Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War

This book is an analysis of the organization, conduct, output and impact of National Socialist propaganda during the Second World War (1939-1945).

Was Nazi wartime propaganda a ‘totalitarian’ mechanism that controlled the perceptions of the Germans? Did it ‘win’ the psychological war over the minds of the population? Was Joseph Goebbels the ‘mastermind’ of the Third Reich? This book analyzes the factors that determined the organization, conduct and output of Nazi propaganda during World War II, in an attempt to re-assess previously inflated perceptions about the influence of Nazi propaganda and the role of the regime’s propagandists in the outcome of the 1939-45 military conflict.

ARISTOTLE A. KALLIS is Lecturer in European Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and researches in interwar European fascism with a particular focus on the German and Italian cases. He is the author of Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany 1922-1945 (Routledge 2000) and editor of The Fascism Reader (Routledge 2004).

“A refreshing reading and a solid appraisal of the omnipresent manipulation of information and disinformation during the Second World War in Germany. The quality of interpretation, the attention to detail, and reader-friendly narrative must be mentioned here. All these add substantial value to Kallis’s depiction of Nazi wartime propaganda. Kallis has placed the subject of Nazi propaganda in its broader context and has addressed important questions regarding political religions, totalitarianism and fascism. Amongst the new generation of scholars forming in the footsteps of those who, like Roger Griffin, Michael Burleigh, Emilio Gentile, and Walter Adamson, revised the discipline in the 1990s, Kallis is arguably the most prominent. This book certainly substantiates this claim.”–Marius Turda, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions