Today, the 27 of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, marks Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. The entire country will pause for two minutes to remember the six million Jews whose lives were stolen by the Nazis.
When we think about the horrors of the Holocaust, we try to understand the deep-rooted antisemitism that led up to it. Surely racism alone does not lead to the systematic genocide of an entire population? How can one explain, then, what prompted the world to turn a blind eye to the atrocities of the Holocaust, which included deadly living conditions, brutality against Jews, mass executions, gassings and designed killing centers?
The world could not have been this blinded and naive to what the Nazis were doing. So how is it that Jews were so dehumanized in the eyes of Europeans that they did nothing while the Nazis shipped off their Jewish neighbors to concentration camps? Even more so, how could an average German citizen, who had known Jewish people personally and had been friendly with them, turn them in to the authorities?
The answer, in my opinion, is a simple one: propaganda. The Holocaust did not happen overnight; it started with words printed and broadcasted in mainstream media. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines propaganda as the dissemination of information to influence or control large groups of people.
How did the Nazis use propaganda to kickstart the Holocaust?
Antisemitism was at the foundation and the primary motivation of the Holocaust but Nazi propaganda was the key to brainwashing an entire society against Jews. In the years leading to World War II, the Nazis took control of most mainstream media. The regime had spent years spreading false and misleading information about Jewish people to dehumanize them and foster antisemitism. This is a tactic, unfortunately, that we see too often in mainstream media today.
The Nazi propaganda campaign against Jews was highly effective because it tapped into preexisting prejudices. The idea that Jews have power and control (something that Kanye West blared out to the world last year) was a prevalent theme in the antisemitic campaign.
There was a list of popular Nazi outlets that contributed to the dehumanization of Jewish people. For example, Völkischer Beobachter (The People’s Observer) was the official Nazi newspaper, characterized as a daily, antisemitic, gossip sheet, circulated to about 8,000 people. In 1921, however, Hitler took the paper under his complete control and distributed it to 1.1 million people.
ANOTHER MAJOR antisemitic outlet was Der Stürmer, arguably one of the worst and most dangerous in the Nazi propaganda campaign. Der Stürmer (The Attacker) was a tabloid read by mostly young and impressionable Germans. Though it wasn’t considered an official publication of the Nazi party, it regularly published blood libels and antisemitic caricatures of Jews. Der Angriff (The Attack) was a paper founded by Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels. He partnered with Hans Schweitzer and frequently published antisemitic cartoons.
By the 1930s, all mainstream media and German culture came under Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry’s full control, including films, theater, music, the press and radio broadcasts. The Holocaust began shortly after.
The Nazis took drastic actions to censor anyone who opposed them. They closed down or took over newspapers that fought back against Nazi ideology. They controlled what news appeared in newspapers and on the radio. The Nazis also burned any books that they considered un-German.
Antisemitism in the media continues
We continue to see examples of the same dehumanization of Jews in today’s mainstream media, especially in the terrible ways news outlets report on the murder of Israelis. By spewing heavy bias and whitewashing the murder of innocent Israelis, news outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian and the BBC are complicit in normalizing the death of Jewish people.
What should also alarm us is the antisemitism in social media, rampant with blood libels and Holocaust denial. Online hatred and calls to violence (particularly pervasive in Arabic social media) have led to the murder of Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora.
It is frightening to think about the mainstream media’s power in normalizing the Holocaust. Today, Jew hate continues to rise worldwide, with politicians like Ilhan Omar perpetuating antisemitic tropes and celebrities like Kanye West echoing the same sentiments that Hitler did.
On Yom Hashoah, we will #NeverForget the six million lives we lost and we will never forget the media’s role in normalizing their murders. This is why we can never stay silent when we see the same hatred, whether directed at the Jewish population or the Jewish state.
The writer is a social media activist with over 10 years of experience working for Israeli, Jewish and cause-based NGOs. She is the co-founder and the COO of Social Lite Creative, a digital marketing firm specializing in geopolitics.