Anti-Semitic Propaganda and the Christian Church in Hitler’s Germany: A Case of Schrödinger’s Cat ()
ABSTRACT
In his epic Mein
Kampf, Adolf Hitler made a point of disparaging the intelligentsia. He
asserted that propaganda was the most effective tool to use in political
campaigns since especially the popular masses generally possessed limited
astuteness and were generally devoid of intellect. This article examines the
part played by Nazi propaganda in bolstering the National Socialist cause and
how it netted the German youth. Nazi indoctrination nurtured racial hatred and
resulted in especially vitriolic anti-Semitism. The policy of Gleichschaltung
(coordination) brought state governments, professional bodies, German political
parties and a range of cultural bodies under the Nazi umbrella, thus education,
legal systems and the entire economy became “captured” entities. Germany became
dominated by the effective propaganda machine via which virtually all aspects
of life was dictated. In this, the Protestant church played a huge part. An
analogy is drawn with Erwin Schrodinger’s Cat paradox, according to which a
macroscopic entity can be simultaneously alive and dead. Thus while people
believed they were alive in Nazism, they were in essence dead from a human
consciousness perspective even if they were adherents of the Protestant and
Catholic churches due to the effectiveness of the propaganda machinery.
Share and Cite:
Nicolaides, A. (2018) Anti-Semitic Propaganda and the Christian Church in Hitler’s Germany: A Case of Schrödinger’s Cat.
Advances in Historical Studies,
7, 1-14. doi:
10.4236/ahs.2018.71001.