Modern Political Mythology

Mythology and Its Place in History

Chapter 8 · Modern Political Mythology: Propaganda & the 20th Century

Every myth so far took generations, or centuries, to build and to unwind. This chapter compresses that same process into years, sometimes months — and introduces a genuinely new, more disturbing variable: two real 20th-century regimes that didn't just interpret or invoke the physical record, but directly manufactured and altered it. That breaks something this course's own toolkit has quietly depended on since Chapter 1.

Nazi Germany, Case 1: A Legend Built to Explain a Real Defeat

The Dolchstoßlegende — 18 November 1919

Germany had lost the First World War on the battlefield — a real, military, documented outcome. Rather than accept that, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg appeared before the Weimar National Assembly's own investigative committee into the causes of Germany's defeat and, reading a statement prepared by General Erich Ludendorff, declared: "as an English general has very truly said, the German Army was 'stabbed in the back.'" The claim — that treacherous internal forces, coded specifically as Jews, socialists, and communists, had betrayed an undefeated army — became known as the Dolchstoßlegende, the "stab-in-the-back myth."

A direct payoff of Chapter 1's own toolkit Who benefits? Germany's own military high command, whose real strategic and command failures the myth conveniently displaced onto scapegoated civilian groups. The myth directly undermined the fragile new Weimar Republic's own legitimacy from its first years, and the Nazi Party built much of its early antisemitic and anti-communist rhetoric directly on top of it — a real, testified, dated origin for an idea that helped shape the following two decades of German politics.

Nazi Germany, Case 2: Manufacturing Corroboration for a Myth

The Ahnenerbe — Founded 1 July 1935

Heinrich Himmler and scholar Herman Wirth founded a real SS research institute, the Ahnenerbe, dedicated to producing pseudo-scientific "proof" of Aryan racial superiority through archaeology and anthropology. It financed real, genuine excavations and expeditions across a decade — including a 1938–39 SS mission to Tibet, led by zoologist Ernst Schäfer with anthropologist Bruno Beger, sent specifically to search for evidence linking Tibetans to a claimed ancient Aryan race, and for the mythical kingdom of Agartha some Nazi occultists believed might hold Aryan origins. The expedition's members genuinely measured skulls and collected anthropological data in service of a conclusion decided in advance.

A chilling inversion of Chapter 3's own method Chapter 3 built euhemerism as a disciplined tool: does independent evidence support a real person or place behind a myth? The Ahnenerbe ran that method backward — not testing whether evidence supported a claim, but deploying real institutional funding, real scientists, and a real decade-long research program specifically to manufacture the appearance of independent corroboration for a conclusion that was never in genuine doubt. The same tools this course has used to evaluate myths honestly were here weaponized to produce a false verdict on command.

The Soviet Union, Case 1: A Film That Replaced the Event It Depicted

Sergei Eisenstein's October: Ten Days That Shook the World, 1927

Commissioned for the Revolution's own tenth anniversary, Eisenstein's film re-created the storming of the Winter Palace as a sweeping, thousands-strong battle. The real 1917 event, by contrast, involved roughly a hundred Bolshevik sailors and soldiers meeting minimal resistance — a real, documented account of a far smaller, far less dramatic night than the film portrays. The filmmakers reportedly detonated more ordnance staging the reenactment than the actual Red Army used in the genuine 1917 event, and more people were injured making the film than during the real storming itself.

When the physical record becomes the myth October's own reenactment footage was so visually convincing that news agencies later mistakenly published its stills as genuine historical photographs of 1917. A dramatized film, made a full decade after the actual event, didn't just illustrate the founding myth of the Soviet state — for a real, documented span of time, it substituted for the historical record entirely in the popular imagination.

The Soviet Union, Case 2: Editing People Out of Photographs

Nikolai Yezhov, Photographed and Then Erased

In April 1937, Nikolai Yezhov — then head of the NKVD secret police, presiding over the mass arrests and executions of Stalin's Great Purge — was photographed walking alongside Stalin along the Moscow-Volga Canal. Yezhov himself fell from favor the following year, was secretly tried, and was executed in February 1940. Soviet photo retouchers then removed him entirely from the original photograph, filling the gap where he had stood with painted-in water — a genuinely pointed detail, since Yezhov had also held the real title of Commissar of Water Transport. Design historian David King, who later uncovered and cataloged thousands of comparably altered Soviet photographs in his book The Commissar Vanishes, documented this as routine, ad hoc practice: a quiet word from the right official was enough to erase a person from the visual record entirely.

A Structural Problem This Course Has to Name Directly

Every chapter until now has trusted the physical record as independent Chapter 1's own toolkit treats "what does the physical record say?" as a genuine check against a myth — it worked because the record, however incomplete, wasn't itself controlled by whoever benefited from the myth. Both cases in this chapter break that assumption directly: a state that controls its own film industry and its own photograph archives can manufacture the very evidence a historian would otherwise use to test its claims. This doesn't make the toolkit useless — it means the toolkit's fourth question needs a fifth, implicit partner whenever a myth is state-controlled: who controlled the record itself, and did they have the power to alter it?

Running the Toolkit

	Dolchstoßlegende	Ahnenerbe	October (1927)	Yezhov Photograph
Who benefits?	Military high command, later the Nazi Party	The Nazi regime's own racial ideology	The Soviet state's founding legitimacy	Stalin's regime, erasing a purged rival
Medium	Testimony, then mass political rhetoric	State-funded "science"	State-commissioned cinema	State-controlled photography
Real record altered?	No — reinterpreted, not fabricated	Genuine expeditions, predetermined conclusions	A real event dramatized, then mistaken for the record itself	Yes — the photograph itself was directly edited

What This Does — and Doesn't — Establish

A claim this evidence supports	A claim it does not support
Both regimes used real, documented, state-controlled institutions to manufacture or alter historical evidence, not merely to interpret existing evidence	Every Nazi-era archaeologist or Soviet-era photographer personally believed they were fabricating history — many likely believed the conclusions they were told to find
The Ahnenerbe's real expeditions produced genuine anthropological data collected under false pretenses	The data itself proved anything about actual Aryan racial origins — the conclusions were predetermined, not derived
October's own reenactment genuinely fooled real news agencies at the time, per the documented historical record	Every subsequent Soviet-era account of the Winter Palace storming relied on the film rather than genuine testimony

Questions to Sit With

Reflection 1

Chapter 1's toolkit assumed a historian could check a myth against an independent physical record. What tools do you think a historian actually has left when the physical record itself has been state-manufactured or altered?

Reflection 2

The Ahnenerbe used real scientists and real expeditions to manufacture false corroboration. Does knowing the method looked genuinely scientific change how dangerous you think it was, compared to a myth that never bothered with any evidence at all?

Reflection 3

October's reenactment footage fooled real news agencies within a decade of the actual event. In an age of far more easily manipulated digital images and video, what do you think has genuinely changed since 1927 — and what hasn't?

Quick Reference — Chapter 8

The Dolchstoßlegende originated in Hindenburg's real 18 November 1919 testimony before the Weimar National Assembly, blaming Germany's WWI defeat on internal betrayal rather than accepting real military defeat
The Ahnenerbe (founded 1 July 1935) used real SS-funded expeditions — including the 1938–39 Tibet mission — to manufacture false scientific corroboration for predetermined Aryan racial claims
Eisenstein's 1927 film October dramatized the Winter Palace storming with more ordnance and casualties than the real 1917 event, and its footage was later mistaken by real news agencies for genuine historical photographs
Nikolai Yezhov was airbrushed out of a real 1937 Stalin photograph following his 1940 execution — one of thousands of documented Soviet photo alterations cataloged in David King's The Commissar Vanishes
Both regimes reveal a real structural limit in this course's own toolkit: "what does the physical record say" only works as a check when the record itself isn't controlled by whoever benefits from the myth

What's Next

Chapter 9: Historians vs. Myth: The Development of Critical Historical Method.