"The total state led by the Fuhrer was, however, never simply a dictatorship of one man. The new politics advocated by the Nazis, the vast project of social and biological engineering that they instigated, required popular participation. Goebbels, as minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, made clear that the regime, the express “will” of the nation, also had to win to its side those elements of the national community that still resisted the siren song of National Socialism. They could not just be “terrorized” but had to be won over through hard work, including propaganda. But dissent could not be tolerated. The claims of the Nazi movement and state upon the individual were total. The National Socialist Revolution, asserted Goebbels, “does not stop for [the realm] of private life.” These totalizing ambitions required not just obedience but also participation. The state had to “set the masses in motion,” as Goebbels put it. If Hitler did not deign to intervene directly in every policy matter, Hitler’s followers believed that “working toward the Fuhrer,” pursuing his goals without his express orders, placed them in accord with the movement of history. Nazi views on the total state and popular mobilization concurred with strategic doctrine, Hitler’s as well as the Wehrmacht’s. In Nazi doctrine, war would allow the race to flourish; to pursue the war successfully, the race had to be purified. Since the coming conflict was never simply a campaign of territorial conquest but always a racial, ideological war, the links between domestic and foreign policy were particularly tight in Nazi Germany."
Nazism

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English