Hitler's Ideology and Propaganda: Mein Kampf to the Beer Hall Putsch

Introduction

"All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to." Thus wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf while serving a prison sentence in Munich following an aborted coup he had attempted in the fall of 1923 — known in history as the Beer Hall Putsch. Another decade was to pass before the former corporal and failed artist would capture power and become the unchallenged dictator of Germany, but the blueprint of his ideology and modus operandi were already defined at that early stage of his political career.

Although the failure of the coup attempt by Hitler and a handful of supporters had at the time looked like the end of the political career of the "Austrian upstart," Hitler's clever use of propaganda at his public trial made the failure the starting point of his ascent to power. This paper examines Hitler's ideology and the use of propaganda employed by him and the Nazis for the fulfillment of their objectives, with particular reference to the events surrounding the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

Hitler's Ideology

Hitler outlined his political ideology in his political autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), dictated to his secretary Rudolf Hess while serving a five-year sentence in a Bavarian prison in 1924. It was based on the concept — or myth — of the racial superiority of the German race, a form of social Darwinism in which a superior German/Aryan race was destined to rule over inferior races, namely the Jews, the Slavs, and the Roma. The ideology also incorporated the concept of Lebensraum (living space) that the German race allegedly needed for expansion into the East, and the mobilization and creation of racial awareness among the masses through propaganda. It further called for the rule of a strong, all-powerful dictator and the use of force to conquer the vast territories deemed necessary for German expansion.

The Nazi Racial Theory

Hitler believed that the whole of human history was a story of struggle between races — "All that is not race in this world is trash" (Hitler 406) — and stated that mankind could be divided into three types: culture-founders, culture-bearers, and culture-destroyers (Hitler 398). He considered the Aryan race the most superior: "Everything that today we admire on this earth — science and art, technique and inventions — is only the creative product of a few peoples and perhaps originally of one race [the Aryans]" (Ibid. 396).

Hitler placed races such as the Japanese and other Asiatic peoples in the category of "culture-bearers," whom he viewed as dependent on the creative inventions of the Aryans for their development. He placed Jews in the last category — "culture-destroyers" — and directed all his hatred toward them, considering them sub-human and worthy only of subjugation or even extermination. According to Hitler, inferior races actually benefited from being conquered and coming into contact with the superior Aryan race, but the Jews prevented the Aryans from assuming their rightful place as the "master race" through a worldwide conspiracy. He believed that the "Jews form the strongest contrast to Aryans" (Ibid. 412) and held them responsible for introducing theories of equality and liberalism to undermine Aryan self-recognition.

Nazi propaganda drew on this framework extensively. St. Paul — called "the Jew Paul" in Nazi literature — was held responsible for spreading the concept of "equality" among Christians to benefit the "sub-human Jews." The Portuguese-born economist Ricardo, the "father of classical national economics," was labeled "the prophet of the liberal economic theory of free trade and economic piracy." Hitler's hatred of the Jews went beyond conventional anti-Semitism. He employed a vicious propaganda campaign against them, painting them as scapegoats for all of Germany's misfortunes — a psychological ploy to channel the energies of the German people and unite them in hatred.

The Jewish question also served as an instrument for instilling a sense of superiority in the German people, which Hitler believed necessary for their national "reawakening." The campaign against the Jews additionally reflected Hitler's theory that the masses must not be presented with two or more enemies simultaneously, as this would dissipate their fighting strength; they needed to focus on a single major enemy — in his rhetoric, the parasitic Jew. Hitler's poisonous propaganda against the Jews was no mere theorizing, as the Holocaust and mass extermination during the war would ultimately prove.