Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

“Propaganda helped us to power,” Joseph Goebbels announced at the Nazi Party congress in 1936. “Propaganda kept us in power. Propaganda will help us conquer the world.” Hitler explained the plan in typically blunt terms: “Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself.”

spared. Nazi Germany poured money and manpower into dividing the American polity, hoping to keep the United States and its arsenal of democracy out of the war in Europe. “America for Americans,” as Hitler said in an interview widely published in the United States in 1940, “and Europe for the Europeans.” His government blanketed America with isolationist and antisemitic literature.