5 ideas
Nazism's deepest influence came less from speeches, pamphlets or explicit doctrine than from single words, idioms and sentence patterns repeated millions of times and absorbed mechanically. Like tiny doses of arsenic, each use seems harmless and goes unnoticed. Cumulatively, these words do the thinking for the speaker, so that even opponents end up reasoning inside the regime's categories.
The regime took words with a negative moral charge and turned them into praise, while leaving their surface meaning intact. The key case is 'fanatisch' (fanatical), which moved from signifying a dangerous, blind excess to meaning a high virtue of loyalty and courage. Once the charge flips, a behaviour that used to trigger alarm triggers admiration, and ordinary speakers pass on the new valuation simply by using the word.
Look for technical and mechanical verbs applied to people and institutions, such as 'gleichschalten' (to switch into line, like electrical circuits), 'aufziehen' (to wind up, stage) or 'ausrichten' (to align). This vocabulary quietly recasts people as machine parts to be synchronised and operated. It makes coercion sound like maintenance and removes the individual will from the sentence entirely.
The Language of the Third Reich was poor and monotonous: a small stock of phrases and superlatives such as 'historic', 'unique' and 'total' used identically everywhere. Every utterance became public address. The regime dissolved the distinction between private and public speech, and between written and oratorical style, so that people talked in the same register at the dinner table as at the rally.
Victor Klemperer was a Jewish Romance-languages professor dismissed in Dresden and later forced into factory labour and a 'Jews' house'. He survived largely because his wife was not Jewish, and in February 1945 the firebombing of Dresden let him tear off his yellow star and escape deportation. Throughout the persecution he secretly recorded Nazi usages under the code heading 'LTI', treating philological observation as a 'balancing pole' that kept him sane. He also caught himself, and fellow Jewish victims, unconsciously speaking the persecutors' language.