Joseph Goebbels was made Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 13 March 1933, six weeks after the Nazis took power, and the ministry's name is unusually honest about what it was for.
His most consequential decision was not editorial. It was industrial.
The Volksempfänger — the people's receiver — was a radio set designed to a price and launched in August 1933 at seventy-six Reichsmarks, roughly a month's wages for a worker, available on installments. A smaller model, the DKE, followed at thirty-five. By 1939 around seventy percent of German households had a radio, the highest penetration in the world at the time.
The sets had limited range. Foreign broadcasts were technically receivable on many of them and became substantially harder on the cheaper models, and from September 1939 listening to foreign radio was a criminal offense carrying, in some cases, the death penalty.
What this produces is not merely a large audience. It produces a single-source information environment inside the home, and that is a different thing.
Lifton's term for the management of everything a person hears is milieu control, and it is the first of his eight criteria of totalism. Under milieu control, ordinary verification procedures stop working — not because they are forbidden, but because every apparently independent confirmation traces back to the same origin. A listener who hears something on the radio, reads it in the newspaper, sees it in the newsreel and hears it from a neighbor who heard it on the radio has, subjectively, four confirmations. Social proof of chapter 8 becomes unfalsifiable when the sources are not independent, and the listener has no way to detect that they are not.
The domestic setting matters too. Goebbels understood that a political meeting puts an audience on alert, and a kitchen does not. Persuasive content received in a familiar, low-threat environment, in the background, while doing something else, is processed by the peripheral route of chapter 61 — the mode that relies on source cues and repetition rather than argument evaluation, and the mode in which counter-arguing does not happen because attention is elsewhere.
Goebbels was explicit that the ministry's task was not to persuade people of specific propositions but to make a whole population think uniformly, react uniformly, and place itself at the government's disposal.
The defensive implication is the only one available and it is structural rather than psychological. The relevant question about any information environment is not whether the sources agree. It is whether they are independent, and the number of outlets carrying a story is not evidence unless they obtained it separately.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Information Diet Defence