the soviet partisan movement 1941-1944 by edgar m. howell

THE OCCUPATION FALTERS 111
This growing fear of German captivity provided a large pool of
trained leaden and personnel for the partisan movement during the
formative period when they were most needed. Russian officers, commissars,
and soldiers when irretrievably cut off from their own lines disappeared
into the forests singly or in groups and joined or formed bands,
giving the movement the professional touch which it sorely lacked at
the time, and without which it might never have grown into an effective
agency of the Soviet war effort.
The Failure of the German Propaganda Effort 61
The efforts of the Wehrmacht Propaganda Division to counter this
steady loss of native support was woefully inadequate, and ended in
failure. It was a losing fight from the start. Closely restricted by shortsighted
OKW policy as to what it could and could not tell the people,
and opposed by well-executed Soviet counterpropaganda which cleverly
exploited almost every aspect of German negativism and almost every
German mistake, the Propaganda Division never had a real chance to
accomplish its mission once the true German war aims were revealed.
The responsibility for the failure was at the OKW level, for the
Propaganda Division was an operational agency only and worked entirely
within the scope of directives handed it from above. Not only
were these directives generally vague in content, but they placed sharp
limitations on subject matter. So few were the permissible propaganda
themes given it that in the last analysis the only positive point offered
during the crucial first months of the campaign was that of liberation
from Bolshevik oppression, while the population awaited the answers
to many vital questions which were studiously avoided. This silence
on important basic questions was widely exploited by the Soviets. Added
to this was the strong psychological effect of the obvious German
inability to either protect the pro-German segments of the population
from the partisans or bring an end to the murdering of mayors and village
elders and the indiscriminate looting by the irregulars. 62
Prisoners of war, defecting Red Army officers, and native intelligence
agents all testified to the poorly conceived and executed German propaganda.
All agreed that it was based too much on the German viewpoint
and demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the Russian
thought process. The Russian People, and probably a good portion
of the Red Army, could have been won over, they believed, if definite
promises had been made and a definite program outlined for the political '
61 For a detailed treatment of German propaganda in the eastern campaign, see:
Buchsbaum, op. cit. Unless otherwise stated, the factual material in this section is
drawn from this manuscript.
62
Bericht, H. Geb. Nord, Nr. 930/42, 4.V1.42., Anl. 150 z. KTB I, H. Geb. Nord.
21287/1.