This answer sums up the mood of the totalitarian who is obsessed by propaganda. He comes to believe that all activity, whether his own or of other people, has meaning. He had developed the sense of responsibility that made him violate tenets which Americans, in a free society, regard as fundamental to human nature: things like self-respect, kindliness, love of family, pity for the unfortunate.
This kind of mentality was found chiefly in the National Socialist and Communist states, and to a lesser degree in dictatorships such as Italy; by contrast, reactionary Japan was almost democratic. This mentality makes it possible for the ruler to control his own people enough to undertake "warfare psychologically waged." Without domestic fanaticism and domestic terror, governments have to fall back on "psychological warfare"—that is, the mere supplementing of politics and military operations by propaganda. It is vain to expect a free people in a free country to submit to such humiliating control, even for the purpose of winning a war. What made the psychological warfare of World War II peculiar was the fact that our enemies fought one kind of war ("warfare psychologically waged," or total war) and we fought them back with another. Theoretically, it is possible to argue that we had no business succeeding.
But we did succeed.
The Pre-Belligerent Stages.
Pre-belligerent operations required extensive use of "black" propaganda. Since their political systems aroused hostility and anger in audiences which they wished to address, the aggressors sought to disguise their propaganda. They used pacifist groups to keep the democracies from rearming. Militarist groups were encouraged to keep the democracies from undertaking domestic reforms or discussing military matters with Russia. Financial groups were contacted to preserve the fiction of normal international relations. Cultural groups were employed to preserve friendliness for their respective nationalities as such. The Japanese did a little global propaganda and for a while subsidized several magazines in this country, but in general they concentrated their main effort in the immediate area of their military operations.
It was the Germans who developed world-wide pre-belligerent propaganda to a fine art. They exploited every possible disunity which could contribute to the weakness of an enemy. They were not choosy about collaborators. If the Communist Party of the United States lent a hand (as it did between September, 1939 and June, 1941, terming the war "an imperialist war"; after Russia got in, the war was called "the democratic anti-fascist war"), the Nazis did not object. They willingly listened to men who had fantastic schemes for world peace and later used such men as aids in getting appeasement. They tried to rouse Catholics against Communists, Communists against democrats, Gentiles against Jews, whites against negroes, the poor against the rich, the rich against the poor, British against Americans, Americans against British—anyone against anyone, as long as it delayed action against Germany and weakened the enemy potential. They went to special pains to organize German-speaking minorities in non-German countries, but they never neglected using people who had no open connection with Naziism at all.
This work was performed, so far as the open propaganda itself was concerned, through the instrumentalities of the Reich's Ministry for Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment under control of that malignant intelligence, Paul Josef Göbbels. The broader program was not solely a publicity matter, and was operated chiefly through Party channels. The German capacity to learn was demonstrated by the contrast between World War I and World War II. In World War I the Germans lacked political motifs, professionalism, and coordination; in World War II they had all of these.
German Accomplishments.
Second, in the strategic field, they made each victim seem the last. There was still hope that war would not arise, even while the Spanish Republic was being strangled before the eyes of the world. The British hoped that they could stay out even after Czechoslovakia fell. Astute though the Russians were, they hoped to stay out even after Britain and France fought. And as late as December 6, 1941 many Americans still believed that the United States would avoid war. This suited the Nazis' book; take them on one at a time.
Thirdly, in the purely psychological field the Germans used outright fright. They made their own people afraid of Communist liquidations. They brazenly showed movies of their blitzkriegs to the governing groups of prospective victims, just to lower morale. When one nation is really ready to fight, and the other knows it, the nation that doesn't want to fight can be reduced to something resembling a nervous breakdown by constant uncertainty. (The author was in Chungking during the summer of 1940, when the German propaganda agent, Wolf Schenke, showed these German movies to the Chinese leaders. The author asked for an invitation and did not get it; it was for Chinese only, said Schenke. But the Chinese were not awed, or made fearful of the power of Japan's ally. They simply said, "Nice movie ... that's the kind of thing we used to do in the Ch'in dynasty," and let it go at that.)