Understanding Hitler’s Popularity

According to a recent Daily Mail poll, 21 percent of those under the age of 29 said Hitler had good ideas, compared with 16 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 49, seven percent for voters between 50 and 64 and just five percent for those over 65. This seems to be part of a trend with Gen Z being more sympathetic towards some of history's most evil individuals.

In the new film, Goebbels and the Fuhrer, the German director Joachim A. Lang hopes to convey how Hitler often seemed like a sympathetic, reasonable person.

In a recent Aish.com interview, Lang explained, “The point is to show Hitler not as a demon. It’s very comfortable to think of him as a demon; it’s easy to distance yourself from a demon.”  Instead, Lang’s depiction of Hitler shows the German leader as a fundamental mercurial and deeply antisemitic person, but also as someone who was capable of coming across as charming and suave, thanks to his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Lang hopes that by understanding how Goebbels was able to make Hitler’s odious worldview seem palatable and even attractive, viewers will be able to view propaganda critically, and to recognize the hallmarks of other demagogues and hate-inducing leaders today, a skill Gen Z needs to learn.

Reinventing Hitler

Prof. Thomas Weber worked as the historical consultant on Goebbels and the Fuhrer and explained that many of the propaganda methods Goebbels pioneered are still being used today.

Dr. Weber’s research on Hitler has shown him to be a fundamentally ordinary, unimpressive man before he amassed political aides like Goebbels who helped raise his profile.  A decade before Hitler successfully seized power, Dr. Weber notes, “Hardly anyone believed that Hitler, if he were to have any political future, would be Germany’s leader.”  One political observer described Hitler as not “a leader but a wonderful agitator” who would provide help “for someone even greater than him.”  He was a “drifter and opportunist.”  (Quoted in Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi by Thomas Weber.  Basic Books: 2017) Dr. Weber has described Hitler’s fellow soldiers from World War I as viewing him as a “rear-echelon (explicative)”.

Yet Hitler was learning the power of propaganda to help change the way people viewed him and his antisemitic views.  Hitler recast his lackluster military service as an embodiment of the forgotten German “every man.” Hitler reframed his deeply personal antisemitism (traced, many historians believe, to his mother’s untimely death while under the care of a Jewish doctor) as the supposed championing of common German people against rapacious Jewish elites.

Joseph Goebbels (on the dais) addressing a crowd in Berlin, February 1, 1935.

Key to this transformation was Joseph Goebbels, a writer with a Ph.D. in German literature.  Goebbels was also a rabid antisemite and found his political home in Hitler’s Nazi party.  By all accounts – and depicted with chilling creepiness in Goebbels and the Fuhrer, Goebbels (and his wife Magda) worshiped Hitler. Hitler grew to depend on Goebbels’ masterful propaganda talents and appointed him head of the party’s propaganda in 1930.

Goebbels’ Early Propaganda

Goebbels honed his persuasive skills by editing the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff (“The Attack”) from 1927 until 1935.  From 1928 onward, Goebbels was also a politician, representing the Nazi Party in Germany’s Reichstag. He experimented with different modes of persuasion, finding which resonated best with his audience. Biographer Peter Longerich notes he tried different styles of writing: “Satirical, fairy-tale, saga, conversational, or epistolary.”  (Quoted in Goebbels: A Biography by Peter Longerich translated by Alan Bance, Jeremy Noakes, and Lesley Sharpe.  Random House: 2015) He pioneered assigning derogatory nicknames to political opponents. His most popular victim was Dr. Bernhard Weiss, the deputy commissioner of police, whom Goebbels attacked over and over, assigning him the Jewish sounding nickname Isador Weiss.  Dr. Weiss tried to defend himself against Goebbels’ attacks; he succeeded only in drawing more and more attention to them and fulfilling Goebbels’ goal of making him look ridiculous.

Another early propaganda win was cultivating the Nazi party’s private army of thugs, the Sturmabeilung, or Storm Troopers.  Goebbels encouraged these young men who were looking for a fight to march in working class areas where many people embraced Communism, one of the Nazi party’s greatest enemies. Violent fights often broke out and Goebbels eagerly publicized the death of each Storm Trooper as a “martyr.” Goebbels’ promoted the song about Horst Wessel, one Nazi street fighter who was killed in a brawl in 1930, and it became the Nazi party anthem and later on the official National Anthem of Germany and Austria. His promotion of the Storm Troopers was so successful that numbers swelled from 450 in 1926 to 32,000 by the beginning of 1933.

Goebbels and the Fuhrer offers a fascinating view into Goebbels’ painstaking propaganda work. We see him rehearsing speeches over and over before he and Hitler deliver what sounds like natural, off the cuff passionate appeals. “The problem is that in most contemporary depictions of Hitler, we see only the last five or ten seconds of a speech,” director Lang observes.  “It seems like he was always raging.” Yet that was not the case.  “Speeches were two hours long; the shouting was only at the end.”  Goebbels and the Fuhrer aims to show people “how persuasive” Hitler was and to alert people to heed history’s warnings and treat today’s demagogues and peddlers of hatred with the same skepticism we now apply to the Nazi era.

Goebbels’ Methods

Historical consultant Prof. Thomas Weber identifies some of Goebbels’ key propaganda methods and warns that there are parallels with today’s populist and anti-Jewish rhetoric.

Goebbels was a master at simplifying complex situations in misleading ways and repeating his lies “time and time and time again.”  Another facet of Goebbels’s propaganda, Dr. Weber notes, is that “it wasn’t important that the individual facts are correct; an item just has to be repeated in the service of a single truth.”

One of the most chilling aspects of Goebbels and the Fuhrer is how Goebbels’ propaganda machine - encompassing newspapers, speeches, radio broadcasts, newsreels and films - created a climate in which Germans were willing to give up everything to what Goebbels dubbed the “total war” effort.

Goebels and Hitler

This willingness to lie brings to mind slurs that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and others offer about Jews. For instance, the PA’s use of photos of Holocaust victims to say falsely that they were Palestinian Arabs murdered by Jews, or the BBC’s doubling down on its insistence that Israeli rockets destroyed a hospital in Gaza in October 2023, even after it became apparent that Hamas rockets were responsible for the strike.  In these and numerous other cases where leaders have lied outright about Israel and Jews, they have faced little consequence, just as Goebbels predicted.

Dr. Weber observes that Goebbels also pioneered the type of political stunts that are still in use today.  He “would interrupt the screening of a left-wing film,” for instance, “by releasing white mice in the theater - those sorts of stunts.”  That stunt has been copied directly in recent weeks by anti-Israel protestors, for instance by those who released maggots and cockroaches in the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke there in July 2024.

“When someone accuses you of something - and it’s correct - you don’t deny it, you just accuse the other side of the exact same thing,” Dr. Weber adds. This tactic of Goebbels is particularly damaging, and widespread today. It leads people to “believe there is no right or wrong,” he notes.  “You don’t have to deny anything; just say the other side is doing it too, or the other side is doing it worse.” When news about Nazis’ atrocities against Jews began to leak out during World War II, “Goebbels said don’t deny it, just find atrocities on the other side” to promote.

Demonizing Jews

Goebbels and the Fuhrer follows the lives of both men from 1937 until their suicides in 1945, and depicts the increasingly effective ways they demonized Jews that echo in today’s climate.

Hitler railed against what he called the Uberschwemmung unseres Vaterlandes, the “flooding of the country” with immigrants, and blamed Jews for orchestrating this supposed “flood” of “inferior migrants”. He was also obsessed with the idea that “real” Germans would emigrate due to this dastardly supposedly Jewish-inspired (and completely fictional) “plot”.  This outlandish theory echoes that of the “great replacement” slur, which accuses Jews of seeking to replace native-born Americans with inferior immigrants.  This falsehood inspired the shooter who murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.

The film shows Goebbels planning Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish riots of November 9-10, 1938. He used the murder of a German official in Paris by a Jewish teenager whose family had been expelled from Poland to stir up hatred.  Kristallnacht fulfilled Goebbels’ goals: it rallied the German and Austrian people around a perceived threat. It was also a test of how far the Nazi party could go in demonizing and inciting violence against Jews.

Goebbels’ legacy lives on. A recent film review in the British paper The Guardian shows just how devalued Jews are today: “If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though (the documentary about Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack) One Day in October won’t help.  Indeed, it does a good job of demonizing Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.” With every repetition that Jews are to blame for violence - even to blame for their own murders on October 7 - the lie that Jews are somehow uniquely bad and underserving becomes even more entrenched.

One of the most interesting episodes in Goebbels and the Fuhrer shows Goebbels at work on Nazi propaganda films, including the 1940 movie Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew).  This infamous propaganda film was shot in the Jewish Ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, and juxtaposed Jews and rats, accusing them of spreading diseases and depleting resources.  The movie shows a graphic scene of a cow being slaughtered for food by Jews, and asserts that no German would be so cruel.  It echoes - and perpetuates - stereotypes of Jews as uniquely sinister and malevolent: tropes that continue to this day.

Many of the ideas and justifications for killing Jews that Goebbels first proposed are still in use. Take Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Ph.D. thesis promotes a revisionist version of Holocaust history.  He’s repeated over and over that Hitler was forced to kill Europe’s Jews because Jews were having such a negative effect on European society. This bizarre assertion, first devised by Goebbels nearly a century ago, is repeatedly tolerated by most observers, who ignore Abbas’ outrageous slander.

Historical advisor Dr. Thomas Weber notes that Hamas, too, is using ideas and tropes that Goebbels invented. “Hamas has been using specific (Nazi-inspired) images since October 7 that are similar” to the propaganda Goebbels pioneered.  “Hamas’ disinformation since October 7 follows the pattern that Goebbels was using.”

Warning for the Present

Director Lang and Dr. Weber hope that viewers watching Goebbels and the Fuhrer will use the lessons they learn to recognize “disinformation and demagoguery” today.  “We live in a world in which the conditions are ripe for demagoguery,” with political leaders and activists increasingly relying on propaganda instead of reasoned debate to persuade others, Lang notes.  He observes that many of the anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that are prevalent today are similar to those in the Nazi era.

Goebbels and the Fuhrer won the Audience Award at the 2024 Munich Film Festival.  It’s now being distributed in the English-speaking world, and the team behind it hope it will help viewers in North America recognize some of the hallmarks of demagoguery and lies that target Jews and others we’re seeing today.  In many areas around the world, “Hitler’s speeches are being used as manuals to win people over,” Lang believes.  The many Holocaust survivors he’s interviewed - including some who are featured in his film - have told him that “they see something in the world today that reminds them of Germany 80 years ago.”