These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Joseph Goebbels, who had completed his PhD in 1921, had been greatly influenced by Edward Bernays, and used the methods of American public relations in broadcasting messages by print, radio, film, and parades. Goebbels had a device installed in his office that allowed him to preempt national programming, and he deployed “radio wardens” to make sure Germans were listening to official broadcasts. The purpose of fascist propaganda is to control the opinions of the masses and deploy them in service of the power of the state. Germans had attempted to employ Bernays himself; he refused, but other American public relations firms had accepted commissions to produce pro-Nazi propaganda in the United States. Goebbels hoped to sow division in the United States, partly through a shortwave radio system, the Weltrundfunksender, or World Broadcasting Station, the Propaganda Ministry’s “long-range propaganda artillery.” By 1934 it was broadcasting pro-Germany English-and foreign-language propaganda to Africa, Latin America, the Far East, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Australia, though its broadcasts to North America far outstripped the scale of all of its other programs. To the United States, where it broadcast in “American English,” the Weltrundfunksender sent false “news,” chiefly having to do with claims about a “Communist Jewish conspiracy.”