# Adolf Hitler's Own Book Mein Kampf (My Battle)/Chapter 6

Chapter VI
War Propaganda
As I studied politics with such interest, I was always much intrigued by propaganda. I saw that the Marxist organizations applied this weapon with a masterly touch.
Events during the war showed the almost unbelievable potency of propaganda. Often there was too much time for thought—but the enemy was the one who filled the blank spaces. While our leaders were failing to do anything, I learned much from the propaganda of our enemy.
The British and the Americans, branding the German as a barbarous Hun, prepared their soldier for war. He was made to hate his enemy with all his heart. Then when this soldier met our cruel weapons, and saw their effect upon his falling comrades, he believed the more in his government and in its—and his own—“righteous cause.”
Whatever little propaganda was manufactured on our side was terrible. Our papers laughed at the enemy as a ridiculous, easy-to-be-vanquished fool; then when our soldiers met him on the battlefield, and learned how untrue this was, they were discouraged if not terrified—and so many of them came to doubt everything they were told, and even the cause they were fighting for.
Freedom From Whom?
The aim for which we fought was sublime; freedom and unity of the German people.
Nations fighting for existence on this planet should not concern themselves with particulars of humaneness and aesthetics. Nature does not know these driveling things—questions of destiny have no obligation to beauty.
Slavery is the most unbeautiful thing related to human life.
‘The Jews are the inventors of the current perfumes of civilization, but their very existence is incarnate protest against the aesthetics of the Lord’s image!
In the time of the World War, propaganda was a means to an end, and this end was the existence of the German race. Propaganda, then, could be looked at only with this in mind. The cruelest imaginable weapons were humane if they hastened victory.
Important is the question: at whom should propaganda be aimed? At the intelligentsia, or at the little-educated masses?
For the intelligentsia we have scientific instruction, not propaganda.
Propaganda appeals forever only to the masses! The business of propaganda is not scientific training of the individual, but instead is the directing of the attention of the masses to certain facts, events, needs, etc.—the purpose is to make these things seem important.
The whole art consists in attacking a point so skillfully that a universal belief in its reality is induced, and a righteous faith constructed.
Propaganda must be popularly toned, dropped to the intellectual level of the dullest of those at whom it is directed. Thus the greater the mass which must be influenced, the lower must be the form of the propaganda used.
Propaganda —And Away With Truth
The less scientific ballast used, the more brilliant will be the success of propaganda.
The absorbant-capacity of the masses is most limited. Their understanding is small while their forgetfulness is great. Therefore, propaganda must be strictly limited to a very few essential points, and these must be used again and again until the dullest man of all cannot help knowing what is meant. As soon as this principle is abandoned the force of propaganda fades.
Our propaganda during the World War—if there was any such—neglected the basically important fact that a deliberately subjective biased attitude must be adopted in every case.
Sometimes it was difficult for me to believe that our propaganda sins and omissions could be blamed upon stupidity. What is a people to think of a poster advertising some soap but which remarks that other soaps are just as good? They would shake their heads. Propaganda’s job is never truly to sum up all the various causes—it must emphasize only the cause it is intended to represent. It must not waste time exploring truth, and then presenting this with intellectual honesty—it must perpetually serve its own truth.
It was a basic error to talk of the war guilt from the standpoint that Germany alone could not be held responsible. The enemy should have been loaded down with the entire guilt, even if this were not true—which it was in this case.
The moment one’s own propaganda grants even a glimmer of justice to the other side, seeds are sown for the doubting of one’s own cause. The masses are incapable of deciding where the enemy’s sins end and their own begin.
“The parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against nature’s vital law of aristocracy.”
Mein Kampf—Chapter III
True or False, Blame the Enemy
At this time the masses begin taking pains not to do the enemy an injustice. An overwhelming majority of the people is naturally so feminine in nature and thought that it is motivated more by feeling than by sober reason. But this sentiment is very simple. There are almost no shadings—there are only opposites. There is never half of this and half of that, but only love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie.
The British proved their knowledge of the primitive masses with their atrocity propaganda, ruthlessly building moral righteousness, while flailing the German enemy with the unequaled, colossal lie of sole war guilt.
Meanwhile our empty-headed “statesmen” poured out a thin stream of pacifist dishwater. How could this make men willing to die!
Propaganda must carefully limit itself to very little, which must be ever and forever repeated. The masses require some time before they even notice anything, and then it only impresses itself upon their memories after it has been hammered in for a long time.
Thus the enemy armed itself with only a few ideas, and thus hurled these out continuously. At first their propaganda seemed madly impudent; later it was merely unpleasant—but finally it was believed.
After four and a half years a revolution flared in Germany—and the slogan of that revolution was born is enemy war propaganda!
All the effect of German propaganda was just nil.