The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic
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Unlike other socialist nations, the GDR had no official censor. It did not need one. Erich Honecker claimed that a “sense of responsibility” guided GDR journalists.26 That was nonsense. The journalist’s role was made clear at one of the Thursday press conferences in 1984. Klaus Raddatz, second in command at the Agitation Committee, told the gathered journalists: “We journalists are the front-line soldiers of a party that we joined of our own free will. No one is forced to become a journalist.”27 That was clear enough. Given the choice between writing for a newspaper and working in a factory, journalists censored themselves to keep their positions and avoid unpleasantness.
Broadcasting in the GDR was a state monopoly. Radio service was reestablished promptly after the Third Reich fell. There were four national stations and a number of regional ones. Television broadcasting began officially on Stalin’s birthday on 21 December 1952. It remained experimental until January 1956, when 2.2 hours were broadcast daily. The initial audience was This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:42 UTC
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tiny, but by 1960 the one millionth GDR television was licensed, the four millionth in 1968.28 There was one channel until 1969, two thereafter.29
GDR radio and television faced challenges unique in the socialist bloc.
The flow of foreign print media could be controlled, but the entire country received West German radio, and 80 percent of the population was in range of Western television. There were energetic attempts to discourage listening to West German broadcasts for years, particularly after the Wall went up in 1961. A common approach was to have groups of both parents and children pledge to avoid Western media.30 Schoolchildren sometimes were encouraged to talk about what they watched at home as a way of gathering information to be used against parents. Groups of Free German Youth members tore down antennas pointed west, though this was of limited effectiveness since many could receive Western television with a room or attic antenna.31 In the end the GDR gave up. Erich Honecker announced in May 1973 that people were free to watch whatever they wanted, though speaking in public about what they saw still could lead to difficulties. This led to the interesting situation that GDR media sometimes responded to Western media, assuming their audiences had seen or heard them, without being able to make clear that was what they were doing.
Television news was most carefully supervised. As the new medium advanced, the newsreel disappeared, with the advantage that, since people did not pay to watch the evening news, there was less incentive to make it lively. The plan for each evening’s news broadcast went to the Agitation Department and came back with direct orders. Instructions sometimes arrived after the program had begun. As late as 6 October 1989 Honecker made last-minute changes.32 The consequence was generally a dreary broadcast filled with long lists of names and titles. The opening stories of the Aktuelle Kamera broadcast for 1 February 1989 are typical:
• Seventy-eight hundred elected bodies will be reviewing their accomplishments over the period 1984–1989 in preparation for the communal elections to be held in May.
• Statistics of progress in Kreis Delitzsch.
• The minister president of Schleswig-Holstein visits the GDR.
• GDR teachers meet to discuss how the school year is going.
• A meeting of leaders of the SED and the Czechoslovakian Communist Party.
• A West Berlin court has prohibited a member of the Communist Party from working as a postal employee, a violation of human rights.
• Neo-Nazi groups are active in West Germany.
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Chapter Five
A further result was that the substantial majority of the GDR audience watched Western news. On average, internal reports found that 7–18 percent of the GDR audience watched the domestic newscast.33 The ratings were secret, even for most of those involved in producing GDR programming. The ostensible reason was to keep the staff from pandering to mass tastes, but embarrassment is the likelier cause.34
How did the news media function in practice? One way to answer the question is to examine how the Nazi and GDR media responded to a critical situation—an anomaly between the official map of reality and reality itself. In the case of National Socialism, the case will be the Battle of Stalingrad, the point at which the war’s tide turned. For the GDR, the example will be the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Both events presented the media with unprecedented challenges.
Victory in Defeat
As Joseph Goebbels noted, making propaganda is easy when one is winning. The first two years of the war were favorable, with blitzkrieg victories in Poland, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France. Initial German uncertainty about the war gave way to national gloating. Even the campaign against the Soviet Union in June 1941 began so well that internal public opinion reports in August found that citizens were expecting the Russians to collapse. German propaganda made mistakes, but there was room for error amid success.
The winter of 1941–1942 was a shock, as ill-prepared German soldiers who expected to be in warm Moscow dwellings suffered frostbite instead.
Spring and summer offensives in 1942 revived optimism, but German progress was insufficient. By October 1942 the Germans had captured 80
percent of Stalingrad, a city at least as important for its propaganda value as for its strategic position, but a Soviet counteroffensive in mid-November surrounded twenty-two German divisions with about 330,000 men. Hitler refused permission to withdraw. By the time the remaining 91,000 freez-ing, starving Germans surrendered on 31 January 1943, another 147,000
had died.35 The catastrophe made it clear that Germany could lose the war.
Stalingrad was a challenge in part because it was unexpected. The war had generally gone well. News reports had been optimistic. The weekly newsreels for October and November 1942 had scenes from Stalingrad, suggesting that the city was almost entirely in German hands. The daily military communiqué published by the Supreme Command of Wehrmacht This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:42 UTC
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(OKW) reported until early November that mopping up operations were in progress.36 A mid-October article on Stalingrad in the leading weekly Das Reich concluded: “At Stalingrad the Soviet front is tottering. A symbol smolders in endless fields of ruins. A mighty power has received the decisive blow.”37 Hitler stopped short of claiming Stalingrad was in German hands, but speaking on 8 November to the Old Guard in Munich, he asserted: “I wanted to take it [Stalingrad] and—you know—we are modest, we really have it! There are only a few very small places left there.”38 The newsreel for 18 November also claimed that there were only a few Soviet positions left in the city. The next week’s newsreel made no claim of approaching victory, but its scenes of advancing German troops left the casual viewer with the impression that German forces were still winning. The average German citizen had every reason to believe victory was near, and that is what morale reports found. In fact, the significance of Stalingrad was not at all clear to the German public. By mid-November public attention focused on the less critical North African front, where the Allies had landed on 8 November. People thought things had quieted down for the winter in Russia.39
Goebbels was more cautious. Trying to build support for a total war effort (and add to his own power in the process), he wanted to remind Germans that the war could be lost rather than console them with easy claims of victory, which demanded more forthright coverage. He had, however, limited control over the press. In his usual self-congratulatory style, his diary entry for 12 December 1942 noted: “The latest reports of the SD and the Reich Propaganda offices were presented to me. In both of the
se, as well as in the reports of the gauleiters, there is very sharp criticism of our news policy regarding the situation at the front. I feel absolutely not guilty of this obvious fizzle. I have always encouraged greater frankness in news.”40 Stalingrad would have been difficult to deal with even if Goebbels had gotten his way, but now German media were left with the difficult task of explaining sudden, drastic, and unexpected defeat, the opposite of what they had been predicting. And it could not be avoided. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers could not disappear without mention, nor could newspapers simply stop publishing maps showing the German lines running through Stalingrad.
The first and easiest strategy was silence. Stalingrad almost vanished from the media. Newspapers mentioned it only in passing. The newsreels for December 1942 and January 1943 turned their attention to North Africa, U-boats, the occupation of southern France, and Nazi pageantry.
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There was material from the Russian front—but it avoided Stalingrad.
Viewers saw a train bringing supplies to the Leningrad front in the 2 December newsreel. The 27 January newsreel showed Russian forces being driven back in several locations. Hitler, who approved the final draft of each day’s OKW communiqué, consistently removed any mention of Stalingrad.41 The press took the cue and said little.
Silence was a signal to Germans that things were going poorly. The Nazis did not conceal victory. The SD report for 7 December observed that some people noticed the absence of Stalingrad from the OKW communiqué and concluded that the situation was serious, even that German forces there might be surrounded.42 Letters from soldiers in Stalingrad carried the message, which quickly spread. But in early January the SD report found that people were only scanning the headlines, since they had concluded that nothing significant was likely to happen in the immediate future.43 Even Goebbels was not fully informed. His diary entry for 5
January 1943 noted that the situation had become “somewhat worri-some,” when in fact defeat was already certain. It wasn’t until he visited Hitler’s headquarters on 22 January that he wrote: “We apparently have to accept the bitter fact that the 22 divisions in Stalingrad are lost.”44
Since Hitler forbade a withdrawal and the Germans lacked the strength to break the encirclement, propagandists had to explain a military disaster.
Silence was impossible as a long-term strategy. Defeat was inevitable. It had to be transformed into a kind of victory. On 16 January the OKW communiqué admitted for the first time that the troops in Stalingrad were being attacked from all sides. Goebbels persuaded Hitler on 22 January to present a more accurate account of the situation. On 25 January the OKW spoke of the eternal honor German forces had won for their valiant and sacrificial struggle.45 That clarified the situation. Within a week, the SD reported that people were beginning to wonder not how long it would take to win the war but how long Germany could hold out and still win a favorable peace.46
The tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power fell on 30 January.
Goebbels and Göring gave major speeches, and Goebbels read Hitler’s proclamation, but none of the three gave Stalingrad central attention. The next day, the remaining German forces in Stalingrad surrendered.
In his diary entry for 4 February, Goebbels recorded the announcement to the public: “We are forced to inform the German people of the loss of Stalingrad. It is bitter, but necessary. We broadcast the news as a special announcement in the afternoon around 4, and put it in an appropriately heroic form. I work out all the details with the Führer personally, who This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:42 UTC
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fully approves my proposals.”47 Goebbels also ordered that theaters and other places of entertainment be closed through the following Saturday.
The daily press directive outlined the line the press would take to announce the defeat to the public:
The heroic battle for Stalingrad has ended. In several days of mourning the German people will honor their brave sons, men who did their duty to the last breath and to the last bullet, and as a result have broken the back of the Bolshevik assault on our eastern front. The heroic battle for Stalingrad will become the greatest of all the heroic epics in German history. The German press has one of its greatest tasks before it. In the spirit of the special OKW
communiqué to be issued later today, the press must report this stirring event, which outshines every feat of heroism known to history, in such a matter that this sublime example of heroism, this ultimate, self-sacrificing dedication to Germany’s final victory, will blaze forth like a sacred flame.
The German nation, inspired by the eternal heroism of the men of Stalingrad, will demonstrate even more nobly than before those spiritual and material qualities which assure the nation of the victory it is now more fanatically than ever resolved to win.48
Since the Nazi worldview hardly allowed for a defeat by the forces of Jewish Bolshevism, the media were to turn a real defeat into a mythic victory.
The press suddenly filled with stories that followed these guidelines.
Stalingrad was presented as a necessary sacrifice that held Soviet forces down while the front was strengthened elsewhere. Ignoring the fact that the surviving German soldiers, complete with a large complement of generals, had surrendered, the media first suggested that German forces had fought to the last man. This proved awkward, since the Russians were broadcasting the names of survivors in their German-language broadcasts (listening to which was illegal). One of the most effective articles on the subject of those missing appeared in Das Reich in mid-February. Hans Schwarz van Berk, one of Goebbels’s close aides, condemned the Soviets for using captured soldiers for propaganda purposes, told Germans that all possible steps were being taken to determine an accurate casualty list, and assured them that the sacrifice of Stalingrad had been worth it.49
The most memorable element of the propaganda on Stalingrad was Goebbels’s “Total War” speech on 18 February 1943. He had been arguing that Germany’s full economic and labor resources should be put under his control in service of the war effort, which Hitler was reluctant to do for morale reasons. He organized a remarkable media event aimed both at persuading Hitler and the German public that resolute action was needed.
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The scene was the Berlin Sport Palace, site of many Nazi rallies.
Goebbels assembled a carefully selected audience of 14,000 that he claimed was representative of the Reich. It included leaders of the party, the military, the state, the arts, science, and culture but also wounded veterans, workers, and women. The usual flags and banners hung above the audience (for example, “A total war is the shortest war”). Radio carried the speech twice, and newspapers printed its full text. And the cameras were there. Five and a half minutes from the speech led off the newsreel for 24
February.
Early in the speech, Goebbels announced his intent to speak forthrightly: “I want to speak to all of you from the depths of my heart to the depths of yours. I believe that the entire German people has a passionate interest in what I have to say tonight. I will therefore speak seriously and openly, as the hour demands. The German people, raised, educated and disciplined by National Socialism, can bear the truth. They know the grav-ity of the situation, and their leadership can therefore demand the necessary hard measures, yes even the hardest measures.”50 He was seeking to reestablish credibility and whip up enthusiasm for transforming the economy to a war footing.
The speech culminated in Goebbels’s famed ten questions on total war.
It is rarely comfortable to recall defeats; once the German public had the time to adjust to Stalingrad, the battle almost vanished from the media.
Hitler made no direct reference to it in his speech of 21 March, Heroes Memorial Day, when one would think a reference to “the greatest of all the heroic epics in German history” would have been in order. Goebbels began a major speech on 5 June 1943 with the sentence “The winter crisis is over.” The speech did not name Stalingrad. Rather, it focused on the evils of Bolshevism and the Jews, the need for total war, and the prospects of submarine warfare.52 As the war went on and German forces retreated growing distances, the argument that Stalingrad had bought time to strengthen German lines lost its effectiveness. The memory of Stalingrad became inconvenient, and the inconvenient did not need to be recalled.
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The Anti-Fascist Protective Wall
The Berlin Wall was built of necessity. Nearly 2,700,000 East Germans left between 1945 and 1961. In 1960, 199,180 left, followed by 155,402 in 1961 up to the day the Wall was begun on 13 August. Half of those who left were under twenty-five years of age. This was a disaster both from the economic and propaganda standpoints. It is difficult to run a planned economy when one is unsure of what the workforce will be, but it also was awkward to explain why the “Better Germany” was hemorrhaging citizens, including the young trained citizens it could least afford to lose.