Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
even though the Nazis had failed to exploit those secessionist
national groups who had offered to fight for the Germans against
the Bolsheviks. Blinded by his own ideology, Hitler would not
tolerate the idea of Germans fighting alongside these ‘subhuman
scum’ and ‘rats’, and while the Germans went about systematically
wiping them out, Nazi propaganda concentrated on Soviet atrocities
and the torture of the GPU. Goebbels had strong reservations
about statements concerning the German exploitation of the
eastern lands for fear that it would merely stiffen enemy resistance.
There was little of the ‘Slavic subhuman’ in his RMVP propaganda,
which concentrated instead on the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik Murder
System’. But this divergence reflects the multiplicity of voices
coming out of the Third Reich. For example, Robert Ley, head of
the German Labour Front, carried out much party training and
education so that his propagandists could take the ideology of war
into the factories. Alfred Rosenberg, who had been appointed in
1934 as ‘Commissioner of the Führer for Supervision of the Entire
Intellectual and Doctrinal Training and Education of the NSDAP’,
was appointed in 1941 as a minister for the occupied eastern
territories. Rosenberg provided the pseudo-intellectual justification
for the anti-Semitic propaganda. He did not get on with Goebbels,
or with Ribbentrop for that matter, who also despised Goebbels.
Then there was Dietrich in the Führer’s office, with whom Goebbels
was in constant conflict throughout the war, the army propaganda
branch (which produced Signal, the most highly circulated German
magazine of the war), and the propagandists of the SS. All these
men felt that the propaganda activities of the others infringed upon
their exclusive territory.
For Goebbels, the most important instrument of Nazi wartime
propaganda was the radio, over which he exercised more direct
control than the press (if not quite as much as the Wochenschau).
For Goebbels, radio was ‘the first and most influential intermediary
between movement and nation, between idea and man’. The
German radio network consisted of 26 stations and was managed
by the Reich Radio Society and, after 1942, supervised by Hans
Fritzsche, who was also the most important German broadcaster of
the war years. Foreign broadcasts were monitored so that rumours
could be countered. All announcers and radio news editors were
required to attend Fritzsche’s regular ministerial conferences so
that they clearly understood the propaganda line, from which they