Color me grumpy. I went to the U.S. Holocaust Museum last week to see their exhibit “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda.” It was visually impressive, but I was disappointed.

What interests me most about Nazi propaganda is how was Hitler able to strike a responsive chord in the German people, enabling him to rise from obscurity to winning 37% of the German vote in 1932. He was undoubtedly a brilliant demagogue, but how was he able to sway so many?

I would have liked to learn more about how Hitler played upon the powerful emotions of the time: German feelings about defeat in World War I (with Russia decisively defeated by German arms and no Western armies on German soil); the role Germany saw itself rightfully playing in Europe and the world, the threat of Bolshevism (which was intense in the 1920s); the ruinous post-World War I hyperinflation; the harsh impositions of the Versailles Treaty; the failure of the Weimar Republic; and economic depression. The exhibit has a little about the stab-in-the-back theory, but I would have liked to know more about how Hitler artfully played on German resentments and aspirations.

There’s a great deal in the exhibit on anti-Semitism, as would be expected, but little on how widespread anti-Semitism was in Europe. I remember once looking through a 19th century edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and seeing the unfamiliar story “The Jew in the Brambles,” in which a stereotypical dishonest, thieving Jew is hanged. A bit more on the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s might help explain the power of Nazi propaganda.

There was also a reference to allied atrocity propaganda in World War I as a precursor to Nazi propaganda, but no such references to Soviet propaganda, which seems a better fit to me. The exhibit notes that one popular Nazi slogan was “Work, Freedom, and Bread,” which is strikingly similar to the 1917 Bolshevik slogan “Peace, Land, and Bread.”