Anti-Semitic Propaganda and the Christian Church in Hitler’s Germany: A Case of Schrödinger’s Cat

Abstract

In his epic Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler made a point of disparaging the intelligentsia. He asserted that propaganda was the most effective tool to use in political campaigns since especially the popular masses generally possessed limited astuteness and were generally devoid of intellect. This article examines the part played by Nazi propaganda in bolstering the National Socialist cause and how it netted the German youth. Nazi indoctrination nurtured racial hatred and resulted in especially vitriolic anti-Semitism. The policy of Gleichschaltung (coordination) brought state governments, professional bodies, German political parties and a range of cultural bodies under the Nazi umbrella, thus education, legal systems and the entire economy became “captured” entities. Germany became dominated by the effective propaganda machine via which virtually all aspects of life was dictated. In this, the Protestant church played a huge part. An analogy is drawn with Erwin Schrödinger’s Cat paradox, according to which a macroscopic entity can be simultaneously alive and dead. Thus while people believed they were alive in Nazism, they were in essence dead from a human consciousness perspective even if they were adherents of the Protestant and Catholic churches due to the effectiveness of the propaganda machinery.