ABSTRACT
The horrors that the victors found in the death camps, which seem to form the limit defining the character of evil in the twentieth century, were also ended; but the weapon the Nazis had perfected that was responsible for those horrors remained. The weapon they left behind was the propaganda-based methodology that was used to turn a country that was thought to be the height of civilization into a machine for murder. This chapter examines this methodology and explores some of its philosophical underpinnings. Adolf Hitler had very little formal education and no job experience outside selling hand-painted postcards to tourists and being in the army. With Hitler, the aesthetic politics of Wagner escaped the opera house and became a fully unconstrained force for cultural change. The chapter discusses what the success of the method looked like in Nazi Germany and by considering some of the implications of this success in terms of its continued use in the modern world.
