Hateful Influence

While studying the history of the Holocaust, I’ve often wondered what my position would have been if I had lived in Germany during the 1930s.Would I have joined the masses and supported the rising empire? Would I have continued my life without speaking up at all? Or would I have stood in defiance to Nazi Germany by considering the Jewish race equal to my own and helping them as a result? As much as I’d like to believe the latter, cold facts show that the majority of Germans supported the Nazi Party, some actively and others passively. How could this have happened?


Aside from the Jewish boycott of April 1933 when many Germans refused to betray their Jewish counterparts, the Nazis experienced almost no opposition from the public. (Kaplan, 1998) Within just twelve years, history shows us that Germany mass murdered twelve million innocent lives. (Marrus, 2000)


I want to scream out and say that this would never be possible today, especially in America. However, Germany was the world’s leading nation in education and science up to the 1930s. The Jews were almost completely assimilated into the culture and many held prominent positions. Why didn’t the people of Germany stand up for their countrymen and save millions of lives?


One explanation could be that the Germans truly believed the ideology behind the Nazi Party, which declared that Aryans were a superior race and they need to exterminate the inferior races, especially the Jews. If this was so, why did the Germans wait until the 1930s to act? Obviously, there had to be another sort of influence that caused this type of bigotry. Propaganda. The Nazis took careful measures to influence the masses through posters, flyers, films and speeches. As we now know, it worked.


The Social Impact Theory explains that in order for something to be influential, the strength, immediacy and number of the source all play a crucial role. In the case of the Nazi Party, it had strength because it held authority over the entire nation and the new leaders offered hope and solutions. The German people were constantly surrounded by different types of propaganda, thus the message was immediate and high in number.


It is no wonder that the public was so quickly affected by this hateful influence and almost no opposition was shown against the government that ultimately killed twelve million people.


If propaganda has such great power and influence, I believe it is crucial that it be used to save lives instead of destroying them.


Sources:
Kaplan, Marion A. (1998). Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Marrus, Michael R. (2000). The Holocaust in History. Ontario: Key Porter Books.