Inquiry Proposal

The topic that I want to cover in my Inquiry Paper is WWII Propaganda.  I chose this topic because propaganda seems to be the best example about how language can be used to control the way a person thinks.  I really do not have a lot of knowledge on this subject other than that all countries had their own form of propaganda and that they used this propaganda to create feelings throughout the general public so that they supported different political maneuvers. I think what interest me the most about this subject is how these posters and newspaper ads controlled how the population of each country thought about the war, and how every country had different reactions and feelings about the war because of this propaganda. I have always been very interested about anything and everything that has to do with World War Two. Mostly I have focused on only the military side of things, but it is also very interesting to me to be able to learn stuff about the civilian side, or the behind the scenes things that deal with the war.

            There are many different angles to the topic of World War Two propaganda, so I am going to have to narrow the focus of my paper down. If I don’t specialize my inquiry question then there is so much information to cover that my research paper would probably be better of just becoming a book on the topic. Since there were so many different nations in World War Two, there is a significant amount of different angle I could go with this paper.  Some of the most well know are the propaganda posters from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but American war posters also fall under the category of propaganda.

I think that the most interesting and probably the most accurately documented type of Propaganda from the time period is that of Germany before the Invasion of Poland. This is why I am going to write my Inquiry Paper on that specific type of World War Two Propaganda. I want to understand what was it that made the people of Germany hate and despise the Jews so much that they would start putting them in Ghettos and eventually killing them by the masses. Ever since middle school we have been learning about the Holocaust and what happened, but none of my teachers has really explained how the Nazis actually got people to believe them and to follow their beliefs. The only thing I was taught about it was that Hitler and his party got the whole country to follow them, but never how they managed to do that. I think that the Nazi propaganda was one of the main things causing the people to think like this. 

“How did the Nazi Propagandists twist language to trick people into following their beliefs?”