Institutional Racism

In 1917, the bureau was subsumed into the new Department of Information and
branched out into telegraph communications, radio, newspapers, magazines and the
cinema. In 1918, Viscount Northcliffe was appointed Director of Propaganda in Enemy
Countries. The department was split between propaganda against Germany organized
by H.G Wells and against the Austro-Hungarian Empire supervised by Wickham Steed
and Robert William Seton-Watson; the attempts of the latter focused on the lack of
ethnic cohesion in the Empire and stoked the grievances of minorities such as the
Croats and Slovenes. It had a significant effect on the final collapse of the Austro-
Hungarian Army at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto.
Aerial leaflets were dropped over German trenches containing postcards from prisoners
of war detailing their humane conditions, surrender notices and general propaganda
against the Kaiser and the German generals. By the end of the war, MI7b had
distributed almost 26 million leaflets. The Germans began shooting the leaflet-dropping
pilots, prompting the British to develop unmanned leaflet balloons that drifted across noman's
land. At least one in seven of these leaflets were not handed in by the soldiers to
their superiors, despite severe penalties for that offence. Even General Hindenburg
admitted that "Unsuspectingly, many thousands consumed the poison", and POWs
admitted to being disillusioned by the propaganda leaflets that depicted the use of
German troops as mere cannon fodder. In 1915, the British began airdropping a regular
leaflet newspaper Le Courrier de l'Air for civilians in German-occupied France and
Belgium.
At the start of the war, the French government took control of the media to suppress
negative coverage. Only in 1916, with the establishment of the Maison de la Presse, did
they begin to use similar tactics for the purpose of psychological warfare. One of its
sections was the "Service de la Propagande aérienne" (Aerial Propaganda Service),
headed by Professor Tonnelat and Jean-Jacques Waltz, an Alsatian artist code-named
"Hansi". The French tended to distribute leaflets of images only, although the full
publication of US President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which had been heavily
edited in the German newspapers, was distributed via airborne leaflets by the French.
The Central Powers were slow to use these techniques; however, at the start of the war
the Germans succeeded in inducing the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to declare 'holy
war', or Jihad, against the Western infidels. They also attempted to foment rebellion
against the British Empire in places as far afield as Ireland, Afghanistan, and India. The
Germans' greatest success was in giving the Russian revolutionary, Lenin, free transit
on a sealed train from Switzerland to Finland after the overthrow of the Tsar. This soon
paid off when the Bolshevik Revolution took Russia out of the war.
World War II
An example of a World War II era leaflet meant to be dropped
from an American B-17 over a German city. See the file
description page for a translation.
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