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Quarterly Journal of Speech
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The Argument for Genocide in NaziPropaganda
Randall L. BytwerkPublished online: 06 Aug 2006.
To cite this article:
 Randall L. Bytwerk (2005) The Argument for Genocide in Nazi Propaganda,Quarterly Journal of Speech, 91:1, 37-62, DOI: 10.1080/00335630500157516
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The Argument for Genocide in NaziPropaganda
Randall L. Bytwerk
The Nazis justified their attempt to exterminate the Jews by claiming that they were only defending themselves against Jewish plans to destroy Germany and its population. I show how the Nazis used the same the same words to discuss both claims, and how they argued that just as the Jews were serious about exterminating Germany, they were equallserious about exterminating the Jews. Since the argument for annihilating the Jews was hard to make in the mass media, the Nazis put it most strongly in word-of-mouth  propaganda using speakers and public meetings.Keywords: Genocide; Holocaust; Theodore N. Kaufman; Nazi Propaganda; Anti-Semitism
How does one argue for genocide?Thousands of books and articles examine the ways in which various Germanbureaucracies competed and cooperated to implement the Holocaust.
1
Much has alsobeen written on the public discourse of Nazi anti-Semitism, particularly on whatAdolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels said and wrote.
2
However, although the Nazi party considered public meetings and word-of-mouth propaganda critical ways of reachingthe masses, these areas have been largely neglected in previous work on Germanpropaganda.This essay examines two important aspects of the Nazi public argument forkilling the Jews. First, I show how the claim that the Jews were attempting todestroy Germany and the Germans was used to justify Nazi efforts to murderJews, focusing on the use of a remarkable 1941 American book, Theodore N.Kaufman’s
 Germany Must Perish! 
, widely used by the Nazi propaganda apparatusfrom 1941 to 1945. Second, I examine not only the anti-Semitic material in themass media with a national audience, but also blunter material intended formore limited audiences. Examining the full range of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda
Randall L. Bytwerk is Professor of Communication at Calvin College. Correspondence to: Departmentof Communication Arts and Sciences, 1810 East Beltline SE, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA.Email: bytw@calvin.edu
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online)
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2005 National Communication AssociationDOI: 10.1080/00335630500157516
Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 91, No. 1, February 2005, pp. 37 
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provides a new understanding of what the Third Reich told its citizens aboutits genocidal policies in print and orally, when it was said, and how persuasive itwas.
Background
The basic Nazi argument was that exterminating Jews was a necessary defensivemeasure. Because Jews were determined to destroy Germany, Germans had no choicebut to destroy the Jews first. Since both claims were monstrous and hard to believe,the Nazis were forced to argue repeatedly that the Jews were serious aboutexterminating Germans, and (less often) that they in turn were grimly serious aboutexterminating Jews. The war was a matter of ‘life or deathin a literal sense.Germany or the Jews would perish.There is considerable controversy about the way the Nazi movement decided to killthe Jews. When did the Nazis decide on the Holocaust, and how centrally involvedwas Adolf Hitler? I do not propose to join that debate, but rather will summarizewhat is generally accepted, and proceed to what Nazi propaganda said.The Nazis themselves needed time to determine what they were going to do aboutthe ‘‘Jewish Question.’’ There was no central plan or intention to kill the Jews whenHitler took power in 1933. The Nazis began with efforts, both legal and otherwise, tomake the lives of German Jews as unpleasant as possible. In the 1930s, they encouraged German Jews to emigrate to just about anywhere. Despite
 Kristallnacht 
 inNovember 1938 and other anti-Semitic measures, the Nazis were still encouragingemigration when the war began, and for at least a year thereafter.Although Nazism succeeded in expelling about half of the 600,000 Jews who werein Germany when they took power in 1933, the conquest of Poland suddenly broughtnearly 2,000,000 additional Jews under German control. This was a problem. Still,until the invasion of Russia, the German leadership thought that the ‘‘Final Solution,’’the nature of which was still murky, could be postponed until after German victory.The shift to murder began with the realization that the war in Russia would bring stillmore millions of Jews under German control, and also that different rules could befollowed. In a war against ‘‘subhumans,’’ murder became easier. It became conceivablethat all the Jews of Europe could be killed. By the fall of 1941, both Nazi practice andNazi rhetoric increasingly suggested a policy of mass murder. Germans throughoutthe tangled organizational apparatus of the Third Reich had determined to kill asmany Jews as they could. There probably was not a written order from Hitler, but thatwas not necessary. His thinking was sufficiently clear to those around him, and theNazi system encouraged fanaticism more than caution in carrying out the Fu¨hrer’swishes.But how did things look to a typical German? What did average Germans, whoprobably did not like Jews very much, but who also would have been reluctant to killthem, read and hear?
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