B006OAL1QM EBOK (29 page)

Radio, as we have seen already, had been brought under the control of Goebbels' Ministry at the earliest opportunity in 1933, and a special division was created to supervise broadcasting in Germany. The system of voluntary local watchdogs on behalf of the Party—the wireless wardens—had been organised the same year, while the Reich Chamber of Broadcasting looked after the political purity of those responsible for every aspect of broadcasting. In war-time the position as regards listening to news or programmes transmitted by foreign stations became extremely complex when Germany had overrun Europe. In 1942 Germans might listen to any station in Belgium, Holland, Occupied France, Poland, Norway, Yugoslavia and Occupied Russia. On the other hand it was a crime to listen to Denmark because she was, nominally, still independent from the political point of view and therefore free to quote news or statements from Allied sources; it was also a crime to listen to broadcasts from Germany's allies—Italy, Hungary, Rumania. There was, however, a rigorously controlled system of listening permits for Government officials and others, the nature of whose duties required them to keep in touch with what the enemy was saying. These permits were often limited to particular kinds of programme and strictly confined to the periods of duty. A radio monitor, for example, whose work consisted in transcribing B.B.C. news and talks, would be a criminal if he went on listening to the B.B.C. when he was off duty, and it was a crime for him to speak to the uncontaminated about what he had heard. To be discovered in the act of clandestine listening to forbidden broadcasts meant imprisonment and the concentration camp. But curiosity about foreign radio was naturally intense. Goebbels in his war-time diary is constantly complaining about the outlandish excuses people trumped up to get a foreign listening permit out of his Ministry.

The Propaganda Ministry devised an ingenious system for taking over the broadcasting facilities of other countries the moment they were overrun by the German Army. The following account of the ‘occupation’ of the Hilversum transmitter in Holland was given to Charles Rollo by one of the station's announcers, who subsequently escaped to Britain:

Berlin radio reporters arrived at Hilversum, thirty strong, the day after the Dutch Army had surrendered. They came prepared to replace any equipment that might have been smashed, and if necessary, even to install new transmitters. With them were enough transcribed programmes in Dutch to last two weeks, and printed programme schedules ready for distribution. After some thought, however, they decided to let the Hilversum announcers carry on as usual, except that all music by British, French or Jewish composers was banned and for a few days all news broadcasts were suspended. When news was resumed, the Dutch announcers were told they might say anything they pleased; guards with loaded revolvers in their hands sat around to discourage untoward comments. This was a brilliantly clever policy. The Dutch people, recognising the familiar voices of the old announcers, were greatly reassured, and many concluded that things were not going to be so bad after all—until Nazi brutality shattered this comforting illusion. Incidentally, among the trucks of the German radio unit was one which is still waiting to be unloaded. It contained two months of recorded programmes labelled—‘For England’.
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Goebbels laid down a careful policy for approach to be made by Germany to the foreign listener before conquest. The first stage was to establish a friendly atmosphere—Germany the neighbour. The second stage involved criticism developing into open attack on the country and the policy of its leaders. The third stage involved the threats of violence to come and the need for the people to get rid of their leaders and capitulate. The last stage was the interim period of deliberate confusion before the Germans themselves took control of the nation's broadcasting from the home stations.

The R.R.G., the German Broadcasting Company owned by the Ministry, remained responsible for the whole of the German radio, which in war-time became a continuous round of two main elements —distraction and instruction. The instruction—news, political talks, propaganda—was devised in close consultation with the Broadcasting Division of the Ministry; the Head of the Home Press Division, Hans Fritzsche (later to be among the accused at the Nuremberg Trials and to be acquitted), was himself the most prominent war-time radio personality, and Goebbels' most carefully considered war-time articles, those contributed weekly to
Das Reich,
were regularly read to the listeners to give them intensive coverage.

As far as distraction went, Goebbels himself initiated what he called “merrier and brighter” programmes in 1941 because of the urgent need for relaxation mostly in the Armed Forces.
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In an article published on 1st March 1941 in the
Völkischer Beobachter,
he wrote defending his relaxation of the rules that had hitherto strictly forbidden the broadcasting of jazz on the grounds that it reflected either a Jewish or a Negroid spirit, according to whichever seemed appropriate at the moment of speaking:

Our experience with the problems of broadcasting has taught us that the organisation of programmes on the radio has to depend not so much on theory as on practice. Soldiers at the front after a hard battle appreciate what they called “decent music”, which means light music, in their cold and inhospitable quarters. People are in general too strained to absorb more than two hours of an exacting programme. If a man who has worked hard for twelve or fourteen hours wants to hear music at all, it must be music which makes no demands on him. After much preparatory work two programmes are now again to be broadcast during the main transmission hours: one on the Deutschlandsender for serious and classical music, another on the Reichssender for light entertainment music, especially during the evening…. It is important to secure good humour at home and at the front.
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He was even prepared to permit jazz for the Forces:

We should like to speak quite freely about whether the German radio ought to broadcast the so-called Jazz’. If ‘Jazz’ means music which completely disregards or even makes fun of melody, and in which rhythm mainly shows itself in an ugly squeaking of instruments offensive to our ears, we can only answer in the negative…. On the other hand, it should not be claimed that the waltzes of our grandmothers and grandfathers must be the end of musical evolution and that everything that goes beyond them is evil…. We are not living in the Biedermeier epoch but in a century whose melody is determined by the hum of machines and the roar of motors…. The radio must pay due attention to this fact, if it does not want to run the risk of “sticking to the frock-coat” … We feel bound to consider the just demands of our fighting and working people.
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Goebbels then announced through this article that there was to be a Forces Programme organised by Reich Cultural Warden Hans Hinkel concentrating on popular music of all kinds. Hinkel was also head of the Troops Entertainment Division of the Propaganda Ministry.

The German Home Service, as distinct from the Forces Programme, consisted of little but long stretches of music (mostly of high quality) punctuated with news bulletins, talks, interviews, eye-witness reporting and outside broadcasts connected with the war. The great personalities on the air were Goebbels and Fritzsche—apart, that is, from Hitler, whose voice was heard less and less often as the war progressed and his public appearances diminished almost to vanishing point. Goebbels spoke in the relaxed, easy manner of the trained professional, his beautiful voice pronouncing with assurance every word and phrase of his carefully composed script. Fritzsche attracted attention by developing an ironic style with the heavy, underlined humour appreciated by the great lower-middle-class public for which his star broadcasts were intended. His prime function was to score off the unheard enemy—his news, his views, the statements of the Allied leaders.

The German European Service, the propaganda radio in foreign languages, had by 1942 extended (mainly in the form of news and talks) to twenty-seven languages. Countries completely occupied found their stations taken over and German-inspired radio coming through their loud-speakers, but countries retaining some measure of independence, such as Denmark, kept a corresponding independence in broadcasting. But as Germany took over the radio-stations of other countries, wavelengths were re-allocated to permit broadcasts to be directed in the appropriate languages to countries which were outside Germany's direct control—either as allies, neutrals or enemies. Broadcasts had to be graded accordingly—whether they were, for example, in Byelorussian, English, Gaelic, Hungarian, Swedish, Turkish or Italian, each of them among the languages in which there were regular services. The German armies of occupation also had to be supplied with German-language programmes.

Short-wave transmitters permitted German propaganda to reach out internationally—to America, the British Dominions and Colonies, the Far East, the Moslem world, Africa and Latin America. This multi-language service extended over the whole twenty-four hours, and included German-language programmes addressed to Germans and German-speaking people all over the world. In the English-language services the technique of heavy humour and loaded irony was obviously considered appropriate as so many broadcasters adopted it—“that liar Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Sea Bottom. Ha! Ha! Ha!” It reached a certain degree of finesse in the initial style of Lord Haw-Haw's propaganda talks to Britain; William Joyce caught on to the dissatisfaction which made the British feel uneasy before Winston Churchill became war leader. Naumann claims that Goebbels liked Joyce and thought highly of him even after he had ceased to be so effective on the radio.

Another division of the Ministry was concerned with the instruction and entertainment of the Forces. The ‘Strength through Joy’ organisations supervised touring concert parties; musicians, actors and other artists were sent to entertain the German Army wherever it might be. The development at home and abroad of Army Welfare Centres, where concerts, film-shows, theatrical entertainments and indoor sports could be organised, came under Goebbels' Ministry, as did the publication of Army newspapers and magazines such as
Oase,
the journal of the Afrika Korps printed in Tripoli. By the end of 1941 there were 60,000 Front libraries in circulation, stocked by means of nation-wide book collections of approved reading. The Party Propaganda Office saw to it that the works of Dr. Goebbels were included in these libraries.

A further piece of organisation to meet war conditions was undertaken by the Propaganda Ministry; this was the formation of the Propaganda Companies to serve the press, newsreels and radio from the battlefronts. Film cameramen, reporters and commentators were mobilised into a general pool under military discipline and sent to complete coverages either singly or in groups, and they were also required to engage in active service in addition to their professional work. There was therefore no segregation for the war reporters; their life in fact was harder than that of the fighting man and their casualties were heavy. Goebbels' own aide and press officer, Rudolf Semmler, had to serve the best part of a year on the Eastern Front before being allowed to return to his privileged place alongside the Reich Minister, whom (as we have said) he surprised by his account of the fighting in Stalingrad.

The theatre was kept alive in war-time Germany; it was claimed in the 1940-41 season that 355 State theatres, 175 independent theatres and 142 open-air theatres were operating—an incredibly large number even for the country which supported the largest number of theatres in Europe.
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Many plays were written of a nationalist or National Socialist character, though the absence of quality in contemporary work led to a revival in Germany's numerous local theatres of the production of the classics. The eternal flow of plays on Frederick the Great (Goebbels' ideal German monarch) gave the dramatists, like the film-makers, a staple theme to which they could return again and again.

After radio, however, it was upon the film that Goebbels relied for his most effective propaganda. Not that he expected all German films to contain propaganda, far from it. But he realised how important it was to develop a strong newsreel, documentary and instructional film service as well as to encourage the production from time to time of feature films inspired by his Ministry and on certain occasions by himself personally. He spent a great deal of time, for example, on the script and the editing of
Ohm Krüger,
the violently anti-British film of the Boer War released in 1941.

As we have seen already, the German film industry was not formally nationalised; Goebbels preferred to control it through the Reich Film Chamber and the Films Division of his Ministry. In any case, his nominees were in charge of each of the production companies. But by 1937 the largest of these companies, UFA, had become
reichseigen
(that is, State-owned) and the dominant factor in the German film world, extending its power into Austria and the Czech Protectorate. This centralisation took place in order to prepare the industry for its assault on the cinemas of occupied Europe, and special distribution companies were set up in the conquered territories to reopen the cinemas for the exhibition of German films. Prints of American and British films held by local distributors were of course destroyed or taken for use as raw material. The German film agencies in Allied and neutral countries were well organised to secure the maximum distribution for those German films considered suitable for exhibition in these territories. In addition to normal distribution through the theatres, films were shown in the occupied countries by means of mobile film vans, and special units were formed to produce short films for this specialised kind of exhibition.