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Class Year

2004

Document Type

Article

Abstract

“One then builds a whole system of thought on such a brief, crisply formulated idea. The idea does not remain limited to this single statement; rather it is applied to every aspect of daily life and becomes the guide for all human activity. It becomes a worldview.” Dr. Joseph Goebbels spoke those words on January 9, 1928 to an audience of party members at the “Hochschule fuer Politik,” a series of talks that investigated the role of propaganda in the National Socialist movement. A few months prior to this event, voters had elected a farmer, Werner Willikens, in the South Hanover-Brunswick district of the Reichstag over a railroad worker. Seemingly, this election was unrelated to Goebbels’s speech on the purpose of propaganda; however, Willikens’s election to the Reichstag reflected Goebbels’s call for diversified propaganda that would highlight “every aspect of daily life.”

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