The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic

by Randall L Bytwerk

  The largest single organization of the Third Reich was the DAF. Ninety percent of German workers were members.26 The SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, the Nazi women’s organization, and all the other party affiliates managed to include most of the rest of the population. It was inconvenient not to belong to several of them. It got one noticed in places like Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, whose notorious columns sometimes denounced those who were not members of the proper organizations.

  The GDR also had a variety of organizations that it was wise to join.

  Nearly all youth joined the various sections of the FDJ. The Society for German-Soviet Friendship (DSF) had 6.2 million members by 1989 (over half the adult population). It was especially popular because joining gave evidence of conformity at a nominal membership fee and with minimal obligation. Pressure to join the FDGB was equally strong.

  Asking too much of citizens generally did not work. For example, in 1952 there was a campaign to get GDR citizens to write millions of letters to friends, relatives, and professional colleagues in West Germany to persuade them of the superiority of socialism. A pamphlet with the entertaining title Your Letter is a Sharp Weapon of Enlightenment in the Struggle for Unity and Peace provided both good and bad examples of letters ordinary citizens might write. Letter writing groups met regularly to discuss ways to get an effective message to West Germans. These were organized by the National Front, the coordinating organization for many GDR activities. It claimed This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC

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  there were thousands of such groups already, but that tens of thousands were needed. However, citizens were understandably reluctant to spend much time writing propaganda letters, and the campaign seems to have died out shortly after.27

  Nearly every GDR citizen was a member of several of the mass organizations, and most served in “leadership” positions over their careers. In 1979

  the Bitterfeld chemical concern had 19,000 employees; 97 percent belonged to the FDGB, 84 percent had joined the DSF, 71 percent of the younger employees were still FDJ members, and 24 percent belonged to the SED. More than that, these organizations required large numbers of of-ficeholders. The FDGB alone had functions for two-thirds of its Bitterfeld membership.28

  It was often not easy to persuade people to take on the tasks that provided little real power at the cost of one’s spare time. Gentle or not so gentle pressure persuaded people to accept these often unwanted duties.

  After all, a post in the FDGB or in the DSF or as an agitator might make a vacation likelier, encourage a promotion, or preserve one from tasks more onerous. One woman who wished to drop her FDGB membership was dissuaded by the fact that a small bonus for her entire work collective depended on 100 percent membership.29 A school psychologist who had been less than eager to join the DSF testified about the pressure she encountered: “There were arguments that membership showed one’s attitude toward the state, toward socialism and the Soviet Union, that membership in the DSF was an essential characteristic of a socialist teacher, and that otherwise the teacher collective could not earn the title

  ‘Socialist Teacher’s Collective.’”30 These arguments gained force because they were made by friends and colleagues. The system punished not only individuals for failing to join the proper groups but also their workmates.

  Given the importance of the collective in the GDR, it took people of forti-tude to do something that brought difficulties on themselves and on their friends.

  The very fact that these were mass organizations is significant. Ellul notes that effective propaganda requires the fragmentation of society, the elimination of smaller groups that provide shelter for those of common outlook.31 The result is that individuals, robbed of the warmth and support of smaller groups, become part of a mass of people who share little, or share nervously. William S. Allen titles a chapter of his study of Northeim during the Nazi years “The Atomization of Society.” He describes how the Nazis quickly shattered the existing variety of clubs and groups, merging This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC

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  them into larger groups that no longer served the purpose of social interaction among like-minded people.32 In the same way, the GDR made independent clubs or organizations difficult. The church was one of the few relatively independent spaces, and even there the GDR worked to reduce its reach. A 1964 report on improving atheistic propaganda, for example, noted that patient and persistent work had to be done to lure participants away from church cultural activities.33 The person who attended a church concert might be drawn into other involvement.

  Education received particular attention.34 Children from the earliest age learned what was appropriate to say in public. Teachers were carefully selected and textbooks rigidly guided. Membership in the youth organizations was for practical purposes compulsory. A 1959 message to parents made this clear: “The start of your child’s education begins an important stage of life: the systematic preparation for a life in service to our socialist community. An important helper in socialist education is the Pioneer Organization Ernst Thälmann, the socialist mass organization for children. . . . It will be most beneficial for the development of your child if you agree to his membership in the Pioneer Organization.”35 It took parents with backbones to resist such messages.

  Wilfried Poßner, later head of the FDJ, had an illuminating experience while a student. He and his fellow students had objected to chanting a slogan at the 1967 May Day festivities (“Neither ox nor ass can stop the progress of socialism”), which aroused the ire of the party. They also made a poor choice of songs for public performance (for example, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”). When they proposed naming their school after Bertholt Brecht, the authorities told them they had opposition and elitist tendencies and that their school would instead be named after a Stalinist-era Soviet writer.36 This was not a personal catastrophe for anyone involved, but it was educational.

  The FDJ’s beginnings were rough, and even into the 1950s membership was stagnating at around 35 percent of the age cohort, due in part to determined resistance by the church. By the 1960s the percentages had reached entirely satisfactory levels of near unanimity.37 Parents who might themselves not be strong supporters of the state got a clear message that their children would be outsiders should they not be members. The pressure worked. One of my GDR acquaintances remembers being one of two members of her school class who did not initially participate. The pressure of being an outsider led her to beg her parents for permission to join.

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  More than that, there were concrete benefits in participating actively in the mass organizations. The FDGB by the 1980s controlled over 5 million vacation opportunities and dispensed 1.8 million trips within the GDR and 16,000 abroad. The FDJ ran a network of youth hostels and also allocated coveted trips abroad.38 These did not often go to members who had not demonstrated appropriate loyalty.

  These were all efforts to persuade people to behave in the approved ways. There was also enormous pressure on people to avoid behavior that undermined the public facade of unanimity. This pressure was not necessarily oppressive—some hardly sensed it. And it came in many forms.

  All citizens became part of the process of gentle coercion. From motives sometimes good, sometimes ill, neighbors worked on neighbors. In Hitler’s Germany, one might see a sign upon entering the local pub that announced that the “German Greeting” (“Heil Hitler”) was expected. Those who failed to display a flag on the proper occasions heard from concerned neighbors, not all of whom were busybodies. As one woman whose m
other was slow to conform later recalled: “People were always coming and saying why haven’t you hung out a flag, for Hitler’s birthday and so on. . . . You almost went to jail. It was very dangerous if you didn’t do it.

  One person after the other came, rang the doorbell, and said you haven’t hung out your flag yet. Finally, my mother bought a real tiny one.”39 Helmut Behrens, a university chemist whose attitude toward the Nazis was hostile, nonetheless warned friends to be cautious of their public statements. Writing of a lab assistant, Behrens recalled: “He was a determined opponent of the National Socialist regime, and I had to warn him repeatedly to be a little more cautious in what he said, particularly with loyal party members.”40

  These were the warnings of friends. There were many less agreeable persons eager to report fellow citizens for a variety of offenses. The Gestapo and the other structures of Nazi power were too thinly spread to uncover every hostile word. They depended on denunciations. Robert Gellately and others have documented large numbers of denunciations to the organs of the state.41 Streicher’s Der Stürmer printed denunciations of more than 6,500 named or identifiable individuals for insufficient anti-Semitism between 1935 and the outbreak of the war. Many had simply displayed common courtesy or had commercial dealings with Jews.42 Other Nazi organizations and publications also printed names of those who did not behave as expected, and the Nazis did not hesitate to arrest and sometimes execute those who violated the rules against public opposition.

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  The GDR was even more assiduous in protecting the public from infectious ideas. It faced the enormous problem that nearly everyone in the country could receive radio or television broadcasts from the “class enemy”

  to the west. I have already noted the efforts to discourage listening to or watching West German media, efforts that failed. Still, much was done to at least discourage people from talking in public about what they had learned.

  Church leader Hans-Otto Furian observed: “The GDR was after all a state that feared nothing so much as the public.”43 The party and state worked hard to keep a unified public outlook on matters large and trivial.

  Some instances are amusing. For example, the GDR had a perpetual shortage of consumer goods. One could not blame the system for that, but neither could one pretend it did not exist. In 1980 there was a shortage of inexpensive tableware. A note in the SED files discusses the situation: “The wholesalers report that everything is being exported. The management cannot tell the sales clerks that, nor could they pass it on to the customers.

  If management here works out its explanation, that does not mean that the same argument is used in other shops in the city. To the contrary, each shop comes up with its own explanation, often the most varied ones at that. At the very least, we have to have the same explanation used in a city!”44 Truth was less important than consistency. The literature on religious cults talks of “holy lies,” lies that are said to be acceptable because they serve the divine good. The GDR had many such “holy lies.”

  Or consider the example of a worker who in 1962 responded to a special edition of Neues Deutschland on a Soviet space flight with the comment that

  “one can wipe his ass with that rag.” A party member overhearing the remark “organized a meeting of the whole work brigade to make the situation clear to him. ‘He apologized and said he did not mean it that way.’”45

  His public humiliation made it clear to the rest that ill-advised statements had consequences.

  The net of Stasi (Ministry of State Security) informants was far tighter in the GDR than it had been in the Nazi period. About 2 percent of the adult GDR population had some relationship with the Stasi. The network of those willing to report their neighbors was well developed.46 The GDR had forty years to build a refined system of dealing with dissidents, who faced a calculated mixture of isolation, professional pressure, prison, emigration, or expulsion. Those who gave any indication of hostile views were dealt with firmly, so firmly that the Stasi estimated in the spring of 1989 that there were only 2,500 activists and sixty “hard core” dissidents in the This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC

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  entire country.47 Their definition is significant. Success generally was measured by the degree to which the citizenry was discouraged from expressing hostile views in public, not by what they thought inwardly. It turned out in the fall of 1989 that the majority of the population was not happy with its state, but only a tiny minority was willing to risk the sanctions that came with public disagreement. That is understandable. Given the GDR’s success in controlling public discourse, the average citizen was hard-pressed to sense how widespread opposition attitudes were. Dirk Philipsen quotes a Leipzig dissident speaking of the situation in the mid-1980s. There were dissident groups scattered throughout the country, but they often were unaware of each other. “The really terrible thing about all of this is that nobody knew that these things were going on in other places.

  Just knowing about it would have made a big difference. Then you wouldn’t have felt so alone. It would have encouraged us a great deal.”48

  To ensure the public facade of unanimity, the GDR took all necessary steps. Under GDR law, a gathering of more than three people for an identifiable public purpose required a permit. In 1983, for example, church officials in Leipzig were told they needed a permit for a public gathering where more than three people were to carry candles.49 The Stasi and other forces guarded against any public demonstration of unapproved ideas. In 1988 a group of about 150 people left the Nikolai Church in Leipzig after a church gathering and walked through the city. The Stasi was present in force. According to the report in the Stasi files: “The participants in the procession carried no banners, symbols or other visible signs with them. . . . The group had no impact on public security and order; it had only slight public visibility.”50 The last point was the important one. Hardly anyone knew what was happening.

  Demonstrations could be banned even if they had the right message. In 1983 a group from Weimar wanted to hold a demonstration in Berlin against NATO. The rub was that, although they favored state policy, it was to be an independent demonstration. On the scheduled day, there were about a hundred arrests in Berlin. Ulrich Poppe, a participant, notes: “That is the kind of fear this state had against an independently organized demonstration, independent of its content!”51 The leadership certainly was conscious of the shaky ground on which its public support rested. Politburo member Günter Schabowski made an interesting statement during the German parliament’s hearings on the GDR:

  The SED was a party that—although there may have been some who thought otherwise—never had majority support. We could proceed only by This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC

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  ignoring whether or not we had a majority. If I have to wait for a majority, I have to choose the path of social democracy, and that we despised.

  We lived continually by suppressing the reality that a large part of the population, perhaps the majority, was against us.52

  The leading West German historian of the GDR, Hermann Weber, made a similar observation: “The fundamental failing of the GDR regime was, from start to finish, the absence of any democratic legitimization.”53 A system that suppresses disagreement faces an insoluble dilemma. It knows that its support may be shallow, but the harsher the methods it uses to enforce public unanimity, the more assiduously citizens conceal their true beliefs and display the approved ones, and the more the system fears its citizens are not behind it.

  The Church Invisible

  The church (wh
ether Catholic or Protestant) was a particular threat to both the National Socialist and Marxist-Leninist systems, since it had a worldview and a source of authority entirely outside their frameworks and since it was all too visible. Large and ancient churches could not be overlooked.

  Widespread belief in God predated both systems, and the Almighty still had followers who sometimes placed their religious loyalty above their loyalty to the reigning political system. Neither system felt quite able to abolish the church by force, but neither could they lightly tolerate an institution that stood outside the prevailing orthodoxy.

  Unlike the Marxists, the Nazis claimed to promote and defend religion.

  They aimed at co-opting religion more than eliminating it. Hitler sprinkled polite references to God in his major speeches. The Nazi platform pledged the party’s support for a “positive Christianity.” National Socialism had clear ideas as to how that positive Christianity should be exhibited. The church was to have nothing whatever to say about politics, limiting its activities purely to the spiritual realm, and Christianity’s spiritual claims would be separated fully from believers’ secular pursuits. As Hitler said in 1933: “The religions and the Churches will maintain their freedom. But we are in charge of politics.”54 A typical Nazi measure came in 1935: “[A]ll Catholic youth associations in the entire state of Prussia were forbidden to participate in any activities that were not of a purely religious nature. In particular, Catholic youth could no longer wear uniforms, or clothes that resembled uniforms in any way; they could not wear pins or medallions in public that would link them with Catholic associations, nor could they This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC