Gus Nussdorfer on Ecunet noted the following quoted material:

August 31, 1939 -- The Final Day of Peace in Europe. "From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" William L. Shirer, Simon and Schuster, 1990

"In Berlin ... a foreign observer could watch the way the press, under Goebbels' expert direction, was swindling the gullible German people. For six years, since the Nazi 'co-ordination' of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world...

"[Shirer wrote in his diary] Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland ... here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained ... What the Nazipapers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion... (563)

.. . . . .
"As darkness settled over Europe on the evening of August 31, 1939, and a million and a half German troops began moving forward to their final positions on the Polish border for the jump-off at dawn, all that remained for Hitler to do was to perpetrate some propaganda trickery to prepare the German people for the shock of aggressive war.

"The people were in need of the treatment which Hitler, abetted by Goebbels and Himmler, had become so expert in applying. I had been about in the streets of Berlin, talking with the ordinary people, and that morning noted in my diary: 'Everybody against the war. People talking openly. How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?' Despite all my experience in the Third Reich I asked such a naive question! Hitler knew the answer very well. Had he not the week before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals that he would 'give a propagandist reason for starting the war' and admonished them not to 'mind whether it was plausible or not'? 'The victor,' he had told them, 'will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory." (593)."

Any lessons here for today?