Mein Kampf
instead of his war spirit or even his steadfastness being strengthened, the opposite occurred. The man became despondent.
The war propaganda of the Englishmen and Americans, on the other hand, was psychologically right. By exhibiting the Germans to their people as barbarians and Huns they prepared the individual soldier for the horrors of war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. Even the most terrible weapons employed against him seemed only to confirm the enlightenment already bestowed on him, and strengthened his belief in the truthfulness of his own government as much as it stirred his rage and hatred against the nefarious enemy. The effect of the weapons which naturally he was discovering by experience at the hands of the enemy gradually came to seem a proof of the barbarian foe’s already familiar “Hunnish” brutality; and he was never led for a moment to reflect that his own weapons might perhaps—in fact probably—be even more fearful.
Consequently the English soldier could never feel he was being untruthfully informed from home, which was unfortunately so much the case with the German soldier that finally he refused anything from that quarter as “a swindle” and “hysterics.” This was all simply because people thought they could detail any convenient donkey (or even “otherwise” intelligent person) to propaganda duty, instead of realizing that for this purpose the greatest geniuses at judging human nature are barely good enough.
German war propaganda was an incomparable laboratory demonstration of an enlightenment whose effects were absolutely reversed through complete lack of any proper consideration of psychology.
The enemy, however, had a tremendous lesson to teach anyone who was open-eyed and flexible-spirited in profiting by the four and a half years’ tidal wave of enemy propaganda.
What was least understood was the first prerequisite of any propaganda activity whatever: a deliberately subjective, one-sided attitude toward every question discussed. The sins in this direction, at the very beginning of the war, and from the top down, were such that one was really justified in doubting whether
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