(Jewish Group) Stanford Linguists Show How Nazis Got Away with Murder

[Behind the Aegis]

A new study said that language used by the Nazis in propaganda throughout their rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s served to slowly dehumanize Jewish people, with the language changing over time.

According to a study published on November 9 in the journal Plos One, linguistic analysis of Nazi propaganda from that period shows that the framing of Jewish people changed from focusing on disengaging the German peoples' moral concern for them to suggesting that the Jews had a much greater capacity for the agency to be "malevolent" after the Holocaust began.

"We investigated the use of mentally state terms considered fundamentally human: experience, the capacity to feel sensations and emotions, and agency, the capacity to have complex thoughts, plan, and act intentionally," Alexander Landry, an organizational behavior Ph.D. student at Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-author of the paper, told Newsweek.

Through propaganda, Nazis portrayed the Jewish people as having less and less capacity for experiencing fundamental human emotions and sensations, thus dehumanizing them in the eyes of the German public. This was potentially an attempt to make the idea of the mass murder of the Jews more palatable to the rest of the country.

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The intellectualization of anti-Semitism continues unabated today!

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Nazis used all media.

Eventually, they'd show film shorts of teams of rats and equate them with Jews, thus justifying the need for extermination.

[modrepub]

2. Black Earth by Timothy Snyder

was eye opening for me. While I wouldn't argue with this study's conclusion, I think Snyder's take on why Jews were systematically murdered was just as valid. Basically there were financial incentives for either murdering or displacing your Jewish neighbors. As people were deported and murdered, their neighbors quickly swooped in and claimed their property and left over belongings. Even in states where Jews were merely discriminated against, their jobs and businesses were either taken by others or bought at steep discounts.

The Nazi state basically fed off of the assets of Jewish communities. These were, IMHO, a significant reason why they were so successful in getting people to follow them (and when folks weren't cooperative the Nazis just eliminated you and took your assets). Jewish assets were a key financial peg that supported the Nazi state.

There's no arguing that Nazis operated under extreme antisemitism. But the financial incentives for their operations shouldn't be discounted.