“Propaganda does not persuade. What it does is legitimize and allow what you wanted to do in the first place, but there were barriers to doing so.”
Almost everything we know about World War II is about the loud stuff. The battles fought. The territory taken and liberated. The atrocities committed.
Maybe 99% of our knowledge lives there. What we almost never hear about is the quiet war. The undercover battle for the minds of the German population itself.
That is the story Peter Pomerantsev tells here, and it is one of the most relevant history books I have read in years. It is part biography, part spy story, and part warning shot for the present.
The Spy Who Talked Germans Out of Their Own War
The hero of the book is Sefton Delmer, a British journalist who grew up in Berlin and knew the Nazi mind from the inside. He had interviewed Hitler. He understood the music of the regime, not just the words.
While the Allies dropped bombs, Delmer dropped doubt. He ran “black propaganda” radio stations that pretended to broadcast from inside Germany, fronted by an invented character called Der Chef. A foul-mouthed, disillusioned German officer who ranted about Party corruption, hypocrisy, and the rot at the top.
Here is the clever part. Der Chef never sounded like the enemy. He never told Germans the war was wrong. He told them their leaders were corrupt cowards getting fat while ordinary soldiers froze and died. He sounded like an angry insider, which is exactly why people listened.
The radio was a Trojan horse. By the time you noticed the message, it was already inside the walls.
How Propaganda Actually Works
The biggest takeaway for me is simple and a little uncomfortable.
Propaganda does not argue you into believing something new. It gives you permission to do what some part of you already wanted to do, and removes the guilt that was standing in the way.
Think about how that works in your own life. The best salesman never changes your mind. He finds the desire you already have and quietly knocks down the excuses keeping you from acting on it. As someone who has spent years in marketing, this hit close to home. The mechanics are identical. Only the stakes are different.
Propaganda does not appeal to your sense of morality or to the suffering of strangers. Pomerantsev points out that most Germans, and later most Russians, did not respond much to the pain of others or to the ethics of what was happening. Why? Because it did not affect them.
What they responded to were louder, more extreme characters. A Der Chef. A Prigozhin. Or the moment the war finally arrived on their own doorstep.
The Part That Stopped Me Cold
Reading this in 2026, the parallels are almost unbearable.
The propaganda Pomerantsev dissects from the Nazi era is strikingly close to what was used to justify the invasion of Ukraine from 2014 onward.
Ukrainians are called brothers, and in the same breath painted as a fascist civilization marked for extermination. We are told Ukraine has always been part of Russia, that Ukrainian is not a real language, that ethnic Russians are being repressed and killed.
It is practically verbatim of what Hitler said to swallow Austria and Czechoslovakia. Same script, new century. The slogans barely needed updating.
That is the quietly terrifying lesson of this book. These techniques are not relics. They are a reusable playbook, and it still works because human nature has not changed since 1939.
Why Good People Stay Silent
The most sobering realization, one both the author and Delmer arrive at, is this. Plenty of Germans and Russians did understand what was happening to their country, their army, and their economy.
But understanding is not the same as being able to act.
Inside a murderous authoritarian system, there is very little an ordinary person can do. The whole machine runs on constant surveillance and immediate, brutal suppression of any dissent. You do not get a second mistake. One wrong word to the wrong neighbor and your family disappears.
That is why Germany only capitulated after total defeat, with Goebbels ordering everyone to fight to the death. The leaders keep living well and keep dictating, right up to the end, at the expense of the people they claim to represent.
It is a brutal answer to the question we all secretly ask. “Why didn’t they just stop it?” Because the cost of stopping it was your life, and the lives of everyone you loved.
Can Truth Even Win?
So how do you fight this? Pomerantsev’s answer is not what you would expect.
You cannot force facts down the throat of someone who does not want to hear them. Delmer understood that decades ago. The real task is to make people want to care about the truth in the first place, to give them a reason and an identity worth holding onto.
That is a far harder, far more human problem than fact-checking. You are not fixing a database. You are fixing how people feel about belonging, dignity, and who they are.
And it is the problem we are all living through right now, scrolling through feeds engineered to feel like our own thoughts.
Final Thoughts
This is history that explains the present. It made me look at my news feed differently, and it made me a lot more suspicious of the feelings my own outrage is being engineered to serve.
I also tracked down an interview with the author, and his ultimate point stuck with me. People do not move because of morality or because strangers are suffering. They move when it finally touches them. That is a depressing truth, but pretending otherwise is how you lose the information war.
I have now read all three of Pomerantsev’s books. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible and This Is Not Propaganda are both excellent, and this one might be the sharpest of the lot. I am genuinely looking forward to his fourth.
5/5. If you want to understand the war being fought for your attention every single day, start here. Grab it.
Thanks for reading.
— Leonidas
