=The German Failure In Propaganda.= German writers, after World War I, sometimes attributed the superiority of the British in propaganda to the innate fiendishness of Britishers as contrasted with the gullible purity of Germans. The psychoneurotic non-com who made himself famous to the world's cost did not make this mistake. In _Mein Kampf_ Hitler stated categorically that the British had understood the professional touch in propaganda while the Germans had not. Hitler's contempt for the masses was shown in his explicit statement of their inattentiveness, their poor response to formal logic, their affirmative reaction to simple one-sided reiteration. He said: "[In England] ... propaganda was a weapon of the first class, while with us it was a sop to unemployed politicians...." German nationalists of whatever stripe found themselves in accord when they blamed their military defeat on the enemy's use of propaganda. They thus succeeded in maintaining the myth, already sedulously inculcated for two centuries, that the German army could not be beaten in the field. The extremists and crackpots among them went on to develop the "stab-in-the-back" theory that an unbeaten Germany was betrayed from within by Jews, socialists, and democratic people. (The mutually exclusive alternatives--namely that either Allied propaganda was fiendishly good, and the Germans merely innocent victims, or else that Allied propaganda was ineffectual and the anti-war sentiment a purely German development--did not keep the Hitlerites from exploiting both alibis simultaneously.) The postwar period of the 1920's saw, therefore, the curious spectacle of the Germans lauding American psychological warfare, and counting it as a major factor of defeat, while the Americans naturally emphasized the fighting record of American troops.