‘State of Deception’ at Holocaust Museum: Deconstructing Nazi Propaganda

Aaron Keyak — February 11, 2009 – 5:00 pm | Comments (1) Add a comment

Here’s an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post on the newest Holocaust Museum exhibit titled, “Hitler’s Terrible Weapon: Publicity.”

After touring the newly liberated Nazi concentration camp at Ohrdruf, Germany, in 1945, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that he made his very public visit “to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ “

Those words are chiseled on the wall of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has just opened a major new exhibition devoted to propaganda. Eisenhower’s intuition that propaganda, which made the Holocaust possible, might also be used to deny its existence remains prescient. Just last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel blasted the Catholic Church for rehabilitating the disgraced bishop, Richard Williamson, who has publicly questioned essential and accepted facts about the Nazi genocide.

In many ways, “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda” feels like an introduction to Holocaust Museum 2.0. The $3.2 million exhibition is one of the largest and most ambitious in years, and certainly the most technologically slick in recent memory. By taking on the subject of propaganda, the museum is taking on the whole of the Nazi project, retelling the story of Hitler’s rise to prominence, his consolidation of power, his ideology and his wars, and the aftermath, including a substantial look at how propaganda and genocide remain linked in places such as Rwanda.

One item on display, a large painting of the young Hitler speaking to a small, rapt audience, is titled “In the Beginning Was the Word.” That biblical reference would make a good subtitle to “State of Deception,” which covers much of the same ground as the museum’s permanent collection, while more explicitly emphasizing the degree to which propaganda was the very fiber of the whole Nazi project.

Click here to read the rest.

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