The attempt to shape or manipulate people’s beliefs or actions by means of information (true or false), arguments, or symbols. Propaganda may be printed, broadcast, or visual. All governments engage to some extent in propaganda activities, describing them in many cases as public information programmes, sometimes with a totally cynical disregard for the truth. In the 1930s, the German Nazis, led by Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, conducted a highly skilful propaganda campaign that indoctrinated the German people with bogus racial theories, urged them to seek world domination, and excluded them from hearing what the rest of the world thought of them. The success of this campaign in persuading some 80 million Germans to embark on World War II may only have been possible because it reflected at least some aspects of their own aspirations. Culpability for the obscenities perpetrated by the Third Reich cannot, therefore, be laid exclusively at the feet of its leaders.