B006OAL1QM EBOK (30 page)

Propaganda began in the newsreels, was developed in special documentaries, many of which were feature-length, and appeared again in those fictional or dramatic films that were inspired by Goebbels. In a speech delivered at the UFA Palace Cinema in Berlin in October 1941 Goebbels said:

The National Socialist State considers it a first duty to infuse into art new impulses which shall deepen public understanding of the greatness of the time. In the domain of the film the directive is the most important encouragement and stimulus to creation…. Among recent films
Request Concert, Bismarck, Jew Süss, Ohm Krüger, J’ Accuse
and
Homecoming
were made on official orders, and I must pay German film artistes the compliment of saying that they tackled these jobs with the greatest enthusiasm.
¹⁹

Request Concert
was a romantic film of a young German soldier reunited with his sweetheart during a radio request concert.
Jew Süss
was anti-Jewish,
Homecoming
was anti-Polish (with a scene of some Polish Jews trying to rape Paula Wessely, who played a German school-teacher), and
Ohm Krüger
was anti-British.
J’ Accuse
was a sinister film advocating the mercy-killing of people who were physically incapacitated, and was designed to fit in with a special Gestapo campaign, and
Bismarck
returned once more to the theme of the united Reich. Most German feature films, however, were of an escapist nature, and productions averaged a hundred titles a year.

Newsreels were inflated in length to some forty-five minutes. It was claimed by the Ministry that by 1942 2,400 prints were made of each weekly newsreel. Certain of the feature-length documentaries were films of marked power and virulence. Such films were
Baptism of Fire
on the conquest of Poland,
Victory in the West
on the war in France and
The Eternal Jew,
a violent and at times obscene attack on the Jews. The last film, produced in 1940, was described in the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
as follows:

There are revealing scenes in the Polish ghettoes—scenes in the synagogues where Jews are doing business, filth in the synagogues, close-ups of Jewish faces. Then the film shows by trick photography the spreading of the Jews all over the world in the form of rat migrations —assimilated Jews are shown—statistics of the number of Jews in the different professions—photographs of Rathenau, Vice-Police-President Weiss, Tauber, Lubitsch, Reinhardt, Chaplin and so on. A skilful selection of photographs of Jewish films and revues is given. The most frightful chapter comes at the end: the cruel, inhuman, barbarous slaughter of animals.
²⁰

Baptism of Fire
and
Victory in the West
used the method of building up shots of conquest and destruction to pæans of Wagnerian music and sardonic commentary. One almost endless series of shots in
Baptism of Fire
shows the roofless shells of Warsaw's buildings as they looked from a low-flying aircraft, while the commentary mocks at Chamberlain for the futility of his decision to support the Poles in their struggle by going to war with Germany. Films such as
Baptism of Fire
were given prestige screenings at the German embassies in those countries which Germany hoped to bring under her power, and so helped to make real Goebbels' belief that propaganda rightly used was an important part of warfare. The aim of these films was to impress rather than to inform, in fact to blackmail the audience into a bloodless surrender. This sensational dramatisation of German power must have seemed a terrifying spectacle to those immediately responsible for their country's future relations with Hitler. Nor were the showings of these films confined to the nations that were occupied or soon to be occupied. German agents, wherever they could, pressed them into distribution in the neutral countries, and it has been claimed that Goebbels had at his disposal some £30 million a year to spend on film distribution outside Germany.
²¹
The latest newsreels and other films were flown from their source of production to the laboratories, and within a very short while all the edited material was ready for dispatch to each European centre or sent by air, for example, to Latin America for immediate release to neutral cinemas. The stark realism of the newsreel material from the battlefronts and its immediacy in date were both essential points in the policy of the Films Division of the Ministry.

The Germans also used silent films for training and propaganda for the Forces and in schools. These films were made by UFA and by a certain limited number of independent producers working in close association with the Ministry.

Work on the preparation for such an important propaganda film as
Ohm Krüger
represented for Goebbels a genuine creative participation in production. The film had always been a medium that attracted him, and his position as Minister gave him the right not only to suggest subjects to the industry but to indicate how they might be treated. On no individual film did Goebbels work more closely than on
Ohm Krüger,
which Veit Harlan directed and which featured Emil Jannings as Krüger. The subject of the struggle between the Boers and the British had always appealed to the Germans since before the days of the First World War, and national prejudice favoured the defeated Boers. Many lines of the script of this film seem to come from Goebbels' pen—as, for example, when Krüger says to his nurse: “If one repeats a lie often enough it is believed,” or: “One must be a dreamer to become a ruler.”

At one end of the film Krüger declaims against Britain: “That's how England subjected our people. We were a small nation. Great and powerful nations will rise to beat England to pulp. Then the world will be free for a better life.”

The creative hand of Goebbels is everywhere apparent. With a matchless effrontery he depicts the Nazis' own methods in their concentration camps in order to blacken the reputation of Britain, and he identifies the father-figure of Krüger with Hitler. The film is constantly influenced by the technique of Eisenstein in
Battleship Potemkin,
as if Goebbels were consciously endeavouring to equal the film he regarded as a masterpiece of propaganda. Finally, his malicious humour is introduced in the witch-like characterisation he imposes on Queen Victoria and in making the youthful Winston Churchill into a villainous Commandant of the concentration camp!

An intimate picture of Goebbels at this time has been created by Rudolf Semmler who, in January 1941 at the age of twenty-seven, became nominally a press officer but actually an aide living in Goebbels' immediate circle. He approached his new job, a promotion from another position in the Ministry, with some trepidation—“I have heard stories of his violent temper”—and he knew that his predecessors had been numerous and had, most of them, been sent away in disgrace by their “temperamental boss”. However, at their first formal meeting he found Goebbels to be quite charming. He soon learnt, though, that he would have to accept his position in the household as Goebbels saw it to be; apart from the valuable privilege of being able to listen to his very frank, if calculated, conversation, Goebbels' aides were often treated as superior lackeys who were required to look after the Reich Minister's affairs for him and speed him on his way. He also learnt Goebbels' attitude to all his staff.

Goebbels wants no real personal contact with his staff. He prefers them to be working machines, without personality, which can be switched on and off as he pleases. Frowein says he thinks of his fellow men and staff as he thinks of his fountain-pen or his wrist-watch— useful articles which have to be changed or repaired from time to time.
²²

Like others before him he soon found he would be half-starved at Goebbels' table, although the butler regularly demanded food coupons from him. He had to dress meticulously; one of his predecessors had been dismissed for allowing his trousers to become uncreased and wearing his cuffs frayed. Semmler's description of Goebbels, relaxed in conversation, is a very revealing one:

Goebbels' moods vary: either he is talkative or he broods silently. He will describe experiences, thoughts and impressions of the morning or of the day in an easy chatty tone, talking more to himself than to his guests or companions. If he is working on a speech or writing an article he sketches out his thoughts aloud. This is partly to see what impression his words make, partly to hit on new ideas and turns of phrase by the way. He likes telling stories of his life, and hands out praise and criticism of his fellow ministers and Party members in the most outspoken manner, the Führer himself not escaping. I can see that criticism is the salt of life to him.

Two hours ago one could hear him booming away at the daily propaganda conference, passionately defending one point or sarcastically refuting another. At table now he is more restrained and objective. Then we see another Goebbels, a sympathetic and attractive character.
²³

Semmler, observant and resourceful, noted Goebbels' hatred of Ciano (“an ill-licked cub”) and of Ribbentrop (“his name he bought, his money he married, and his job he got by intrigue”); he seems, however, to have been an admirer of Winston Churchill, at least in private conversation. Semmler remarks on this in January 1941 which is all the more interesting because this was the period when Goebbels' public attacks on the British Prime Minister reached their height in his weekly articles—“those ice-cold eyes betray a man without feelings. To satisfy his blind and ruthless vanity he will walk over dead bodies…. He does not seduce children but nations…. Let Churchill gamble and England will pay,” he wrote in the fulfilment of his campaign.
²⁴
But the man he really hated was Ribbentrop; as Semmler put it: “Whenever talk comes on to Ribbentrop Goebbels always starts talking admiringly of Churchill.”
²⁵

Göring he seemed now (in 1941) merely to despise. Goebbels regarded his own tendency to distrust others as a sign of wisdom, even of greatness.

Goebbels is full of distrust of the men around him, even of those closely connected with him. He maintains that this puts him in good company with Frederick the Great, Bismarck and Hitler himself, all classic examples of the suspicious nature of great men. Hitler, for example, always believed that he was being deceived, put no faith in his staff and colleagues, and could never shake off the feeling that important matters were concealed from him. And Goebbels himself watches the scene around him like a watchman on a tower with his telescope, always suspecting that somewhere intrigues are going on which may threaten his position. Goebbels secretly distrusts all his staff. He sees the worst side of every human being and admits frankly that he has become an uncompromising misanthropist.
²⁶

Semmler noticed how anxious Goebbels became if he were not constantly receiving messages and urgent phone calls or called upon to make some rapid decision. His state of mind in this respect seems to have been almost pathological; his restless nature needed the preoccupations of incessant activity. This was the sign that he was in demand and that he was not being by-passed by others in the circle of power round Hitler. His self-confidence depended on his being always at the centre of affairs, and it became part of the dance of attendance required by him of his staff that they should see to it that he was kept on the go.

It is to Semmler's personal credit that he seems to have retained a balanced judgment in the difficult task of pleasing Goebbels; though he admired him, his was by no means an uncritical admiration.
²⁷
What is more important, he won Goebbels' confidence and was therefore able to record some very frank expressions of opinion from him.

Although Goebbels' position with Hitler was as secure as anyone's in the topsy-turvy world of Nazi hierarchy, it is plain that he was worried that the Führer was being ill-advised and that he himself had insufficient access to him; that the Nazi policy of propaganda was not wholly concentrated in his hands and that bad mistakes were being made—in particular by Otto Dietrich, the head of the Party Press Department, who was ultimately responsible to Hess (and later to Hess's successor, Martin Bormann) and not to Goebbels. This division of authority and consequent creation of rivalries never failed to enrage Goebbels, though such divisions were, as we have seen, part of the system Hitler had devised before the Party came to power. Dietrich's biggest gaffe was to announce at a press conference held at the Propa ganda Ministry in October 1941 that the Soviet armies had been destroyed and that the Russian campaign was virtually at an end. This according to Semmler made Goebbels foam with rage because of its “unbelievable irresponsibility”. Nor could Goebbels stop Hitler's own propaganda ideas; when the Russian campaign had started Hitler himself composed twelve solemn
Sondermeldungen
or special radio announcements which were intended to be impressive interruptions of the normal programmes with news of some new triumph of German arms. They were introduced by fanfares and followed by Wagnerian music. But what might have been a stirring piece of showmanship soon degenerated into a cliche as the supposedly hot news was taken out of the file time and time again to Hitler's orders. The special communique ceased to be special, and the fanfares began to cause amusement. To the master-showman Goebbels this was an intolerable misuse of a good trick.

When Hess flew to Britain alone in a Messerschmidt fighter plane on the evening of 10th May 1941 and landed near Glasgow by parachute, Goebbels was on tenterhooks as to the use to which the British would put what he regarded as a god-send from the point of view of their propaganda. He refused for once to give any directive; he was too angry. Fritzsche has admitted that Goebbels was completely at a loss what to do or say, and that he retired to bed in a sulk.
²⁸
It was therefore left to Dietrich, as Head of the Press Division, to devise what statement he could. Dietrich blundered again, implying that Hitler's deputy had been known to be suffering from delusions! Everything possible was done by Goebbels during the next few days to distract the curiosity of the German public by playing up the military news—even according to Semmler elaborating on murders and traffic accidents. But time went by and Britain made no comment beyond the fact of Hess's identification and interrogation. However, on 13th May Goebbels went to see Hitler in Berchtesgaden, and found him in tears and looking ten years older.