(Jewish Group) How did Nazis use propaganda to justify their horrors?

[Behind the Aegis]

How did Nazis use propaganda to justify their horrors? Stanford psychologist’s analysis explains

“The Jew works to infiltrate the peoples and hollow them out. He fights with his weapons, with lies and slander, poison and discord. He intensifies the battle until the bloody extermination of his hated foes. We say today, and forever more: The Jew is the parasite among the peoples!”

These chilling words, translated from a 1944 pamphlet written for Hitler youth troop leaders, carried a typical message; Nazi propaganda famously portrayed Jewish people as vermin and as villains. Even though by then millions of Jews already had been killed in the Holocaust, they were still being portrayed as powerful and nefarious.

Social psychologists have a term for that kind of portrayal: It’s agency, or ascribing to an individual or group “the ability to plan, to have control,” said Alexander Landry, a social psychologist and Ph.D. student at Stanford’s business school who has just published a paper analyzing 18 years of Nazi propaganda.

Attributing great agency to Jews, even during the Holocaust, is just one of the findings in Landry’s research, using software to analyze the language in a translated database of Nazi propaganda.

Landry, 25, and his co-author studied 18 years of pre-war and wartime propaganda, between 1927 and 1945, from an archive maintained by Randall Bytwerk of Michigan’s Calvin University.

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