Axis on the Air

Harold L. Ettlinger

• Publisher: Eumenes Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839741197
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Axis on the Air, first published in 1943, is a fascinating look at the use of radio for propaganda purposes by the Nazis, Japanese, and Italians during World War II. Author Harold Ettlinger, a columnist for the Chicago Sun, provides insight and numerous examples of Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels, famous traitors such as "Lord Haw Haw, " Jane Anderson, and Ezra Pound, and Axis broadcasts to its own citizens as well as efforts to create unrest and lower morale in England and the United States. The book also examines Allied radio services such as the BBC and Voice of America, plus radio stations in some of the smaller European countries such as Sweden and Finland.A vivid, authentic description of how the Axis, led by Goebbels, has used the radio as a weapon for subjugating its enemies.

V. DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Divide America from Britain, stir up in the western world the fear of a Red menace, destroy the admiration of the nations of Europe and of the Germans themselves for the United States—those are the constant aims of Dr. Goebbels’ political warfare. He does not merely plant propaganda seeds of that kind among us and hope that they will grow. He nurses them tenderly, cultivates them year in and year out. He is not discouraged by the fact that they may fail to sprout in one place, but immediately plants them in another. Nor does he depend on the false but reasonable-sounding burden of a single argument to obtain his result for him. In fact he does not trouble much about our reason at all.

His method is to hammer away constantly, night after night, on the radio with the idea that some among us will begin to take his lies for truth merely because we hear them so often. By force of constant repetition—not just ten or a hundred repetitions but tens of thousands—he hopes that the slogans he seeks to implant in us will become part of our thought patterns no matter how we fight against them. The mere fact of the constant hammering away at the words “Bolshevik menace” will, in his opinion, make even the most rational among us think, first subconsciously then openly, the moment there is the slightest provocation, that the threat of Communism is worse than being submerged in a Nazi world. He sees to it, moreover, that no matter how the war is going on the battlefield his propagandists find some material in it for their campaigns.

For example when Germany was winning sweeping victories in Russia he sought persistently to get us to relax our preparations for total war against Germany, arguing that the Nazis were doing the world a service by repelling “the Asiatic hordes” from western Europe. That failed, fortunately, and just as fortunately the tide of battle turned in Russia. But Goebbels was not discouraged. He began to work on a new theme—the theme that we had better do something quickly to prevent Russia’s regaining too much ground. Not directly but by devious means, through neutrals and through tried and trusted anti-Reds among us, he gave forth the idea that continued Russian victory would put the Kremlin in Berlin, would lead to the Bolshevization of Europe and would, specifically, wipe out the investments of those of us who had them.

The same was true of his propaganda effort in regard to us and the British. In stirring up anti-British feeling against us he played first on the tune that we would never send any troops to help them, that we were going to be merely silent partners who would sit back and let them win the war for us, then step in and reap the benefits. When the numbers of our troops and planes and Lend-Lease items became too great for even the most unobservant Britisher to overlook he changed the theme. He began to warn England that we were going to reduce her to a dependency, that we were practically taking over even before the war was won, that the only way for her to maintain her independence was to do it in a Nazi-dominated world where England—with a few colonies subtracted, of course—would be allowed to go her own way.

His job with us has been to try to discourage as much as possible the sending of men and supplies to Europe. Before the war began the Nazi line fitted in perfectly with that of our own isolationists, who argued that we should keep everything we had at home and protect our own shores, because nobody would attack us unless we sent our armed forces abroad. Night after night the Berlin radio sent back to this country quotations from the speeches of isolationists and professional anti-Britishers among us with the idea of spreading even further arguments which already had ample currency in our press. Goebbels retransmitted the ideas to us in such form that listeners got the impression they represented the majority opinion. He never once let it leak out over his radio that anybody at all except President Roosevelt and a few Communists and Jews recognized a sufficient Nazi menace to go to meet it before it reached our shores, when the time would be too late.

We were attacked, of course, and with that the isolationist argument that we needed to fear no attack crashed to the ground. Goebbels was forced to find new arguments, and he did readily enough. They were not arguments so much as insinuations, for the most part—the spreading of stories of how the British were taking advantage of us, how they were using Lend-Lease goods to win our South American markets from us, how they were building the kind of ships that would secure post-war shipping monopolies (he told England exactly the same story about us) and how Britain was sitting back, snug in her island, and waiting for us to send our boys over to get killed while her own troops merely carried out home-guard patrols.

Turning continental Europe against us was perhaps his hardest task of all. Goebbels knew that the people of Europe recalled all too vividly for his purposes the fact that victory in the First World War had followed American intervention. How great a part we actually had in that victory on the field of battle might continue as a subject for controversy among military experts, but he was not interested in the opinions of military experts. He was interested in the ordinary little man who believed, and did not need to reason, that the word America spelled victory, for that is the way it had been once before. He knew, too, that his own people, pessimistic by nature and carrying deep in their hearts the thought of defeat even in the days of the greatest victories, connected the name of our country with the German disaster of 1918. His job, then, was to try to make Europe believe that it was not die same this time, that we would never get enough military strength in the field to win a victory, that Germany would have it well won before we, in our slow, lumbering way, got moving. Failing that, he sought to paint us as barbarians whose arrival in Europe was to be dreaded rather than welcomed.

Goebbels’ belief that he could successfully help Germany’s conquest of the western world by playing up the Red-menace theme was not merely a theory. It was based on actual experience gained before the war, particularly in France. The Red-menace theme was an extremely important part of softening the French. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the fear of Bolshevism and of social revolution in their own countries was the underlying factor in the behavior of French and British statesmen during the entire period between the two world wars. First the socialistic German republic was allowed to be sabotaged because of the fear that its ideas, which politicians in France and England thought were similar to those of Russia, might spread to the rest of Europe. Second, the Fascism of Mussolini in Italy was given every help and encouragement by France and England’s conservative politicians because they had been convinced, by carefully built-up propaganda which the Nazis later merely took up and carried forward, that the alternative was a left revolution in Italy. Then everything that could be done to undermine the Popular Front government in France was done by conservative political and financial interests under the direct influence of the German industrialists and their colleagues elsewhere in Europe, who were always closely linked in their undercover activities. And finally the Spanish Republican government was allowed to fall to a Fascist army, directly aided by Germany and Italy, because the Axis powers had convinced men like Chamberlain that the alternative was Red revolution which would seep from Spain into the rest of western Europe.

Those of us who followed the French press in the days when the farce of non-intervention was being played during the Spanish War know now that the papers which most ardently campaigned against intervention and which most carefully nurtured the Nazi propaganda line of the Red menace as applied to Spain are the very ones which are most subservient to the Nazis now. We know that in occupied France the men who ran the pro-German, anti-Loyalist, anti-British papers like the daily Le Matin and the weekly Gringoire are the most slavish collaborators. The tragedy is that in the days before the war we allowed them to parade behind masks of patriotism when actually they were even then committing treason by playing a game which led to the weakening of France to the point where its conquest on the actual battlefield was easy.

Those among us who are ardently opposed to Communism might ask if there really is not a Red menace, even if the Nazis do play it up for their own purposes. The answer, for anybody who cares to look for it, is on the battlefields of Russia, where as many German troops were put out of action as we had in all of our armed forces by the summer of 1943. The answer lies in the tremendous devastation wrought by the battle, of the gigantic task awaiting Russia when the war is over, when clearly the Kremlin will have much more important things to do restoring normal life in the Soviet Union than trying to stir up revolutions among the rest of us.

In a given week in January 1943, shortwave monitors in this country calculated that the thirty percent of the Nazis’ broadcasting to Britain and the United States was devoted to the Red-menace bogey. Incidentally, during the same week Tokyo, which was still at peace with Russia, spent much of its broadcast time directed at Russia to stirring up Russian distrust of the Anglo-Saxon countries. It must not be forgotten that, since the Red-menace campaign is only designed to separate us from our most active ally, it would naturally follow that nothing must be left undone in the effort to turn Russia against us.

In this connection Axis propagandists have not let the Russians forget that after the last war it was American and other allied troops who were occupying Russian soil, and not Germans.

The Axis does not always come out clearly and tell us what it hopes to achieve by its hammering away at the Red scare, but in January 1943 the Hungarian radio admitted the following:

“As a result of the latest Russian successes it is clearly apparent today that the interests of the Axis powers and the Allies are to a certain extent identical. This does not mean at all that the Allies will sue for peace. But the Allies would do well to take into account the realities and not establish a second front in Europe.”

It is all very simple: we were not to establish a second front to make Germany fight on two fronts. If we obligingly reframed she would use all her available power to defeat the Russians and then turn against us, with no eastern front to worry about.

To the Russians at the same time Tokyo broadcast a commentary entitled “Anglo-Saxon Machinations Against Russia,” in which liberal misquotations from a New York Times story were used to make the desired point.

“The reason the United States wants an army of 11,000,000 men,” the Japanese commentator told the Russians, “is not that they need it to defeat the Axis but that they want to have it in order to neutralize Soviet power after the war.”

Tokyo then warned the Soviets that the United States and Britain had a very poor record of dealing with weaker nations, “such as India, France, Latin America and Chungking,” a record which, the speaker said, made the sensitive Japanese shudder at the brutal conduct involved.

That record ought to serve as a warning to the Russians, he continued, as should the alleged fact that the Allies drove the Soviets to fight the Germans “with the sinister intention of ruining both powers.” The fact that Germany made an unprovoked attack on Russia in June 1941 did not cramp the commentator’s style.

Berlin has used the same kind of argument, employing a Russian speaker whom it called Lenin’s Old Guard and who pretended to be the voice of an underground anti-Stalin movement inside Russia. A typical broadcast by that voice was the following:

“Don’t let us be fooled by the tyrants in the Kremlin. The British and the Americans are not going to open a second front. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever. They don’t care what happens to Mother Russia. They only want us Russians to sacrifice our blood to save the British Empire and to protect the warmongering, Jewish-dominated American government.”

Sometimes the Nazis can combine the Red-menace theme with its anti-British line to this country and thus accomplish a double purpose—and sometimes they get the help of our own press in so doing.

For example in the summer of 1942 the Nazis broadcast repeated allegations that the Soviet-British treaty signed at that time contained secret clauses in which they plotted to divide up the world without letting the United States in on the deal. The Nazis not only broadcast the story but saw to it that it was planted in the neutral press, or the press that we thought was neutral. Thus the story was printed in a pro-Nazi Swedish paper. It was planted there, of course, for the purpose of having some American correspondent pick it up and cable it to this country, and Donald Day, then correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, promptly complied. Day, who had been stationed in Riga for years and had taken on himself the special job of sending anti-Russian dispatches to this country, was an old hand at helping to keep the Red-menace theme alive. Press dispatches from Finland reported late in 1942 that he had finally resigned his post, which was then in Helsinki, and joined the Finnish army.

Day’s dispatch quoted the Swedish paper to the effect that the Soviet government had demanded the creation of an enlarged Russian “sphere” in the Scandinavian peninsula, and had also demanded the Baltic states, central Europe and the Balkans. Besides that they were to be given military and political control over Finland, Germany, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria and military garrisons and bases throughout Europe in order to secure free access to the North Sea and the Mediterranean.

Most American correspondents abroad can be trusted not to pick up Nazi-inspired stories which have been planted for the express purpose of spreading anti-Russian and anti-British feeling among us. But every once in a while there is a slip, sometimes inadvertent and sometimes committed by a man whose anti-Red bias is such that he will give rein to it even if he knows it might help the enemy.

In April 1943 fuel for Goebbels’ anti-Bolshevik campaign was provided by the Polish government in exile, which could hardly claim to have done it inadvertently, because the material which it used had been openly furnished by the Nazis. The German government announced in the spring of 1943 that the graves of some 10,000 Polish officers and men had been discovered at Katin on the Smolensk front and that the men had been massacred by the Russians before they evacuated that region. The fact that the Nazis had occupied the territory for two years before the “discovery” was made should have tipped everyone off to the nature of the charge and should have forestalled its use as a political issue. But the Polish government fell for it. The apparent reason was that the Poles wanted to use the charge as a striking issue with which to get their real quarrel with the Soviets out in the open and put Moscow on the defensive. That issue was the matter of post-war frontiers. Premier Sikorski’s government wanted assurance from Russia and guarantees from the United States and Britain that Poland would be restored to her 1939 borders. The Soviet government had already served notice that it intended to retain the 1941 borders, which were also the frontiers left to Russia after the First World War. These had only been altered in Poland’s favor as a result of a victorious campaign against the young Red army in the early twenties. Russia claimed that the population of those regions was not Polish but White Russian and Ukrainian and that they rightfully belonged inside the Soviet frontiers. Both Britain and the United States had tacitly indicated that they would not bring pressure on Russia to withdraw that claim.

Accordingly, Poland decided to make an issue of the alleged massacre. The Soviet government dismissed the charge as an obvious plant designed to create a rift among the United Nations and said that the men in question had been killed on the Smolensk front by the Germans. Instead of accepting this explanation Sikorski accepted the Nazi suggestion that the Internationa...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• I. THE BATTLE OF WORDS
• II. THE BIGGEST LIAR IN THE WORLD
• III. THE TRAITORS
• IV. THOSE WHO FELL
• V. DIVIDE AND CONQUER
• VI. TO BORE FROM WITHIN
• VII. THE FREEDOM STATIONS
• VIII. THE SATELLITES
• IX. THE VOICE OF JAPAN
• X. THE BOTTOMLESS PIT
• XI. PURSUIT OF THE FOX
• XII. WE CALL HIM MEYER
• XIII. SLAVE PEOPLES, FREE SPIRITS
• XIV. TROUBLE ON THE HOME FRONT
• XV. THE SOFT UNDERBELLY
• XVI. GERMANY’S NIGHTMARE
• XVII. THE END OF IL DUCE
• XVIII. PROPAGANDA AND PEACE
• XIX. PROPAGANDA GEMS
• XX. THE VOICE OF MOSCOW
• XXI. THE VOICE OF AMERICA
• XXII. LONDON CALLING
• XXIII. SHADES OF VICTORY