Nazi Propaganda in Germany, 1939-45. Did the Campaigns Bolster or Undermine Popular Antisemitism? (PDF)

Essay from the year 2011 in the subject History Europe - Germany - National Socialism, World War II, grade: 78.0%, Durham University, language: English, abstract: Did the antisemitic policy of the National Socialist regime succeed because it was anchored in deeply rooted anti-Jewish sentiments which permeated all classes of the German population? This rather simple question posed by David Bankier, one among many historians of the Third Reich who have been unable to satisfactorily resolve this issue, raises a whole host of complexities which come to dominate any examination of the impact of antisemitic propaganda upon the German population. Have historians, such as Yehuda Bauer, been too willing to assert that Nazi propaganda targeted and subsequently radicalized a pre-existing bedrock of latent antisemitism among the German people?

Such assertions would seem to substantiate Frank Bajohr's suggestion that antisemitic propaganda functioned within the framework of National Socialist rule as a 'dictatorship of bottom-up consent', a Zustimmungsdiktatur which was firmly rooted in the German population's growing responsiveness to the leadership of the Third Reich. However, the validity of Bajohr's claim is somewhat undermined by contemporary evidence of the German population's reactions to antisemitic measures, particularly in SD reports, which frequently reflect Jeffrey Herf's argument of "a radical Nazi minority operating in a society with a less radical but broad antisemitic consensus, a consensus broad enough to render people indifferent [...]".

Such indifference must be viewed in terms of a situation whereby the collective concerns, and collective opinion, of the German population were suitably divorced from the abstracted and de-historicized idea of 'the Jew' propagandized by the Nazi leadership throughout the war to render the German population desensitized to the plight of the Jews.