Stanford Linguists Show How Nazis Got Away with Murder
A new study said that language used by the Nazis in propaganda throughout their rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s served to slowly dehumanize Jewish people, with the language changing over time.
According to a study published on November 9 in the journal Plos One, linguistic analysis of Nazi propaganda from that period shows that the framing of Jewish people changed from focusing on disengaging the German peoples' moral concern for them to suggesting that the Jews had a much greater capacity for the agency to be "malevolent" after the Holocaust began.
"We investigated the use of mentally state terms considered fundamentally human: experience, the capacity to feel sensations and emotions, and agency, the capacity to have complex thoughts, plan, and act intentionally," Alexander Landry, an organizational behavior Ph.D. student at Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-author of the paper, told Newsweek.
Through propaganda, Nazis portrayed the Jewish people as having less and less capacity for experiencing fundamental human emotions and sensations, thus dehumanizing them in the eyes of the German public. This was potentially an attempt to make the idea of the mass murder of the Jews more palatable to the rest of the country.
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And it continues to this day, and not only on the right!
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So this a both-sides thing, huh? Right. 
