Following a humiliating peace imposed by the Allied Powers through the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of World War I, German pride sank to a low point. Hitler detested the peace, believing that German leaders had compromised the integrity of their nation by accepting its harsh terms. Through his leadership of the Nazi party, he desired to restore pride by emphasizing the importance of an unrestrained Germanic ideal. This nationalistic ideal appealed to the German people, who began to experience a sense of self-worth and exclusivity. In his comprehensive study "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," William L. Shirer observes that "Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions which had long been pent up in the German people."
In his leadership of the Nazi party, Hitler advocated an extremely conservative social vision, based upon nationalistic ideals. The true enemy, he believed, was the so-called "Jewish menace." For Hitler, Jews destabilized the state imposing their collective will through fidelity to a Marxist ideology. In his 1925 book "Mein Kampf," Hitler mused, "the Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight," thus withdrawing from humanity "the premise of its existence and its culture." For this reason, Hitler sought to impose regulatory measures designed to severely curb Jewish influence in German society. This conservative political doctrine appealed to a vast portion of the German population, since many people were concerned with developing a strong sense of German nationhood.
Unlike the politically unstable Weimar Republic, which Hitler overthrew and replaced with the Third Reich, the Nazi regime actively engaged itself with the work of expanding the scope of German political power. Despite the fact that most Germans were averse to their nation's involvement in war during this period, Hitler spearheaded acts of military aggression on the pretext of national self-defense. As spoils of war fell into the nation's hands, the popularity of Nazism rose over the course of several years in the 1930s.
Nazi propaganda, produced under the supervision of Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels, was charged not only with the task of portraying the enemy in an unflattering light but also with portraying Germany's favored people in a flattering light. German supporters of Nazism viewed the world from the perspective of their paternal leader, Hitler. With dramatic flash, Hitler's Germany was captured in Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 propaganda film "Triumph of the Will." According to author Rainer Rother in "Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genuis," this film "could be termed a classic if it were a feature film, and it presupposes that the members of the audience will activate a mode of perception which has been instilled in them by conventional feature films, thereby making the connections suggested by the montage (Hitler's review of the armed forces--Hitler's aeroplane--Hitler's point of view from the aeroplane."