[Goebbels] specialized in articles on [[w:Bolshevism |Bolshevism of a decidedly pro-Russian tone. He worked on a speech, ‘Lenin or Hitler?’ In this c… - Curt Riess

In a number of contributions published in the Voelkischer Beobachter [Goebbels] celebrated Lenin as the national liberator of his country. ‘The Soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevist or Marxist or international, but because it is national—because it is Russian,’ he wrote to a leftist friend. ‘No Czar has ever aroused the national passion of the Russian people as Lenin did.’

Only in exceptional cases have the Nazis ever used German citizens or former German citizens as agents in the United States. This is only logical. A man or a woman with a German accent would have small chance indeed of convincing a gathering of even the most stupid people that, in advocating America’s isolationism or withdrawal from the war now, he is motivated solely by patriotic feelings for America.

Goebbels was well informed indeed on some things the Russians were doing. He knew that the Communist had been the first to co-ordinate propaganda and espionage. He knew that Lenin himself was the inventor of total propaganda, and that he had even coined the word to describe it: agitprop—an abbreviation for agitation and propaganda. Propaganda had meant to Lenin persuasion of the masses, and agitation was the aggressive form of persuasion.