Selling Hitler: Propaganda and the Nazi Brand -
By Jean-Pierre Filiu

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'etre, 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 communiques, to architecture, to weapons design. There
were groups to initiate rumours and groups to spread graffiti.
Everything could be interrogated for its propaganda potential, every
surface inscribed with polemical meaning, whether an enemy city's name,
an historical epic or the poster on a neighbourhood wall. But Hitler was
in no sense an innovator - his ideas were always second- hand. Rather
his expertise was as a packager, fashioning from the accumulated mass of
icons and ideas, the historic debris, the labyrinths and byways of the
German mind, a modern and brilliant political show articulated through
deftly managed symbols and rituals. The Reich would have been
unthinkable without propaganda - it would not have been the Reich.