Propaganda as a weapon and a tool of totalitarian power 177 MARCIN POPRAWA ORCID: 0000-0002-6035-4623 University of Wrocław Propaganda as a weapon and a tool of totalitarian power: The image of the concept in the common discourse of the war and occupation years (1939–1945) Introductory remarks and research goals The basic publication goals have been indicated in the title. In this article, I describe communication phenomena pertaining to the war and occupation years (1939–1945), which occurred in the parts of Poland occupied by the Third Reich, called in the ofcial nomenclature the General Governorship. 1 In this paper, I do not focus as much on the description of the semantics or pragmatics of the propa- ganda language used by the Nazi authorities toward the inhabitants of the occu- pied country, but rather I try to answer the question of how a collective encounter with the brutal practice of the totalitarian power (with its war and totalitarian discourse), and in fact, in the means of mass communication subordinated to it, was refected in the common discourse (“non-totalitarian”). Thus, I describe the narrative about the methods and means of hegemonic communication used by the Nazi authorities (texts and forms) (cf. Garlicki, Noga- -Bogomilski 2004; Fras 2006; Kamińska-Szmaj 2013), which became established in the “anti-totalitarian” discourse. The form of updating this discourse are jour- nals and war chronicles, in which one can fnd quite a large collection of remarks 1 The article is part of a series of my publications on war and political propaganda; see Poprawa (2016a, b, 2017). I have outlined the model of political communication, political discourses of 1939– 1945, and totalitarian propaganda more broadly in Poprawa (2016a, 2017) — in these deliberations, I refer in part to the fndings contained in previous works. Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis No 3891 Jêzyk a Kultura • tom 27 • Wrocław 2017 DOI: 10.19195/1232-9657.27.12 Język a Kultura 27, 2017 © for this edition by CNS