The Anglophone world has negative connotations for the word 'propaganda' purely because our enemies used that word more than us.
Who is "our" & "us"? If it's not me, am I "the enemy"?
Kindof like the English speaking people of Japanese descent in the Western US circa 1940. Stripped of their property & sent to internment camps. I hope history does not repeat itself in present & future "propagation" efforts. But hope & reality are two different things.
I would love to meet the "we" or "us" that is doing the propaganda. To propagate what I think about their efforts of course.
The person was pretty clearly talking in the past tense about WWII, not claiming that anyone is your enemy now.
Whether you like it or not, being born on a particular patch of dirt means that you are in fact part of the shared history of people born on that patch of dirt, which includes having had the Germans as enemies at one or two points in the past.