La propagande antisemite

The Second World War, propaganda and anti-Semitism

In September 1939, shortly after Germany invaded Poland, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, dictated a memo demanding more Nazi ‘wall newspapers’, or posters. ‘Everywhere in the Reich where there is dense traffic, poster boards of the Nazi party are to be set up’, Goebbels insisted. ‘All means of transport (railroad, streetcars, subways, buses, and so on) will receive posters, which are to be placed in every wagon, on the train platforms, in the ticket windows, as well as in the entrances to these forms of public transport’ (fig.2). As historian Jeffrey Herf explains, ubiquitous political posters – named Parole der Woche, distributed by the thousands every week from 1936 to 1945 and strategically displayed all over Germany – were a primary means of asserting Nazi ideology and, in particular, radical anti-Semitism.2

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