Once Hitler and the Nazi party were elected into power in 1932, Hitler named Joseph Goebbels as the director of a new, pro-Nazi ministry of propaganda. Goebbels quickly began to imagine a conglomerate that would control film, radios, schools, universities, and most importantly, the people's attention. The press, radio, and film industries soon fell under the control of the Nazi ideology. The Ministry, through the Reich Press Chamber, took control over the Reich Association of the German Press. The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which it was later called, acted largely in mandating laws with which news papers were to follow. What they could, and could not publish. This is just one of the many types of censorship that the ministry enforced. They also created a law, mandating that the publishers keep registries of the editors. Any Jew, or person married to a Jew, were to be excluded from such a profession. As the Holocaust raged on, many similar and worse acts were completed by the Ministry of Propaganda. We hold such a negative connotation with the term now, that instead of referring to them as such today, we simply call them, Public Relations teams.
“Creating a Propaganda Ministry was a novel idea for a country at peace. Governmental propaganda organizations had tended to be temporary committees necessitated by war or disguised as ministries of information. Indeed, Goebbels initially opposed the term propaganda, recognizing that in popular usage, both in Germany and abroad, it was associated with lies.”
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