The success of National Socialism was based on the charisma of Adolf Hitler, appeal of its absolutist dogmatic ideology and the promise to the German people of a return to the lifestyle to which they had been accustomed prior to World War I. An efficient propaganda operation, under the leadership of Joseph Goebbels, using modern mass media, indoctrinated the masses and fostered the personality cult of Adolf Hitler. The greeting "Heil Hitler" became an integral part of verbal and written interaction and replaced most other forms of salutation. This greeting by itself elevated Adolf Hitler to an ultra-significant other. The personality cult kept the people exalted and in line; in line because, simultaneously with improved living conditions, Germany had also turned into a police state in which disagreement and disobedience was punished with removal to prisons and concentration camps. The mass of the German population was held captive until the very end by a totalitarian system based on an appealing yet virulent ideology. This totalitarian structure can be likened to a prison-like existence from which there was virtually no escape. Only those with an unusually high moral and social intelligence, a profile in courage and humanity rejected the regime's destructive forces.
Pseudo-scientific ideologically tainted ethnology entitled Race and Soul, by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1938. This book was an introduction to "racial science".
Under Sigrune and Eagle: Encounters of our SS and Police in their Assignments in the General Government [Occupied Poland], 1939-40. The SS symbol was called the Sigrune. This publication contains anti-Semitic and anti-Polish anecdotes, reports, testimonies and illustrations reflecting the successful ideological indoctrination of the SS and the police. Furthermore, these police and SS troops were assigned to slaughter Jews behind combat lines and were infamously known as Einsatzkommandos [task force], subdivided into Einsatzgruppen. The two following illustrations are from this book:
Gibbering Jews
Quarreling Jews
Jews in the Legal Sciences: Jews and Criminality
A vicious, racist anti-Semitic book which asserts that all Jews are born criminals. One of the most important "academic writings", reflecting an identification with and the promulgation of Nazi racist ideology.
Treatise on Racial Hygiene, 1941. Eugenicist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was the director of the University Institutes for the Biology of Inheritance and Racial Hygiene (Frankfurt/Main). Verschuer and Fischer were the academic initiators for Mengele's and similarly situated experiments conducted by SS medical personnell at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, as well as other concentration camps, such as the identical twins experiment.
It is interesting to note that mostly psychiatrists and medical personnell were responsible and engaged in mass destruction of alegedly inferior human beings.
Original copy from the desk of the Stürmer newsroom from the years 1940-41, The Jew Mandelbaum in "full armor". Proudly he wrote to his Rebekka, "Don't I look like a real warlord... I am doing excellently in the Supply Department." The photo has been retouched to adjust to stereotypical Jewish imagery created by the Nazis, a standard procedure used by the Stürmer editorial staff.
Don't Trust Any Fox on the Green Pasture or Any Jew Taking an Oath: A picture book for young and old by Elvira Bauer, 1936.
An early indoctrination into anti-Semitic and racial hatred published by Julius Streicher's Stürmer Publications. The illustrations below are from this book.
Expulsion of Jewish children and teachers from German schools.
Seduction of a blonde Aryan.
"What a poor wretch is the Jew! He doesn't like his own women! He thinks he's terribly clever when he steals himself a German one. But look at him here, this Jew: he doesn't match with her at all! Next to this German woman, o horror, he looks just pitiful! He'd be much better off leaving German women alone and sticking with his 'Kalle' (Jewish women)".
Sign reads: "Jews! Not welcome here".
A Jewish butcher selling "filthy ware".
A brown-uniformed Julius Streicher, Gauleiter (Nazi district leader), of Franken (Franconia, Bavaria) and publisher of one of the most widely-read Nazi weekly, The Stürmer, accepting flowers from a pack of adoring children. Inscription reads: "So, this is the Streicher".