Mind-Munitions

The Second World War 241
subjected to the most comprehensive propaganda campaign the
world has ever witnessed, a campaign that has even been described
as ‘the war that Hitler won’. However, as in the case of Japan, it is
difficult to distinguish between the role of patriotism and the role
of propaganda in making people fight to the bitter end. Those
teenage members of the Hitler Youth who defended the streets of
Berlin against crack Soviet troops in April 1945 were undoubtedly
indoctrinated with Nazi ideas to such a degree that propaganda
cannot be discounted. Young people were a prime target of propagandists
in all totalitarian countries, particularly in one which was
to last 1000 years. (It might be added that the youth of democratic
systems were also susceptible to all forms of propaganda; in British
wartime cinemas, children cheered at newsreels of Churchill,
Roosevelt, and Stalin and booed when Hitler or Mussolini appeared
on the screen.) German youth had been wooed by the Nazis in the
1920s and after Hitler came into power in 1933 they were educated,
organized, trained, and regimented by a Nazi education
system that subordinated scholarship to ideology. Members of the
Hitlerjunge (Hitler Youth) and Bund deutscher Mädchen (German
Girls’ League) enjoyed a military education (Wehrerziehung), in
which uniforms, bands, parades, rallies, and films played on their
emotions, rather than cultivating their intellect. The teenagers
defending the streets of Berlin in 1945 knew nothing else. They
were indeed ‘Hitler’s children’.
In 1923, after the failure of his Munich Putsch, Hitler had
declared: ‘Propaganda, propaganda, propaganda. All that matters
is propaganda.’ The whole thrust of Nazi propaganda thereafter
was directed at man’s baser instincts. In Mein Kampf he had written:
The psyche of the masses is not receptive to anything that is weak.
They are like a woman, whose psychic state has been determined less
by abstract reason than by an emotional longing for a strong force
which will complement her nature. Likewise, the masses love a
commander, and despise a petitioner.
Propaganda, therefore, consisted of ‘attracting the crowd, and
not in educating those who are already educated’. And for Hitler,
the crowd was brutal, violent, emotional, corrupt, and corruptible.
Propaganda was designed to attract followers from this broad mass
of the population, organization was designed to attract members
of the party. But the party must not grow too large lest its strength