Propaganda is a highly charged and negative concept. Hearing the word, we think of politicians telling conscious lies in order to win over public opinion. Of course, we should not take any propaganda statement at face value; it is clear that time after time propagandists consciously distort what they know to be true. However, really effective propaganda is based on genuine beliefs. Because the assertions of Nazi activists were obviously absurd and contrary to reality, therefore we tend wrongly to assume that the speakers or writers could not really have believed in what they were saying or writing. Not only were the assertions clearly untrue but also from a logical point of view they made no sense because they often contradicted one another. At the heart of Nazi thinking about Jews was this fundamental contradiction, which in different forms appeared again and again: The Jews were boundlessly contemptible and at the same time all powerful; they were cowardly but always victorious. In the 1930s when few countries were willing to take in Jewish refugees, the Nazis repeatedly characterized, with considerable pleasure, this inaction as evidence that Jews were disliked everywhere, at the same time that they asserted that those very governments were in the pockets of Jewish conspirators. Jews were inferior and despised everywhere, and yet at the same time they controlled everything. In the worldview of the Nazis, antisemitism grew everywhere, but at the same time so did the power of Jews.

It would be a mistake to regard antisemitic Nazi propaganda as nothing but empty verbiage for the purpose of winning over the population by demagogy. On the contrary, we must assume that the fundamental propaganda themes represented the genuine beliefs of the Nazi leaders and activists. Nazi propaganda is important not only because it prepared the soil for mass murder and later justified genocide but also because it helps us understand the mind of the perpetrators. It is only because the Nazis really believed in what they were saying that they had the mad determination that enabled them, after years of preparation, to carry out their self-appointed task to kill every Jewish man, woman, and child. We have no better way to understand Nazi thinking than to listen to what they were saying.