Before 1939, the brutal war enthralling Europe between July 28, 1914 and November 11, 1918 was not called World War I. "The Great War," "The War to End all Wars" and "The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy" for the first time employed modern technologies including airplanes, tanks, chemical weapons and submarines, killing more than 7,000,000 and wounding more than 21,000,000 worldwide.

Trench warfare near the border of Germany and France yielded almost unimaginable casualties (sometimes thousands dead in a single day without an inch of progress), and we still use idioms from this war, including "over the top," "business as usual" and "last ditch." Excluding the missing, more than 1,500,000 dead and more than 4,000,000 wounded soldiers purchased Germany's defeat. No records of German civilian casualties exist. The chemical weapons employed in the war were so ghastly that a new Geneva Convention defined their use as a war crime.

Despite this gruesome history of carnage and defeat, just 20 odd years later a former soldier named Adolph Hitler led the highly educated and egalitarian people of Germany into an even more disastrous Second World War.

How? Many would cite the humiliating Treaty of Versailles and the worldwide depression that characterized the 1930s as reasons for the Germans' gullibility. However, despite previous imprisonment for an attempted military coup, Adolph Hitler and his cronies rose to power by methodically manipulating, and ultimately controlling virtually all of the information the German People received.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, "Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched form of life as paradise." Propaganda tools such as the broken record (relentlessly repeating something until it becomes common "knowledge"), ad hominem attacks (kill the messenger) and false dilemmas (i.e., portraying proposed solutions as worse than the problem) are not necessarily dishonest. However, propaganda's most effective forms, the big lie (the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed), half truths (i.e. lies by omission) and fallacies of logic, often are dishonest.

Propaganda is a general term describing communication meant to persuade. In late 1930s Germany, Nazi Riechsminister for Propaganda and National Enlightenment Hermann Goebbels literally elevated political propaganda to an art. Cynically applying advancements in marketing and public relations, the Nazi propaganda machine created celebrated films and apparently staged shocking events like the Fire in the Reichstag. Instead of selling shoes, propaganda systematically deceived and controlled the German People.

Buttressed with peer pressure, nationalism, intimidation, imprisonment, torture and assassination, Goebbels' comprehensive propaganda co-opted and manipulated virtually every form of communication in Germany, keeping the German People terrified, confused, misinformed and above all obedient in the face of incrementally increasing criminality in their alleged democracy. Eventually, countless German citizens rationalized, accepted and even participated in horrific war crimes, including the enslavement, starvation and execution of millions of innocent men, women and children.

Like fascism, propaganda did not die with the Third Reich, and both can thrive quite successfully behind a patina of respectability. Perhaps the only defense against propaganda is gathering as much information from as many sources and points of view as possible, then applying critical thinking in its analysis. If 1930s Germany is any example, unquestioningly believing what you are told is a recipe for disaster.

by Groff Schroeder