In the Third Reich, the National Socialists not only used anti-Jewish propaganda to stir up anti-Jewish sentiment. The choice of words in publications from the Nazi era also indicate that the Jews were deliberately dehumanized in preparation for the Holocaust: In the run-up to the mass extermination, propaganda increasingly denied them the ability to have feelings and morals. After the beginning of the Holocaust, the Jews were additionally demonized and portrayed as evil, according to historians.
When it comes to mass killings and other atrocities, a certain trend often seems to emerge beforehand: “The perpetrators of such mass killings try to dehumanize their victims,” explain Alexander Landry of the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California and his colleagues. The perpetrators deny their victims fundamental human sensations and feelings and try to dehumanize them. According to the theory, this should lower the inhibition threshold for violence among the perpetrators and make their actions acceptable.
National Socialist propaganda in view
It is also discussed whether there was such a systematic dehumanization of the Jews in the propaganda of the Third Reich for the Holocaust and the National Socialists. So far, however, there have been conflicting interpretations. In order to create more clarity, Landry and his team therefore examined digitized documents from the German Propaganda Archive for their study. This contains hundreds of posters, leaflets and pamphlets as well as newspaper articles and the transcripts of political speeches from the Third Reich.
For their analysis, the researchers developed a method to specifically search for words in the texts from the period 1927 to 1945 that expressed negative evaluations of Jews. They then evaluated these using a linguistic program to look for signs of dehumanization. In total, they analyzed more than 57,000 words from 140 different National Socialist propaganda texts in this way. For comparison, the historians examined non-Jewish texts from this collection in the same way.
Dehumanization in two stages
The analyzes revealed that, in the run-up to the mass exterminations, there was actually an accumulation of terms in National Socialist propaganda that denied the Jews human impulses and emotions. “This increasing denial of typical human feelings and experiences is consistent with the notion that such dehumanization reduces moral concerns before committing an act of violence, thereby facilitating it,” say Landry and his colleagues. By depicting the Jews in propaganda as “subhumans”, they were denied their human dignity and thus the need to protect their lives.
Interestingly, however, this Nazi propaganda strategy changed when the systematic mass killings began in 1941. “After the onset of the Holocaust, we see an increase in terms that associate the Jewish population with evil and sinister intentions,” the historians report. The Jews were now accused of striving for world domination, actively undermining public health or otherwise harming the “German people”. “These patterns correspond to a demonization of the Jews,” say Landry and his team. Accordingly, the Jews put their intellectual abilities entirely at the service of morally reprehensible goals – and thus proved to be “subhuman”.
Taken together, the study thus confirms the theory according to which the National Socialists also dehumanized their victims before and during the Holocaust in order to justify the murder of the Jews and to make them “more acceptable”. However, depending on the point in time, they use two different strategies. “To combat violence, one must understand the motives that drive and encourage it,” the researchers explain. Analysis of Nazi propaganda helps to understand the role of dehumanization in this context.
Source: PLOS; Specialist article: PLoS ONE, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274957