all that different from the State Prosecutor's view of Hitler at his later trial. The count was sentenced to death, a sentence which was later commuted to life imprisonment, of which he served four years. The sentence is not dissimilar from Hitler's own sentence to imprisonment, which was actually a fairly comfortable enforced holiday which gave him time to write Mein Kampf.. As you can see, Hitler appears to have had deep wells of anti-semitism to draw on.
Daniel Goldhagen's hotly disputed argument in Hitler's Willing Executioners (1997) is that we do not need the panoply of research methods into social influence to explain the success of Nazi anti-semitism. In his view (which he backs with a wealth of evidence) we are fundamentally mistaken if we see Germany in the 1930s and 1940s as essentially an 'ordinary', 'normal' society which had the misfortune to be ruled by evil politicians who were adept at using the modern mass media and other propaganda tools to pervert the 'ordinary decent' German. We do not need to explain how the Nazis persuaded the people to accept behaviour which they initially found abhorrent, since they did not in fact find it abhorrent. Goldhagen produces much evidence to show that, where 'ordinary decent' Germans stood up to the Nazis and openly expressed disapproval (for example of the euthanasia programme or of Nazi attacks on the Christian churches), the government backed down. Although much evidence has come to light over the years since the III Reich of discontent and resistance,
virtually nothing has come to light to lend credence to, let alone substantiate, the belief that Germans departed from the essential features of the Nazi conception of Jews, viewed the persecution of the Jews as immoral, and judged the regime as a consequence to be criminal.
(441)
Goldhagen's research seems to demonstrate quite convincingly that it is unlikely that most Germans were unaware of the atrocities being committed. He also maintains that it is inadequate even to claim that the majority of Germans were indifferent to the fate of the Jews; rather, the majority of Germans, including the Christian churches, supported the extermination of the Jews and many thousands of them actively and enthusiastically participated in it. This was not the case in Mussolini's Italy, where the military routinely disobeyed orders to deport the Jews, nor indeed was it the case in many other countries occupied and tightly controlled by the Nazis. This is a particularly important argument with regard to the explanations which conventionally come from research into social influence, since they depend on the assumption of a 'universal' (or at least 'universally' Western) human psychology which can be moulded and manipulated in similar ways in similar environments. In showing that Germans themselves were rarely harshly punished, or punished at all, for open criticism of the regime's policies and in demonstrating that under roughly similar conditions other nationalities did not behave roughly similarly, Goldhagen presents a serious challenge to the 'social influence' explanations of the Holocaust. He maintains that it is not feasible to maintain that people in general and Germans in particular are inclined to obey authority (see the section on Milgram), citing the evidence of Germans' open defiance of the authority of the Weimar regime and Germans' frequent open criticism of Nazi policies. Goldhagen further maintains that the argument that people are strongly motivated to conform and to comply with peer pressure (see the section on Asch) is also unsustainable with regard to the Germans' anti-semitism. Although Goldhagen does find evidence of such pressure, for example in reports of certain SS men hitting or feigning to hit Jews only when other SS men were present, he considers it to apply only to a tiny number of individuals. The wealth of detail which Goldhagen presents in his book to undermine these arguments from social psychology (see esp. pp.379+) is impressive and should certainly needs to be taken into account when reading through the sections on social influence.
We have seen in the section on persuasion that group norms play an important rôle in the rejection or acceptance of persuasive messages. In appealing to anti-semitism, Hitler was appealing to just such group norms. In anchoring his messages firmly in such norms, Hitler increased his chances of his other messages being accepted. A group's norms appear to be strengthened by real or imagined attack from other groups. Hitler set about blaming the Jews for the ills that had befallen the great German nation. Whether the apportioning of blame conforms to any kind of objective reality probably doesn't matter a great deal, as long as the group identified can be singled out for blame. For example, in Hitler's case the portrayal of the Jews as cowardly anti-German subversives who were active conspirators in bringing Germany to its knees flew in the face of the fact that very many Jews had fought bravely for Germany in the First World War and had been highly decorated for valour. In fact, Captain Guttman, who had recommended Hitler for the Iron Cross in World War I and pinned it on his chest, was a Jew. The accusation that the Jews were both in cahoots with bloated plutocrats around the world and that they were the agents of Bolshevism (signified presumably in the poster by the hand full of gold and the hammer and sickle) seems oddly self-contradictory, but logic doesn't matter too much either, as what Hitler is drawing on is an elemental and ages-old hatred.
It would appear to be an advantage in this tactic if the out-group can be accused of subversive and clandestine activities, possibly linked with some group abroad. Thus, the Jews, though frequently the subject of gross caricatures like that in the poster above (so very different from the firm-jawed Waffen-SS Aryan with his limpid gaze firmly fixed on the Nazi future), were also to be feared because, as one of Hitler's later propaganda films 'demonstrated', they could so easily assume a 'European' appearance, blending in with the 'true' Germans and subverting Germany from within. This ability was particularly fearful because the Jews were allegedly members of an international Jewish conspiracy, whether something cooked up by Zionists, or Bolsheviks or bloated plutocrats like the Rothschilds, or a mixture of all three - Nazi propaganda was none too choosy.
In 1937, the US Institute for Propaganda Analysis was created. They identified seven basic propaganda devices: Name-Calling
Plain Folks
The first of these, name-calling, is clearly what we see in operation here. As communication students, you will be keenly aware of the positive and negative connotations attaching to certain words, what Hayakawa calls 'purr words' and 'snarl words'. Hitler drew extensively upon the already existing 'snarl words' to define the Jews, and thereby, by contrast, to strengthen the positive connotations of the 'purr words' he used to describe the Germans.