> There's a moment in the film in which hilter interacts with an unemployed labourer, and in that interaction he imbues this guy with a sense of purpose, hitler has told him he is a soldier - a soldier with a shovel, it's nonsense, but it is carefully crafted nonsense.
That's more or less what I'm trying to say, the little morsel of self esteem given to labourer, the sense of purpose and inclusion, comes tangled up in an insane and horrific ideology, if he wants to eat that morsel he needs to swallow the other part too. So the strategy isn't nonsense, it's nasty, but not nonsense. The human need for inclusion and self esteem is real, responding that need is real, the nonsense is the mythology in which that response is served.
Well, maybe not total nonsense? The same kind of thing seems to have worked elsewhere too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration