Ah an answer at last

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/esser.htm

Growing up in a Jewish home with grandparents as survivors and going to a Jewish my entire life, I thought I was fairly knowledgeable regarding how the holocaust was started and what went on during it. I know that a lot of Jews were brutally murdered and that the way Hitler convinced Germany that Jews=dogs were by using them as a scapegoat, saying that they were the source of Germany’s current depression.

I thought this was his only tactic because I guess no one ever told me otherwise. But a question always lurked inside my head, how good the Germany all of sudden just say “hey Adolph is right they are the reason why I’m broke!” It just didn’t make sense to me. But I figured the holocaust is a sensitive topic and is not on of those things you generally start arguments over. So I let this question be for quit sometime.

But recently I have been thinking about this question again, only this time I have a correct answer that makes sense to me. What is this answer that I have been looking for ever since the third grade? Propaganda

To be short propaganda is the art of persuading or manipulating someone by any means possible to believe as you do. The Germans particularly Hitler were masters of it. You can see from the signs and visuals they use in their ads to intense rhetoric and myths they have in their articles and books.

An article I thought that displayed this best was displayed in opening chapter of a book Hermann Esser wrote. Herman Esser was one of Hitler’s early followers; the book is called “The Jewish World Plague”. It was written shortly after a mass display of Jewish violence and was saying how the Jews got what they deserved therefore not deserving any sympathy whatsoever for their demise.

Contrary to the three or four sentences I used to some this book up it is highly complex and filled with classic propaganda tactics. It starts off with the classic tactic of creating the enemy.

“The treacherous murder of the young German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the office of the German embassy in Paris on 7 November 1938 by a 17-year-old Jew named Herschel Grünspan is rightly viewed by the entire German people as a contemptible sneaky attack on Adolf Hitler's new Greater Germany. Eighty million people were touched in the depth of their being; justified outrage erupted. According to their own figures, the Jews, who had been living very well among the German people for centuries, were worth a total of 8 billion marks. When the Reich government required them to pay a penalty of a billion marks, the Jewish-democratic world press howled as if Jews in National Socialist Germany were starving and going to the dogs.”

From this the common German is manipulated into despising the Jew, the tact’s that are used is fairly obvious to one who has a basic knowledge of propaganda. Distortion and myth are crucial in this first paragraph. The murder clearly was not out of cold blood and did not lack reason. Additionally on top of the massacre the Germans had on the Jews the Germans gave the Jews a fine for this incident. They said it was well deserved and the Jews have a lot of money anyways so why the big fuss. This emphasizing the old Jews is rich myth, and what was once envy of this successful nation turned quickly into resentment and hate.

He then proceeds on to the history of Jews saying guess saying how every country which they resided in the past has crumpled, Rome Spain ect… what he leaves out is the part that they were brutally persecuted. These countries most likely fell because many of their top officials were Jewish before they started with the persecution of them. When you lose a important part of your government staff it doesn’t really help you.

The most common thing he does though is refer to the Jews a poison. Which is a word that doesn’t really leave ones mind. .He seldom threw out phrases like these one referring to the Jews.

“It grows and grows like weeds in the state, the community and the family and infests the blood of humanity everywhere.”

“In brief, that is the pestilential nature of Jewry, against which every people, every state, every nation must, should and wants to defend itself if it does not want to be the victim of his bloody plague.”

“Jewry is the embodiment of materialism, the epitome of sensuality, of greed, of dishonesty, of selfishness, of heartlessness and the lust for power”.

By saying this he not only creates an enemy out of the Jews but makes a poison out of them. He creates the idea in the typical Germans head that you shouldn’t just hate the Jews but should beware of them.

After reading this excerpt from the book it became very clear to why the Germans followed Hitler’s words like hey were gods. He was a master propagandist and so were all his followers. He pounded the idea that Jew=dog so hard it was impossible not to follow.

So now my question is clearly answered in a very in depth kind of way. So now if you were to ask me how Hitler transformed Germanys will into his. I would obviously say propaganda. Yes it is not specific whatsoever so to rephrase the question, what was the most important tool of propaganda that Hitler used to make anti-Semitism a Semite in itself?

The answer in my opinion to this would be enemies. Enemies are good for numerous reasons they always make someone wrong, there is no better way to prove a point than to disprove someone else’s. More importantly it creates unity for example the quote “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” couldn’t explain this better. The best way people unfortunately come together is not their common interests but contrarily their common hates and dislikes.

In this introduction Hermann Esser not only makes an enemy of the Jew, but he makes them scared of the Jew. Usually one shouldn’t be scared of their enemies, but he portrays the Jews not as the kind of enemy that you would have to fight against. Rather he makes them equal to a flue which can kill you if you don’t take your medicine.Having them around whether they actively against you or are working for you is a danger in itself. Having a theory like this only gives you one solution, to get rid of the flu before it kills you.

This unfortunately brings us back to the scary reality that things like this can still happen today. Whether it is to exterminate the Jews, veto the two term presidential rule or to declare war on a country we really don’t know much about, the world is easily manipulated and controlled. Threats like these will always exists and unfortunately with the constant current advances in technology the possible evoloving nightmare can only get worse