#joseph-goebbels

#joseph-goebbels

At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it).

A few years ago, sometime during the harrowing year of 2020 that would change everything, author Herve Le Tellier discovered that someone had written a name on the outer wall of his new house in the village of La Paillette, in southern France. When he later found that the same name appeared on the monument to the town's sons who died for the homeland, Le Tellier realized he had a story in his hands and that he wanted nothing more than to tell it.

Generative AI tools have created a flood of fake, sometimes misleading, content about the Holocaust that experts warn are distorting the realities of the history of Nazi Germany for young audiences. An emaciated and apparently blind man stands in the snow at the Nazi concentration camp of Flossenbuerg: the image seems real at first but is part of a wave of AI-generated content about the Holocaust.