The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic
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publicly display Catholic flags and banners; they were forbidden to go on marches or to go hiking and camping; and they were forbidden to participate in organized sporting activities of all kinds.”55 Protestant organizations suffered the same treatment.
Acceptable religious activity was to be hidden behind the walls of the church, invisible to all save those in attendance. The Nazis steadily complained about “political clergy,” which meant any involvement at all by the church in activities not narrowly ecclesiastical. Large numbers of Christians were imprisoned and sometimes killed during the Third Reich. Essentially, the Nazis were denying the church status as an organization with a worldview. The Nazi Party could speak to everything. The church was to restrict its activity to the “purely spiritual.” The SD kept careful watch on the church during the war, noting particularly its efforts to go beyond its
“proper” role. The Catholics, for example, organized a nationwide “festival of faith” for the youth on Trinity Sunday in May 1940. The SD reported that the bishop of Fulda had said that the Christian faith was “more valuable than any worldview.”56 Although the Catholics had avoided overtly hostile rhetoric, there was no doubt either to church members or the Nazis about what that meant.
The Nazis’ goal was to make the church as invisible as possible, to eliminate it as an alternate organization with a powerful and all-encompassing worldview. A 1942 newsletter for propagandists ordered party speakers to avoid religious questions entirely in public meetings: “Difficulties with religious matters have surfaced most of all where speakers let themselves be provoked and led into a discussion of such matters. This gives the church what it wants: a public discussion.”57 State organs kept careful watch over the church and fretted when surveillance was inadequate. Party files from Baden, for example, complain that the more people were involved with the church, the less they were involved with the party and that many meetings occurred behind the “hermetically sealed doors” of the Catholic parsonage, where no one reported on what was said and where there was no possibility of influence.58
Church membership remained high, although participation was not always strong. Even in 1939, 95 percent of the German population maintained church membership, including a majority of party members.59 The hold of the church was clearest with regard to religious ceremonies. Despite attempts to establish party rituals, in many areas the party had less than 1 percent of the “market” for rituals of birth, marriage, and death.60
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People might say “Heil Hitler,” but when it came time to be buried they preferred a priest to their local group leader.
One must recall that for many Germans, membership in the church was nominal, a matter more of traditionalism than strong faith. In the country-side, the hold of the church was often strong, but in cities the story was different. In Berlin, for instance, 70 percent of the population were members of the church (they paid their church tax), but only about 9 percent had taken communion even once during 1932.61 Still, even for those who were not convinced of the Christian faith, the church provided a refuge, a source of grounding for beliefs outside Nazi ideology. This was not acceptable.
Hitler and other Nazi leaders looked forward to a reckoning with the church once the war was won, but until then they were forced to tolerate its presence while working to limit its influence as much as possible. This was generally a calculated decision that taking forceful action would help the church more than harm it. For instance, Bishop Galen of Münster was outspoken in denouncing Nazi policies (for example, abolishing religious schools and euthanasia). He enjoyed enormous popularity in the heavily Catholic region. The party feared him but concluded that arresting him would cause real problems. As the propaganda leader for the area wrote to Goebbels in 1941: “Police measures against the bishop of Münster are hardly likely to be successful. Were he to be arrested and convicted, the church would see the bishop as a martyr and other bishops and priests would take up his assertions.”62 Many less prominent priests and pastors were arrested, but that generally occasioned only local protest.
The GDR benefited from the damage to the church’s credibility resulting from its often inadequate response to Nazism. As a professedly atheist enterprise, the SED could hardly favor religion. The official GDR position was that the “development, transformation and gradual disappearance of religion follow the inevitable processes of human life.”63 Like the state, Marxism predicted that religion would fade away over time, but the church did not diminish as rapidly as the SED had hoped. The SED tried to hurry the process along by a concerted campaign.64 The efforts took interesting directions. One churchman remembers receiving a biographical dictionary of world history at the beginning of the 1960s that somehow avoided any mention of Jesus Christ.65
Like the Nazis, the SED attempted to restrict the church to purely “spiritual” activities. Stasi head Erich Mielke wrote in 1956: “The existing churches in the GDR have lost a significant part of their influence on people by the separation of church and state, and will be more and more This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC
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compelled to limit their activities to purely church matters.”66 Churchman Ehrhart Neubert noted the GDR’s success in limiting the church’s role in public: “The churches had no opportunity to express themselves independently and freely in public (e.g., in the media). They could only express their views on certain matters ‘within the church,’ as the regulations said.
Even church-owned newspapers, magazines and publishing firms were subjected to strict censorship. Critical public statements and even hints of the same were immediately banned. The distribution of church newspapers was frequently blocked.” The result was self-censorship on the part of the church.67 Fearing to lose what little public say they had, religious leaders generally avoided saying things that would offend the party.
The GDR did try to “socialize” the church in a variety of ways. The GDR
Christian Democratic Union was one of the four permitted non-SED parties. With a membership of about 140,000, it provided a way of incorporating Christians into the political structure. Late in its life the SED even discovered a slight affection for the church. The SED gave enthusiastic support for the 1983 Luther Year.68 Bear One Another’s Burdens, a surprisingly sympathetic film released in 1988, presented the struggle between a young Lutheran clergyman and a Communist, both patients at a tuberculosis san-itarium. They begin as determined foes but warm to each other as the film progresses. As Kurt Hager observed in a memo to Erich Honecker, the film’s message was that “people have to work together for peace and socialism.”69 Many more examples could be given. They were attempts at directing religious energy in approved directions but also consistent with the larger goal: restricting the church to the spiritual realm. Outside of that, the church was to be as inconspicuous as possible.
The church unsettled the SED by providing shelter to some who were attracted more by the safety it provided than by its theology. As John Burgess observes, the church came to have “greater significance as a political than as a religious force.”70 I visited the Statt-Kirchentag in a Leipzig church in July 1989, an alternative gathering with a heavy ecological emphasis held during the Evangelical Kirchentag (church congress) . Much there was far more open than one expected to find in the GDR. Of course, things were already beginning to move, but the experience confirmed what Wolfgang Gröger, the church’s youth pastor in Leipzig in the early 1980s, told me of his visits to city hall to secure permission for various church activities. “You can do anything you want as long as it is inside
the walls of a church,” he was sometimes told. That was not strictly true, since the state’s organs kept careful watch on what happened inside as well as This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC
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outside the walls, but there was more flexibility if things happened where they could not be seen.
Despite the SED’s success in keeping the church as invisible as possible, the church remained a problem throughout the GDR’s history. In part, the SED simply did not understand it. As Mary Fulbrook notes: “The main mis-calculation on the part of the SED here . . . was to assume that the Church operated according to the same hierarchy of command—in other words, that it was essentially characterized by the same democratic centralist structures—as the SED itself. To the SED’s dismay, it discovered too late that it could not rely on the leadership of the Church to contain unruly spirits below; that ‘turbulent priests’ had greater leeway in the Church than did their secular counterparts under the iron hand of communist party discipline.”71
Still, church membership steadily dropped. Once the SED adopted the policy of making church membership increasingly uncomfortable (but not impossible), those wishing a quiet life decided it was not worth the trouble.
The GDR had 82 percent Protestant membership at its beginning. By the mid-1980s it was 30–40 percent. Only 7 percent of East Berliners claimed any church affiliation in 1987. In the new satellite towns (often built with no churches), membership was as low as 3 percent. The SED expected membership nationwide to drop to 20–25 percent by 2000.72
Sharp Swords
Goebbels observed that a “sharp sword” stood behind effective propaganda.
The GDR Ministry of State Security advertised itself as the “shield and sword” of the party. Everyone knew that force stood behind propaganda.
The knowledge that there were consequences for undesired behavior was not usually at the forefront of people’s thinking, but they did not forget. As one socialist observer wrote in 1936: “The workers fail to take even those actions that require only a little courage.”73 Ehrhart Neubert asked: “Who in the GDR back then admitted that he was afraid? Only a few, and only in private. It is important that we understand that. Fear was instrumentalized and used by the system.”74 This is easy for those living in more open societies to forget or underestimate. Citizens of both systems knew that dissent risked rapid and severe punishment.
Yet few in Hitler’s Germany or the GDR lived in steady fear. Both systems were generally “rational” in their use of terror. With some exceptions, those who got into trouble were not surprised. Most others, knowing the This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC
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consequences for dissent, allowed their spines to bend, justifying their ac-quiescence in ways that were psychologically comfortable. There is the human tendency to assume that the universe is fair, that one gets what one deserves. The poor “deserve” to be poor, those arrested “deserve” to be arrested. This relieves the fears of most citizens. Both systems worked to persuade people that only those who deserved it were punished by the state.
Nazi Germany and the GDR were entirely willing to use force, sometimes terror, but generally as a last rather than a first persuasive method.
As Hadamovsky noted in the chapter of his book titled “Propaganda and Force [ Gewalt]”: “Propaganda and force are never absolute opposites. The use of force can be a part of propaganda. Between them is every degree of effective influence over people and masses, beginning with the sudden winning of attention or the persuasion of the individual to thundering mass propaganda, from the loose organization of the converted to the creation of half-governmental or governmental institutions, from individual to mass terror, from the legitimate use of force by the stronger rank, class or state to forcing obedience and discipline by military force through martial law.”75 The sliding scale should also be somewhat unde-fined, leaving the audience unsure of the boundaries of “safe” conduct.
They will err on the side of safety. In 1936, for example, people in Hamburg received a letter from the NSDAP local group urging them to display the flag on holidays. It ended with this sentence: “We hope that you will need no further reminder.”76 The letter makes it clear that something could happen to recalcitrant citizens but leaves it to their imagination what it might be.
Werner Best, a high Gestapo official, was clear on the Nazi willingness to use force in 1936. He wrote that the Gestapo was charged with eliminating any challenge to the Nazi worldview. He put it in medical terms: Each attempt to promote another political outlook, or even to maintain one, is viewed as a manifestation of disease that threatens the healthy unity of the indivisible national organism that must be eliminated, without regard to the subjective desires of its bearer. . . .
Fulfilling this task is made more difficult by the fact that, since the National Socialist revolution, all outward signs of enemy activity have been eliminated, but their human bearers still exist and to a large degree still pursue their goals in new secret or concealed ways. To find these enemies of the state, to watch over them, and to render them harmless at the proper moment is the prophylactic task of a political police.77
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Best was worried that he could not see into people’s souls and knew that many were only going through the motions. His Gestapo had the medical task of keeping an infection from spreading. He was concerned not about overt action but rather about detecting ideas that, though hidden, could lead to public action.
A remarkable 1943 article in the Schwarze Korps, the SS weekly, made clear the sword behind propaganda. It told the story of a soldier home on leave after being wounded at Stalingrad. While visiting friends, the conversation turned to an old woman who had complained about the war effort.
People suggested she was not quite right in the head and did not need to be taken seriously. Reporting her might send her to prison or even the gal-lows. The Schwarze Korps was of a different opinion. It noted that there was only “a small percentage of criminals and racial trash in Germany” who opposed the war effort but that they could weaken the resolve of the soldiers at the front: “It therefore goes without saying that we must treat these few outsiders with the same determination and harshness that we show toward the enemy, regardless of how stupid and innocuous we find them. This a war for our very survival. He who does not want our victory wants our defeat. He who wants our defeat wants our death.” Those who did not report such people, the article concluded, were cowardly traitors.78
The article suggested that opponents were few and despicable, buttressing the facade of unanimity while at the same time suggesting that the punishment for failing to support the state, even by an old woman not in full command of her faculties, could be death.
During the twilight of the GDR, Erich Mielke led a Stasi staff meeting.
He asked what the mood was in the factories and was told: “That is naturally a very complicated question at the moment, Comrade Minister.”
Mielke’s response: “That is a very simple question. It is a question of power, nothing else.” Later in the same meeting he asked if there was the prospect of another 17 June 1953 (the uprising suppressed by Soviet tanks). His subordinate assured him there was no such threat: “That will not happen tomorrow. After all, that is why we are here.”79 The GDR’s citizens remembered what happened in their own country in 1953, and Hun-gary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in the 1980s.
A person considering robbing a bank may be discouraged by the knowledge that the police are likely to intervene and may be frustrated by the knowledge but no
t terrified. Totalitarian systems exert a similar pressure.
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trouble. Propaganda does not hesitate to suggest the power that is hidden behind it. But people are unlikely to tell themselves that they have re-frained from a given action through cowardice. They reduce the dissonance by gradually changing attitudes; an action once considered but rejected is less likely to be considered the next time.
Furthermore, it is hard to summon the resolve to resist. In democratic societies, one presumes a certain amount of controversy. In the United States, for instance, Democrats expect Republicans to disagree with them.
The sanctioning of disagreement makes it easier to disagree. Totalitarian societies resist and punish most forms of public disagreement while at the same time presenting a facade of certainty. This puts citizens in a difficult position. They are uncertain in the face of certainty. They know that supporting a worldview other than the prevailing one may result in drastic penalties. Yet it is also hard to chip away at a wall of orthodoxy with cautiously stated critical arguments that must presume the fundamental valid-ity of that very orthodoxy. That is, citizens of the GDR had to argue from the basis of socialism in their attempts to change it, yet the SED defined attempts to change socialism by individuals or groups as unacceptable, since only the collective wisdom of the party was able to determine where the party should go. Citizens of Nazi Germany faced a similar wall of orthodoxy that forced those who dissented to use weak arguments to attack an apparently absolute case. What is one against the many, the unsure against the sure? By making many arguments impossible, totalitarian states left the remaining arguments weak.