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Strategy cannot simply be defined as something someone does on a battlefield or a weapon he or she makes. Strategy must be considered on many different planes. There are many different strategies that lead up to the tactics on the battlefield, diplomatic tactics, propaganda tactics, and a host of others that must be taken into account before the war is even began. Hitler s strategy was to take targets that he could get his hands on without directly declaring war on any nations. Hitler knew not to fight a multiple front war. He knew that if he did he would be crushed quickly.
Hitler knew also, how to make people follow him, Without this weapon he would ve never had an army. Hitler knew that propaganda would be crucial part in this war in helping him raise an army and fuel it with ideas of what it was fighting for. Hitler used propaganda as one of his prime weapons. Propaganda had been used as far back as World War One and farther back then that. It became a realistic way of explaining ones ideas around the time of the printing press, but was used in many other ways then slogans and posters. Propaganda could be any speech or a way of promoting or demoting any ideas.
Propaganda can serve almost any use the person using it would want to. It shows a limited amount of ideas from a limited perspective. It is one of the most effective ways of spreading single sided ideas to a large amount of people. Hitler used it to show that he was a born leader. In one Pro-Hitler poster, Hitler is surrounded by his army on a podium with both arms in the air adorned by a hallow of light with about fifty swastikas below him (Hitler, Adolf) That creates a very powerful image that isn t easy to forget. As long as that name paired with those kinds of images are in people s heads the propaganda has succeeded with catchy artwork and symbols to make the viewer remember the ideas.
Anyone and everyone can use propaganda. Hitler used it; the U. S. used it to promote economy and to rally itself for the war, and to increase its industrial capacity for war. The U. S.
also used pictures of a loud-mouthed dictator to harbor feelings of agitation in U. S. citizens about Hitler. Hitler used every form of propaganda that he could think of.
Hitler had speeches, parades, posters, and symbols all to convince people that he would be the one, the Fuhrer, to bring Germany out of its rut and back into its past greatness. People were tired of the depression and were bitter from having to pay reparations. When people saw him and his organized armies, they didn t think crazed dictator, they thought that he was a uniformed, proud, patriot. That was Hitler wanted them to think. As Hitler had posters showing the allied powers as horrible things out to destroy the dream of the third Reich, they only reaffirmed the beliefs of his soldiers of what war was like. Hitler wasn t just born as the patriotic, Anti-Jew, calculating person that we now know.
He was born on April 20 1889, in small Austrian town, but later moved to a much larger town. He had three brothers and two sisters, one brother died, not from starvation or poverty, but the measles. In most of his speeches Hitler would try to give the impression that his family was poor, and on the edge of poverty, when actually they were well off. The last name that his father used was Schickelgruber, young Hitler knew early that lacked the heroic ring that he felt he needed. So he changed his name to Hitler a name that some of his relatives used, but spelled it in a way that suited him best, rather then Hitler, Huettler, and Hitler. Hitler did exceedingly bad in school, but he read often and was a big fan of a certain German author of American trash fiction.
This writer, Karl May, wrote westerns filled with violence and was extremely popular with most German school children, however they soon lost interest as they reached adulthood. Hitler, however, did not. He later commented on Karl May as in fact, he opened my eyes to the world. May s writing fit into Hitler s world perfectly. They reaffirmed everything he thought. It was rich in prejudice, racism, and violence (Switzer. ) Hitler aspired to be an architect or artist, but was unsuccessful at this.
Even in his seat as a dictator he still considered himself an artist. People who saw his paintings said he usually avoided people, both in art and in real life. His steeples, churches, towers and other designs in architecture were very accurate. Eventually he could not afford anything on such an unsuccessful profession, He wondered the streets of Vienna looking for odd jobs and he slept on benches. After this Hitler fought in World War One, which Hitler fought very bravely in and was decorated for courage many times. During the war Hitler is gassed and goes into a state of hysterical blindness, where the only reason he can t see is because of hi blinding anger and bitterness for the allies.
The Versailles treaty shocked Hitler. Hitler felt that the fatherland had been handed away and that the people that had been trying to fight to keep the allies back had been deceived. He called the signers of the Versailles treaty traitors. He also thought it was part of a Jewish plan to wreck the Fatherland. He was bitter about this for a long time. About a year after that Hitler made his first important speech in a beer hall, and later named his organization the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi, for short.
By the summer of 1920 it has three thousand due paying members. Parades were probably one of Hitler s most effective methods. They had no real meaning really except to show off the power of his army, to rise the morale of his troops, of the civilians, and to make himself seem more of a figurehead. There was lots of preparation for one of his marches, women would sprinkle flowers on the pavement before the soldiers passed, swastikas were everywhere.
These parades gave the German people a kind of solidarity. We are German. The parades would usually end with a speech. Hitler was said to move from bitterness to joyfulness constantly, and he would take his viewers with him on every mood (Share. ) Hitler s Youth was an organization that he made to familiarize children with the idea of total obedience to the higher authorities while disguising it as a kind of girl and boy scouts. They sometimes joined as early as six and played games of tactical, and strategic nature. They sung patriotic songs and even had little uniforms and did the well known Heil Hitler salute (Switzer. ) Censorship was not used until later in his political life.
Censor ship was everything from book burning to murdering people. At the beginning of his dictatorship, Hitler outlawed labor unions, burned books, and outlawed all other political parties except the Nazi party. Hitler outlawed labor unions to keep the economy moving at a fast enough pace to keep his war machine moving. Hitler didn t burn ALL books, he simply burned all the books that had any kind of independent thought or ideas behind them. There was a huge book-burning bonfire in Berlin on May twentieth. Everyone was invited.
The Nazi s had things called party block wardens. People could report conversations to the Nazi s which could set them up for imprisonment or death depending on how serious the reported conversation was. By 1936 everyone was watching what they said. Hitler outlawed political parties for one obvious reason-to make the spread of Hitler s ideas faster, to clear the way of different ideas. He would probably murder some of them later. Hitler s censorship also spread to murder or imprisonment for those who spoke against him.
During The Night of the Long Knives Hitler murdered some of his enemies and friends in order to get rid of anybody who might possibly want to conspire against him. People accepted the disappearances of others because if Hitler said so it must ve been that way. Hitler s men would tell them they had been locked up for their own safety. Hitler chose the symbol for his Nazi party to be the swastika; it is a very old symbol, dating back to ancient Egypt it is Propaganda in its highest form, no other had a symbol of such power.
Hitler once said A symbol it is! Hitler also tried to show himself as the nice guy by constantly having photographs taken of himself with children or puppies, or ideally, both. He supposedly liked animals so much he became a vegetarian. Photos like this were in newspapers almost daily. Someone that was very close to him was Albert Speer, who had the following impression of him. His appearances also surprised me.
On posters and in caricatures I had seen him in military tunic, with shoulder straps, swastika arm band and hair flapping on his forehead. But here he was wearing a well-fitted blue suit and looking markedly respectable. Everything about him bore out a note of reasonable modesty. Later I learned he had a great gift for adjusting- consciously or intuitively-to his surroundings. -Albert Speer, on his first encounter with Adolf Hitler at a university meeting, from his autobiography, Inside the Third Reich.
Hitler could change his mood entirely and was a master actor. It is doubtful that Hitler ever could ve became as popular as he did with out anyone knowing his name. Without his ability to be so many different things he would ve been nothing. For example, he was a tractarian, patriot, leader, artist, and leader of youth. But all of these were something he wasn t. Behind all of this he was a calculating conquerer.
All the parades were just to draw an army for him to use, as were all the patriotic speeches, because without them he couldn t have gotten half of what he wanted done. The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses. But the masses are slow-moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated a thousand times will the masses finally remember them. -Adolf Hitler, from Mein Kampf.
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Research essay sample on World War One Adolf Hitler
