Film & Radio Propaganda in World War II

K.R.M. Short, K.R.M. Short

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000458305
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia militar y marítima

This book, first published in 1983, brings together leading world experts on film and radio propaganda in a study which deals with each of the major powers as well as several under occupation. By examining each nations' propaganda content and comparing its various strands of output designed for different audiences, the historian is provided with an important source of a nation's official self-image. Total war forced governments to formulate goals consistent with the received national ideology in order to support the war effort. To this extent, much of the domestic propaganda was directed towards stimulating the population to make sacrifices with promise of a new world if the peace were won.

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

1 PROPAGANDA IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, 1919–1939

Philip M. Taylor

As the crumbling stonework of the terraced steps at the Zeppelin field in Nuremberg would now appear to suggest, limestone is not the best of foundations on which to build a thousand-year Reich. Yet, to contemporaries, the Nazi Party rallies held there during the 1930s were awesome spectacles. Sir Nevile Henderson, who attended the 1937 rally shortly after his appointment as British ambassador to Germany, described Hitler’s appearance in the following terms:

His arrival was theatrically notified by the sudden turning into the air of the 300 or more searchlights with which the stadium was surrounded. The blue tinged light from these met thousands of feet up in the sky at the top to make a kind of square roof, to which a chance cloud gave added realism. The effect, which was both solemn and beautiful, was like being inside a cathedral of ice.¹

This was the house that Reich architect Albert Speer and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels built for the adoration of the Führer. The Nuremberg rallies represented the culmination of the annual celebrations of Hitler’s rise to power and of the revival of Germany under his direction while, at the same time, providing the emotional climax of a sustained propaganda campaign conducted throughout the year. It was Leni Riefenstahl’s intention, in her film of the 1934 rally Triumph of the Will, to allow those who had not been able to attend to join in the commemorations. Like the rallies themselves, the filmic record of them remain masterpieces of the Nazi concept of propaganda and of the role which mass meetings and the mass media could play, not only in preaching to the converted at home, but also in demonstrating to the outside world that Hitler enjoyed the full support of the German people. ‘The Party is Hitler. But Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler’, declared Rudolph Hess at the 1934 rally. If further ‘proof’ was needed, observers had only to note the overwhelming majority who voted for the Führer’s policies in the series of plebiscites organised throughout the 1930s. There was, as yet, no sign of the contempt which Hitler was to develop for the German people during the final stages of World War II, nor of the contempt which many came to feel for him afterwards. For the moment, at least while peace prevailed, the recovery of Germany under Hitler appeared nothing short of miraculous - an impression driven home and abroad to great effect by Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

The same had been true, if to a lesser extent, of Italian recovery under Mussolini, particularly before 1935. Had not the Duce succeeded where his predecessors had failed in making Italian trains run on time and in eradicating malaria from Rome by the draining of the Pontine marshes? To many observers, Mussolini’s achievements, like those of Hitler, seemed to outweigh the more unpleasant gangster-like methods of their regimes, especially when it came to the removal of political opposition, as on such occasions as the Matteoti murder or the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. In Mussolini’s case power was in many respects more apparent than real. Italian military planning, for example, was more akin to Lewis Carroll than to Clausewitz. As John Whittam has written, Mussolini ‘was so convinced by the power of words that he came to believe that even foreign policy and military objectives were attainable by the skilful deployment of an army of journalists rather than by the more orthodox formations’.² Indeed, Denis Mack Smith has examined Mussolini’s entire foreign policy in terms of a massive propaganda exercise lacking any genuine basis in reality.³

We are certainly more used to thinking of Mussolini in terms of the fabrication of illusions which masked the harsh realities of Fascist dictatorships. One need only recall the movie-set façades with thousands of cheering Italians standing on concealed scaffolding which the Duce had erected to impress Hitler during his visit to Rome in May 1938, or the painted imitation cardboard trees lined along the processional routes. The competitive element in the relationship between the two dictators often provoked amusement among contemporary observers, something which was brilliantly portrayed by Charlie Chaplin as Adeonoid Hinkel and Jack Oakie as Benzino Napoloni in Chaplin’s 1940 satirical masterpiece, The Great Dictator. During the war, mockery became a regular feature of allied propaganda. British Movietone, for example, parodied scenes from Triumph of the Will in the newsreel ‘Germany Calling’ (1940) using trick photography of Riefenstahl’s footage to the music of ‘The Lambeth Walk’.⁴ Alberto Cavalcanti lampooned Mussolini in his 1941 film, Yellow Caesar. However, such wartime exercises have tended to obscure the very potent nature of state-subsidised propaganda in the hands of the dictatorships during the inter-war years and, indeed, to diminish our appreciation of the enormous impact which it had upon contemporaries during a period in which illusions flourished. It was not simply a question of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s fictional heroine, telling her girls of the classical qualities of the Italin Duce or of the obsession with the German Führer of Unity Mitford and many of her ‘fellow travellers of the right’.⁵ Admirers of both regimes, however silly, undoubtedly helped to foster a distorted image of fascist achievements, aiding their foreign policy objectives in the process. The claims made by the German government in 1934–5 and by such admirers as Charles Lindbergh concerning the size and offensive capacity of the Luftwaffe to deliver a ‘knock-out blow’ from the air were widely accepted in the years leading up to World War II. We know now that this strength was greatly exaggerated. But, at the time, such claims undoubtedly reinforced Nazi diplomacy at the expense of its adversaries.⁶ So too did the belief that the Rome/ Berlin Axis and the Anti-comintern Pact posed a genuine threat to the British of a three-theatre war, a scenario which was not to materialise in 1939.

Propaganda played a vital part in the peacetime diplomacy of both Italy and Germany. It was not just that both regimes to a considerable degree owed their existence to the successful employment of propaganda during their rise to power, or even that their maintenance was sustained with the aid of agitprop and the use of terror. They also regarded propaganda as an integral factor in their domestic and foreign policies or, in some instances, as an alternative to those policies.

Before turning to this matter, it is necessary to clarify the broader context in which propaganda could take root and flourish. Essentially, there are three main reasons why propaganda became a regular feature of international relations between the wars: (1) a general increase in the level of popular interest and involvement in political and foreign affairs as a direct consequence of World War I; (2) technological developments in the field of mass communications which provided the basis for a rapid growth in propaganda as well as contributing towards the increased level of popular involvement in politics; and (3) the ideological context of the inter-war period, sometimes known as the ‘European Civil War’, in which an increased employment of international propaganda could profitably flourish.

Propaganda, regardless of its precise definition, may well be an activity as old as man himself but its systematic or scientific employment in the service of government is basically a twentieth-century phenomenon. Propaganda is essentially about persuasion. The word itself has been much used and little understood. Perhaps, following Professor Medlicott’s appeal made some years ago for diplomatic historians of the 1930s to abandon the use of the word ‘appeasement’ on the grounds that it had become such an emotive and prejudicial label for describing British foreign policy, a similar appeal should be made with regard to the word ‘propaganda’. A major problem derives from the debasement of the word since World War I. Before 1914, ‘propaganda’ meant simply the means which an adherant of a political but chiefly of a religious doctrine employed to convince the unconverted.⁷ The religious connotations derive from its semantic origins. Although the transmission of symbols dates from ancient times, the first remotely official propaganda organisation was established by the Papacy in the sixteenth century as a direct response to the forces unleashed by the Protestant Reformation. Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85) established a Commission of Cardinals to spread the true faith to non-Catholic countries and, shortly after the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, Pope Gregory XV made the Commission permanent in 1622 as the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide charged with the management of foreign missions. From the very outset, therefore, propaganda and external affairs were inextricably connected. The word soon came to be applied to any organisation established for the purpose of spreading a doctrine, religious or political. Its employment increased steadily throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly at times of ideological struggle as in the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary Wars.⁸

It was, however, between 1914 and 1918 that the wholesale employment of propaganda as an organised weapon of modern warfare served to transform its meaning into something more sinister. World War I was the first ‘total war’. The conflict required the mobilisation of elements in the societies of the belligerent nations which had previously been generally uninvolved in, and unaffected by, the exigencies of national survival. Once the initial ‘short-war illusion’ had been shattered, propaganda began to emerge as the principal instrument of official control over morale. The Great War substantially narrowed the distance which had previously existed between the soldier at the front line and the civilian at home. War was no longer a question of relatively small professional élites fighting against like armies on behalf of their governments. It had become a struggle involving entire populations pitted against entire populations, which were now required to supply the manpower and the material and to endure the deprivations deriving from this total effort. The mobilisation of the entire resources of the nation - military, economic, psychological - in such a gargantuan struggle demanded that national governments develop the weapons of censorship, propaganda and psychological warfare. At home, propaganda was used to justify the need for continuing the struggle until victory was secured, often by the vilification of the enemy through atrocity stories, or to explain the need for personal sacrifices in the national interest. In enemy countries, it was used to persuade soldiers and civilians, by fair means and foul, that their sacrifices were unjust and unnecessary and to incite mutiny, revolt or surrender. Nor was neutral opinion excluded from what became a struggle for world sympathy; the United States especially was a happy hunting ground between 1914 and 1917 for propagandists striving to win the hearts and minds of the American public and its government with all the economic and military benefits which that could entail for the successful suitor. By 1918, all the belligerents had recognised the value of propaganda as a weapon in their national armouries.⁹

Although certain countries, notably Germany and France, had entered the war with at least some of the basic equipment required to engage in the war of words (having devoted considerable official energy to propaganda as an adjunct of their foreign policies since the 1870s)¹⁰ the nation which finished the conflict with reputedly the most successful propaganda was Great Britain. This was despite the fact that in 1914 Britain possessed nothing that could even remotely be described as an official propaganda department. This impressive exercise in improvisation began with the creation of the Press Bureau and of the Foreign Office News Department and culminated in the establishment of a full Ministry of Information under Lord Beaverbrook and a separate Enemy Propaganda Department at Crewe House under Lord Northcliffe. The success of this operation was to have serious long-term consequences for British foreign policy during the inter-war years. In the United States, for example, the belief that the American people had somehow been ‘duped’ into involvement on the Allied side in 1917 by British propaganda emanating from the most secret of its propaganda organisations, Charles Masterman’s War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House, merely served to reinforce the arguments of those isolationist elements which advocated post-war withdrawal from the devious machinations of the Old World. Various scholarly studies of Britain’s wartime propaganda published in the United States appeared to confirm these views. H.C. Peterson’s book, for example, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–17 (significantly published in 1939) pointed to the methods of Masterman, Gilbert Parker and their fellow propagandists in helping to secure United States entry into the war on the Allied side and, by implication, warned against a repetition in another.¹¹ American sensitivity to foreign propaganda was highlighted by the passing of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act which required all foreign publicists operating on American soil to register with the...