Wednesday 11 February 2009

Holocaust museum recycles Jewish propaganda

Link

Wearing a black hat and a suit bearing the yellow Star of David, a man recoils from a large finger pointing at him from above.

"He is to blame for the war," reads the poster caption.

Similar images, along with newspapers, speeches and broadcast clips, tell the story of how Nazi Germany's propaganda machine cultivated hatred and suspicion and portrayed Jewish people as the enemy in the new museum exhibit "State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda."

The exhibit opened Jan. 30 at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and runs through December 2011. It documents how propaganda fostered public indifference as the government and its allies went from hostilities to mass atrocities of the Holocaust, when millions of Jews and other groups were killed between 1933 and 1945.

Museum officials hope visitors will become more critical of information and more aware of anti-Semitism and intolerance. For instance, the exhibit touches on the 1994 Rwandan genocide and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call to wipe Israel off the map.

"It's to alert people to the fact that hate speech and language like this didn't go away when the Nazis fell," said Steven Luckert, the exhibit's curator. "These are things that we have to be constantly aware of in our own day."

Nazi leaders branded Adolf Hitler as a savior. The swastika logo became instantly recognizable in posters and other marketing used to attract votes from women, laborers and students as the Nazis rose from a little-known party.

After coming to power in 1933, Hitler established a ministry of "public enlightenment and propaganda." Visitors can use a touchscreen monitor to see and hear examples of the ministry's work, including music they used.

Newspaper reports also played a role in gaining support for the Nazi agenda. Curators said many Germans didn't share Hitler's desire to go to war in 1939 so fabricated reports of countries such as Poland threatening the country were printed to make it seem like an invasion was necessary.

At its core, the Nazi party promised to unite Germans under a national, Aryan identity regardless of class, religion or region -- but excluded were Jews, the mentally and physically disabled, gays and other groups considered "impure." More crap

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Wiesenthal illustrated his book with drawings which he allegedly did either while in Mauthausen or from memory thereafter, and one of the more famous pictures from his book is of three Jews, in their striped prisoner outfits, who had been shot at the stake by the Nazis. (reproduced below).

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