The Virtual Historian

Anti-Semitic propaganda:
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the creation of a genuinely anti-Semitic propaganda in Europe, with recurring themes, specific structures, codes and rhetoric. This was established by a dual process: the emergence of popular political movements – like leagues and parties – that had anti-Jewish discourse at the heart of their doctrines, and the advent of the media age with the emergence of a cheaply available and popular mainstream press. In the age of the Industrial Revolution and urbanization, many political parties in France, Germany, and Central and Eastern Europe made anti-Semitism a corollary of their political struggles. Anti-Semitism became a recurring theme of defensive nationalism in any context where certain social groups, especially the middle classes, felt threatened. As a doctrine and myth that spurred action, anti-Semitism was spread throughout society by propaganda. In France, Édouard Drumont played a major role in the dissemination of such ideas. In April 1886, he published the France juive (Jewish France), a bestseller. In April 1892, he created La Libre Parole (The Free Speech) with the subtitle "La France aux Français" (France for the French), which later expanded to La Libre Parole illustrée (The Illustrated Free Speech); both periodicals served anti-Semitism. At the same time other comparable anti-Semitic newspapers spread in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Dreyfus Affair (wherein an innocent French Jewish military officer was framed) marked the intensification of anti-Semetic propaganda: the racist texts, cartoons, stickers, and postcards that appeared in the anti-Dreyfus camp were widely reused in France and abroad. A few years later, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were manufactured by an anti-Semitic Russian forger, Mathieu Golovinski of the Okhrana. This pamphlet pretending to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christian societies enjoyed considerable success and was translated into many languages, first in Russia in the early twentieth century and then from 1920 on in most European countries. In the United States, the anti-Semitic industrialist Henry Ford relayed these accusations in The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, a new bestseller cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf. The Protocols were an integral part in the antisemitic training of the right-wing, and were the propaganda tool of choice for decades; their Manichean character and hazy origins led to their perennity.

During the 1930s, the intensification and refinement of propaganda by totalitarian regimes gave new life to anti-Jewish discourse. Germany became the epicenter of anti-Semitic propaganda, with the National Socialist government trying to encourage the spread of its ideas across Europe. This was accomplished by the Weltdienst ("Global Service"), funded by the Ministry of Propaganda and the NSDAP, and the Reich soon became the rallying point for the anti-Semites of Europe. Trips to Germany were organized offering meetings with Nazi leaders and visits to concentration camps or the anti-Jewish Nuremberg museum.

Images and texts came to serve anti-Semitic hatred. There was an unprecedented profusion of anti-Semetic and racist media. In 1938, some newspapers such as Der Strümer in Germany or Difes della Razza (Unlike the Race ) in Italy made their names in racist and anti-Semitic iconography. Exhibitions such as “the Wandering Jew,” presented in Germany in 1937, allowed for the distribution of catalogs, posters, and other hate materials. The gigantic propaganda machine set up by Nazi Germany promoted the recirculation of themes and images that were not necessarily more violent than Europe had known in the late nineteenth century, but whose meaning was no longer the same when Jews were reduced to social pariahs. In the context of systematic persecution, anti-Semitic propaganda contributed to the trivialization and justification of violence against Jews.

During World War II, in occupied Europe, the Germans spread propaganda that was more offensive than ever. Just as the newspaper cartoon and caricature ascended to a place more prominent than ever before, the cinema and photography rose to ever greater influence. Germany was one of the few regimes to bring anti-Semitism to the silver screen in fiction films like Veit Harlan’s Süss the Jew (1940), which was seen by twenty million viewers in occupied Europe. Photographs were also used to try to demonstrate the existence of a Jewish race by anti-Semites like Nazi anthropologists Eugen Fischer and Hans Günther. From 1914 on, the anti-Semitic press often used portraits of destitute and starving Jews photographed in the ghettos of Central Europe to establish the decay of the "Jewish race."

The hate loaded into images or texts was typically adjusted to fit local anti-Semitisms and traditions, and when they could, the Germans used national propagandists in their occupied territories to relay their racism. In occupied France, the Vichy regime’s propaganda – orchestrated by the information services of the French State and the entourage of the Marshall, and relayed by the French Legion of combatants and various parastatal (political authority) structures – superimposed onto that of the occupying Germans. Tough present in the Southern zones and Northern zones, anti-Semitism was particularly violent in the occupied zone, as expressed by the collaborationist press in posters and documentaries. The exhibit on Le Juif et la France (The Jew and France) opened in Paris at the Palais Berlitz (with 200,000 visitors) on September 5^th, 1941, marking a high point in the integration of the French and German traditions of anti-Semitic propaganda. During the Second World War on the Eastern Front, anti-Jewish posters, leaflets and images were catalysts for murderous hate.

Translation into English by Éric Bélisle.