Nazi propaganda blamed Jews for Germanys post‑WWI woes

Reviewer #2: The authors provided quantitative analysis for the notion that the dehumanization of human beings leads to mass violence. The purpose of their work is to examine the temporal dynamics of dehumanizing Jewish people in Nazi propaganda between 1927 and 1945.

The · Eternal Jew is perhaps the most reviling propagandistic piece of · film in Nazi Germany and presents the Jewish people as a plague. They are compared to rats that spread disease and contagion and · flood the nation while devouring the resources of the area.

Animal symbolism was prevalent in Nazi propaganda of all forms. Nazis · frequently portrayed their adversaries as monkeys, pigs, dogs, snakes and other · animals. A particularly widespread depiction of the Jewish people was as rats.

Films in particular played an important ... the enemies as defined by Nazi ideology. Nazi films portrayed Jews as "subhuman" creatures infiltrating Aryan society....

Nazi propagandists disguised the regime’s genocidal policies against Europe’s Jews, claiming that the Jewish population was being “resettled.” ... Propaganda was used as an important tool to win over the majority of the German public ...

... Nazi propaganda often portrayed Jews as engaged in a conspiracy to provoke war. Here, a stereotyped Jew conspires behind the scenes to control the Allied powers, represented by the British, American, and Soviet flags.

The Nazis wished to ensure that ... "Jewish" reprisals. Especially from 1942 onwards, the announcement that Jews were being exterminated served as a group unification factor to preclude desertion and force the Germans to continue fighting. Germans were fed the knowledge that too many atrocities had been committed, especially against the Jews, to allow for an understanding to be reached with the Allies. — David Bankier (2002) The Use of Antisemitism in Nazi Wartime Propaganda...

Propaganda often fueled imagined threats using stereotyped and racialized images of scapegoated groups, elaborating familiar antisemitic themes and thus misrepresenting and threatening Jewish people.

Film – the cutting edge of 1930s technology – was a key means of spreading propaganda. To support the intensification of eugenic and racial policies, “documentary” films were created to reinforce ideology: for example, films depicted the physically and mentally disabled as living lives “which were only a burden”. The 1940 film, Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) used footage of the starving and degraded populations of ghettos in Warsaw and Lodz to depict “typical” scenes of Jewish life, as well as a gruesome sequence of ritual slaughter of animals.