Hitler’s entire approach to propaganda might be understood as a reaction to the rationalism for which German thinkers were known. Instead, he had an alarmingly intuitive understanding of how to appeal to a mass audience and to the reptilian core.
In Mein Kampf, he asks, “To whom has propaganda to appeal? To the scientific intelligentsia, or to the less educated masses? It has to appeal forever and only to the masses!” The strong leader, by “understanding the great masses’ world of ideas and feelings, finds, by a correct psychological form, the way to the attention, and further to the heart, of the great masses.” Propaganda must “be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent….
Therefore its spiritual level has to be screwed the lower, the greater the mass of people which one wants to attract.” It can also be understood as a reflection of his time working for the advertising industry. In the early 1910s, while living in Vienna, Hitler made money as a freelancer, drawing advertising posters for products like hair tonic, soap, and “Teddy Antiperspirant foot powder.” In Mein Kampf he suggests that propaganda need be like advertising, and seek first to attract attention:
“A poster’s art lies in the designer’s ability to catch the masses’ attention by outline and color,” he writes. It must give “an idea of the importance of the exhibition, but it is in no way to be a substitute for the art represented by the exhibition.” Similarly “the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses towards certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses’ field of vision.” Those who are “already scientifically experienced or…striving towards education and knowledge” are not the subject. Hitler also intuited a few other basic truths about how we process information: since everything can be ignored, imprinting information in the memory requires a constant repetition of simple ideas.
“The great masses’ receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great. As a consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans until even the very last man is able to imagine what is intended by such a word.” Nuance was nonsense; complexity was a risk: As soon as one sacrifices this basic principle and tries to become versatile, the effect will fritter away, as the masses are neither able to digest the material offered nor to retain it.”
One couldn’t overstate the intensity of the effort required, for the masses “with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousandfold repetition of the most simple ideas.” Finally, Hitler understood the demagogue’s most essential principle: to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion. And far less welcome: what the audience most wants is an excuse to experience fully the powerful feelings already lurking within them but which their better selves might lead them to suppress.
“The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak. Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine, tolerating no other beside itself.”
If to pay attention is to open the mind to information, to do so in an animated crowd is to fling the doors wide open. To be exposed to any information is to be influenced, but in crowds the possibilities go well beyond everyday experience. Gustave Le Bon, the first theorist of crowd psychology, held that it is loss of individual responsibility that makes the individual in the crowd more malleable.
Freud would say that the superego was supplanted by the will of the crowd, as unconscious wishes rise to the surface and are shared. In any case, we know it when we see it.
Le Bon and Freud are now hardly considered cutting-edge guides to how the mind works, but here, in the words of the enraptured, their ideas seem to shine through. Alfons Heck would remember attending a Nazi rally as a boy in the 1930s. He was not particularly partial to or interested in Hitler; yet at the conclusion of the führer’s speech the boy was transformed: “From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul.” The rally Heck attended, one of those held annually at Nuremberg, boosted Hitler’s oratorical effects with various other elements— lights, giant swastika banners, and marching men—to create what Albert Speer called “total theatre.”
As one attendant described the experience: Nothing like it has ever been seen before. The wide field resembles a powerful Gothic cathedral made of light….One hundred and forty thousand people…cannot tear their eyes away from the sight. Are we dreaming, or is it real? Is it possible to imagine a thing like that?… Seven columns of flags pour into the spaces between the ranks….All you can see is an undulating stream, red and broad, its surface sparking with gold and silver, which slowly comes closer like fiery lava. As Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who documented the 1935 gathering called the “Rally of Freedom,” wrote, “What I witnessed in Nuremberg…is one of the most remarkable events I have ever experienced. It was all so gripping and grandiose that I cannot compare it to anything I experienced before as an artist.