APPENDIX 1
In Mein Kampf Hitler said that propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people and that it should be presented in a popular form so as not to go over the head of the average man in the street. He wrote:
The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings. Finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side.
Hitler put his idea about crude messages appealing to lowest common denominator in society into practice when he re-established the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party’s daily newspaper in 1925. In 1926 Der Angriff also made it on to the ‘must read’ list of the party faithful and from 1933 its editor, Joseph Goebbels, was installed as Germany’s permanent Reich Minister of Propaganda, holding that office until Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945.
During Goebbel’s tenure as propaganda maestro the Third Reich produced some of the most striking, albeit racially offensive and crude, official communications ever issued by an elected body.
Goebbel’s proudly exclaimed that, ‘It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio.’ Funkstunde (Radio Hour) was the Third Reich equivalent of the Radio Times and regularly featured the Führer on its cover.
Introduced in July 1938, the Kennkarte was the basic Third Reich identity document and every German citizen was issued one and expected to produce it when confronted by officials.
This particular Kennkarte was issued in 1943 and rather optimistically states that it is valid until July 1948.
Shortly after he was elected chancellor in 1933 Hitler made Nuremberg the city of the Reichsparteitag (Reich Party Congresses). This souvenir postcard celebrates the Reichsarbeitsdienst (translated as Reich Labour Service and abbreviated RAD), which both militarised the workforce, indoctrinating it with ideology. However, the RAD make a major contribution to reducing unemployment during the depression and economic turmoil that spawned the Nazis.
This picture wallet celebrates the Luftwaffe’s achievements in the skies above Warsaw, Paris and London.
Once the capital of Thuringia and a focal point of German enlightenment, for writers like Goethe and Schiller, composers like Franz Liszt, artists like Klee and Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement, Weimar also gave its name to the short-lived democracy of the Weimar Republic period. It was also one of the cities that got mythologised by the National Socialist propaganda as this ten-year anniversary of the Nuremberg Rally testifies.
The cult of the Führer was everything in Nazi Germany, which Britain’s propagandists well understood as this series of pages from a small photo booklet so admirably illustrate. In Berlin in 1937 the Nazi leadership opened a major exhibition, Gebt mir vier Jahre Zeit (‘Give Me Four Years Time’), about the accomplishments of the Hitler regime in the four years since they came to power, reversing the humiliation of Versailles and promising good times ahead. Dropped from RAF aircraft, this booklet shows the German people actually what they got – broken promises, death on the frozen wastes of Russia and Italy, an erstwhile ally and inspiration for Hitler, turning its back on the Reich and pulling out of the war.
Dozens of miniature books like this one, The Führer and the Workers, full of photographs of Hitler embracing the masses and revealing little of the reality of this demonic character, were snapped up in their millions by the faithful.
As might be expected of the head of state, Hitler was even beatified on postage stamps.
This fundraising Gedenkblatt (commemorative sheet) for the German Red Cross dates from 20 June 1941. On 22 June the Third Reich invaded Soviet Russia and from then on such events would become more and more commonplace.
Dropped in bundles over the Reich by Allied aircraft, this bookmark is self explanatory. On one side the expression on the face of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the leader of the Luftwaffe, turns from pleasure to pain as German cities experience terror bombing of the kind he happily inflicted on French and Polish cities. The reverse asks a series of questions most Germans wanted the answers to: ‘How many have to fall in Russia? Why hasn’t the Luftwaffe got enough aircraft? Why is England not starved? When will our rations be further reduced? Why is the Führer never seen in bombed cities? How many people are executed each day in Germany? Why does the government suppress all the Allied declarations about their policy to Germany after Hitler’s fall? Who said not a single enemy bomber would attack the Ruhr?’
Consisting of the Heer (army), the Kriegsmarine (navy) and the Luftwaffe (air force), at its inception in 1935 the Wehrmacht appeared invincible. Die Wehrmacht magazine, which was published from 1936 to 1944, was designed to promote the activities of the combined service. This edition shows an ill-clad soldier on the Eastern Front.
For twenty-five years the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer) served as the mouthpiece of the Nazi Party. It first appeared as a weekly newspaper in 1920 but from 1923 fed the party line to the German public on a daily basis. These two photos show the front and back of a British reprint of the paper which was dropped over Germany by RAF bombers. It contrasts Hitler’s confident announcement that the destruction of Bolshevism would soon be decided (entschieden) after the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 with the reality of the situation in 1942 as the German 6th Army was overrun at Stalingrad, the turning point of the European war and the Führer was accused of lies (lügen) and is going to lie again. ‘The writing is on the wall’, it says ‘it’s going wrong.’
