Imagine you are a German citizen living in the early 1940s. Would you know that the German Government was engaged in the extermination of millions of Jews and other ethnical groups? The question is controversial: one interpretation is that Germans couldn’t possibly be unaware of what was going on. But, it is also true that the extermination was never mentioned in the German media. Ordinary Germans might have been aware that the Jews were being mistreated, but they had no way to know the extent of what was going on. In the cacophony of news about the ongoing war, the issue of the Jews didn’t register as something really important. Something similar happened in Italy with the defeat of the Italian army in Russia in 1943. The disaster was never mentioned in the media and it didn’t play a role in the public perception of what was going on.
The propaganda techniques used in Germany and in Italy during WWII were still primitive, but they were nevertheless effective in the field we call today “perception management.” The technique of denying information is called “deception by omission.” A good description is reported by Carlo Kopp.
