Kellner argues that ordinary citizens could see the regime's crimes clearly if they chose to look, documenting that news of killings of the disabled, persecution of Jews, and atrocities circulated widely; he insists their ignorance was willed, a refusal to draw conclusions from evidence already in front of them. Complicity is therefore not confined to perpetrators but extends to the majority who declined to see.
A German justice official in the small town of Laubach kept a secret diary from 1939, pasting in newspaper clippings and annotating them to expose the gap between official propaganda and the crimes he knew were occurring. He wrote so that a future reader could not claim the truth had been unavailable, hiding the notebooks because discovery meant death.
Kellner reads each piece of official propaganda as an inversion of the truth, so that the louder the regime proclaims a virtue or victory, the more reliably it signals the opposite reality it is concealing. The published word becomes evidence not of what happened but of what the state most needed to hide.