The "Divide and Conquer" pamphlet published by the U.S. Office of War Information (O.W.I.) in 1942 is a unique example of government attempts to warn Americans during World War II about the dangers of Nazi propaganda and to help them identify and guard against enemy disinformation. The instructional brochure, transcribed and republished by the Cold War Radio Museum for the first time in several decades with an extensive introduction by international journalist, broadcaster, writer and propaganda expert Ted Lipien, also offers interesting lessons for today's propaganda wars with their clandestine and overt operations undertaken by authoritarian governments of countries such as Russia and China to influence and subvert U.S. political and electoral system. "He knows that prejudice in any form plays his game," the wartime guide to Nazi propaganda warned Americans about Hitler's motives. "Before Hitler attacks any country, his agents carefully sow seeds of hate and disunity, turning people against their own governments, governments against their allies, class against class."It could have been easily a comment on the current aims of the Kremlin's propaganda or the behavior of some politicians, both foreign and domestic, who engage in fear mongering and subversion of democratic elections. Ted Lipien shows how this expose of Nazi propaganda is still highly relevant for today's information wars.In 1942 Americans received the warning that Hitler wanted "To destroy our national unity [and] create unrest in all groups of the population." The alert was undoubtedly timely and based on solid evidence although it was less obvious that such Nazi subversion was producing the desired effect of changing American minds as it did when used against some of the European nations. In America, Hitler's propaganda was said to be "trying to set capital against labor, White against Negro, Catholic against Protestant, Christian against Jew." The warnings about Hitler's intentions were true, but there was little evidence presented in the U.S. government pamphlet mailed out to American households that Nazi propaganda was achieving its ends among Americans. Similarities with some of today's propaganda, however, are immediately apparent in the 1942 brochure and make for a very interesting and enlightening reading of this historical document reprinted for the first time in many years.In the first months of the war with Japan and Nazi Germany, the Roosevelt Administration became concerned about Japanese and German propaganda attempting to to influence American public opinion. In articles reminiscent of some of the media reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election campaign, Americans were told that German and Japanese propaganda radio broadcasts were interfering with the U.S. electoral process. Even though the "Divide and Conquer" pamphlet was strictly about resisting the influence of Nazi ideology, it still offers valuable lessons for identifying attempts at interference from any ideological perspective and any government or media source. This includes the Russian State now headed by an ex-KGB officer President Vladimir Putin. He has shown himself to be an expert in the use of propaganda, disinformation and subversion. Many of the Nazi propaganda techniques described in this booklet have not changed and are now being used with the help of new digital technologies against the United States and other democratic nations. Ultimately, there was not much difference between the evils of Fascism and Communism and their respective propaganda. While "Divide and Conquer" presented and warned against only one type of propaganda, we can still draw today many valuable lessons from this 1942 U.S. government document.

A history of Nazi propaganda based on never-before-published posters, rare photographs, and historical artifacts from the USHMM’s groundbreaking exhibition. “Propaganda,” Adolf Hitler wrote in 1924, “is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.” State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda documents how, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Nazi Party used posters, newspapers, rallies, and the new technologies of radio and film to sway millions with its vision for a new Germany—reinforced by fear-mongering images of state “enemies.” These images promoted indifference toward the suffering of neighbors, disguised the regime’s genocidal actions, and insidiously incited ordinary people to carry out or tolerate mass violence.The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is addressing this topic today because, in an age of instant electronic communication, disseminators of messages and images of intolerance and hate have new tools, while at the same time consumers seem less able to cope with the vast amounts of unmediated information bombarding them daily. It is hoped that a deeper understanding of the complexities of the past may help us respond more effectively to today’s propaganda campaigns and biased messages.

Jeffrey Herf, a leading scholar in the field, offers the most extensive examination to date of Nazi propaganda activities targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East during World War II and the Holocaust. He draws extensively on previously unused and little-known archival resources, including the shocking transcriptions of the “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” radio programs, which convey a strongly anti-Semitic message. Herf explores the intellectual, political, and cultural context in which German and European radical anti-Semitism was found to resonate with similar views rooted in a selective appropriation of the traditions of Islam. Pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin, including Haj el-Husseini and Rashid el-Kilani, collaborated with the Nazis in constructing their Middle East propaganda campaign. By integrating the political and military history of the war in the Middle East with the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the propagandistic diffusion of Nazi ideology, Herf offers the most thorough examination to date of this important chapter in the history of World War II. Importantly, he also shows how the anti-Semitism promoted by the Nazi propaganda effort contributed to the anti-Semitism exhibited by adherents of radical forms of Islam in the Middle East today.

Based on a detailed examination of specific aspects of Nazi propaganda, this book (originally published in 1983) enhances the understanding of National Socialism by revealing both its power and its limitations. The work tackles aspects of Nazi propaganda which had been neglected in the past, but together they demonstrate the disproportionate role assigned to propaganda in one of the most highly politicised societies in contemporary European history.

Hitler was one of the few politicians who understood that persuasion was everything, deployed to anchor an entire regime in the confections of imagery, rhetoric and dramaturgy. The Nazis pursued propaganda not just as a tool, an instrument of government, but also as the totality, the raison d'être, the medium through which power itself was exercised. Moreover, Nicholas O'Shaughnessy argues, Hitler, not Goebbels, was the prime mover in the propaganda regime of the Third Reich - its editor and first author. Under the Reich everything was a propaganda medium, a building-block of public consciousness, from typography to communiqués, to architecture, to weapons design. There were groups to initiate rumours and groups to spread graffiti. Everything could be interrogated for its propaganda potential, every surface inscribed with polemical meaning, whether an enemy city's name, an historical epic or the poster on a neighbourhood wall. But Hitler was in no sense an innovator - his ideas were always second-hand. Rather his expertise was as a packager, fashioning from the accumulated mass of icons and ideas, the historic debris, the labyrinths and byways of the German mind, a modern and brilliant political show articulated through deftly managed symbols and rituals. The Reich would have been unthinkable without propaganda - it would not have been the Reich.

The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds. According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast international conspiracy. Leading the assault was an insidious, belligerent Jewish clique, so crafty and powerful that it managed to manipulate the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, a necessary move to destroy the Jews before they destroyed Germany. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and Otto Dietrich’s Press Office translated this fanatical vision into a coherent cautionary narrative, which the Nazi propaganda machine disseminated into the recesses of everyday life. Calling on impressive archival research, Jeffrey Herf recreates the wall posters that Germans saw while waiting for the streetcar, the radio speeches they heard at home or on the street, the headlines that blared from newsstands. The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. Here we find an original and haunting exposition of the ways in which Hitler legitimized war and genocide to his own people, as necessary to destroy an allegedly omnipotent Jewish foe. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.