Selling Hitler

Nicholas O'Shaughnessy

A radical reappraisal of how Hitler and the Nazis conceived of themselves from the outset as a propagandistic state, rather than propaganda being merely an accessory to power. Hitler was one of the few politicians who understood that persuasion was everything, deployed to anchor an entire regime in the confections of imagery, rhetoric and dramaturgy. The Nazis pursued propaganda not just as a tool, an instrument of government, but also as the totality, the raison d’être, the medium through which power itself was exercised. Moreover, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy argues, Hitler, not Goebbels, was the prime mover in the propaganda regime of the Third Reich--its editor and first author. Under the Reich everything was a propaganda medium, a building-block of public consciousness, from typography to communiqués, to architecture, to weapons design. There were groups to initiate rumours and groups...