Nazi propaganda within Germany placed a strong emphasis on appealing to emotion, national pride, on feeling at one in something important, something world-shaking and bigger than yourself. The lights of the rally, the parades, the speeches... Watching it would be better than me explaining it. It was extremely effective in part because it appealed to widespread emotions that were common in Germany. Nazism was sleek, modern, cool, it crucially transcended class appeal: while on the right and thus gaining the appeal of a rightwards movement, it was simultaneously revolutionary. The only other truly appealing movement on that scale in the Depression to young, out of luck men was Communism, which was hampered by impractical internationalism and the appearance of being the puppets of Moscow in such a hypernationalistic society such as interbellum Germanuy.

Outside of Germany, it depended on the country and the time era. It was effective in some ways-in spite of the general chaotic structure of the Third Reich, as revealed by Albert Speer in his groundbreaking work, Nazi Germany was thought of well into the 70s in the West as a monolithic, well organized machine. Anti-Semitic propaganda, particularly works that linked Jews to Bolsheviks, also had an effect in much of the Eastern territories. But the Nazis all too often shot their own external propaganda in the face for it to be too credible, as time went by. A key example of this was the Soviet Union: there were plenty of people in places like the Western Ukraine and the Baltic States who were all too glad to be rid of the Russians. But Nazi propaganda was never nearly as effective as it could have been because of Nazi racial policies toward the conquered people, which were even worse than Stalin's.

Another example is Poland: it never seemed to occur to Nazi racial ideologues or Prussian generals (in general, in the 1920s, extreme anti-Polish racism was far more endemic than extreme anti-Semitism in much of Germany) that 30 hard-fighting divisions of the Polish Army might have been extremely useful for taking Moscow and squashing the Bolsheviks like bugs. If hardline anti-Communism really was the goal of the state, that would be the logical policy. But then again, if they had not been those nutty racial ideologues, they wouldn't have been Nazis at all.