What the success of
Jew Süss
and the comparative failure of
The Eternal Jew
showed was that Germans did not want mere propaganda. With the coming of war, people needed distraction from their daily cares more than ever. William L. Shirer recorded in October 1939 that ‘in the movie world the big hit at the moment is Clark Gable in
Adventure in China
, as it’s called here. It’s packing them in for the fourth week at the Marble House. A German film,’ he added, ‘is lucky if it holds out a week.’
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Shirer was exaggerating: not all German films were failures. Goebbels was well aware of the popularity of films like
Request Concert
and
The Great Love
, each of which attracted more than 20 million cinema-goers. Both had an implicit ideological content, depicting couples separated by war and conquering their own personal desires in the service of the wider community, and coming together once more at the end. At the same time as showing episodes of military action, they bracketed out the more violent and destructive aspects of war, presenting to the audience a sanitized version of conflict that it was meant to find reassuring.
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The huge success of these films persuaded Goebbels to order that four out of five films made should be ‘good entertainment films, secure in their quality’. And indeed, no fewer than forty-one out of the seventy-four movies made in Germany in 1943 were comedies.
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By this time, people were flocking to see lavishly costumed operettas, revues, detective films and melodramas. At the very same time as Goebbels was delivering his ‘total war’ speech to the Party faithful in the Sports Palace, ordinary Germans were settling down in Berlin’s cinemas to watch
Two Happy People
,
Be Fond of Me
and
The Big Number
. The next year, escapism reached new heights with
The White Dream
, a review on ice featuring a song that advised people: ‘Buy a colourful balloon / Take it firmly in your hand / See it flying off with you / to a foreign fairyland.’
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By 1943, neither the proliferation of entertainment movies nor the hectoring tones of the voice-over in the weekly newsreel could disguise the fact that the war was going badly. As the Security Service of the SS reported on 4 March 1943, it was clear that ‘people are no longer going to the cinema just for the sake of the newsreel and don’t want any more to take on all the unpleasant secondary burdens that a visit to the movies often brings with it, such as queuing for tickets’.
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The more the propaganda began to lose touch with reality, the more the newsreels’ repetitious insistence on the inevitability of final victory met with scepticism among audiences. In mid-1943 Goebbels tried to offset this disenchantment by commissioning a colour film from Veit Harlan on the siege of the German town of Kolberg, on the Baltic, by Napoleon’s armies in 1806. After the shattering military defeats of Jena and Austerlitz, the garrison had decided to surrender the town, but the mayor had rallied the citizens to a last-ditch defence. Many Nazi propaganda themes of the second half of the war came together here: the Party’s distrust of the army, the populist appeal to ordinary Germans to rally round the flag, the belief in sacrifice, the stoicism of the people in the face of death and destruction. ‘Death is entwined with victory,’ as the mayor says at one point. ‘The greatest achievements are always borne in pain.’ ‘From the ashes and rubble,’ another character says, anticipating defeat and implicitly exhorting audiences to go down fighting, ‘a new people will rise like a phoenix, a new Reich.’
Many of the speeches in the film were written not by Harlan but by Goebbels himself. He allocated it a budget of 8.5 million Reichsmarks, twice the normal production costs for a feature film. In a graphic illustration of the priority he attached to propaganda, Goebbels requisitioned 4,000 sailors and 187,000 soldiers from the army to play the battle scenes, at a time when they were badly needed at the front. The incident it portrayed was sufficiently obscure for most people not to know that Kolberg had in fact been taken by Napoleon: the screenplay had the French Emperor withdrawing in dismay, confounded by the unyielding resistance of the citizens. But it was all too late. The film was not ready until 30 January 1945, when it was shown in Berlin on the anniversary of Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor twelve years previously. By this time many cinemas had been destroyed - 237 of them by August 1943 already. In Hanover, only twelve out of thirty-one cinemas were still working. The breakdown of railway communications meant that the possibility of getting copies of
Kolberg
out to the rest of the country had more or less disappeared. Hardly anybody saw it. The town of Kolberg itself was taken by the Red Army less than two months after the première. ‘I will ensure,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary, ‘that the evacuation of Kolberg is not mentioned in the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command’s report.’
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III
It was Joseph Goebbels’s ambition to bring the Nazi message into the home of everyone in Germany, and for this purpose no institution was better suited than the radio.
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In August 1939 the Reich Propaganda Ministry took over all radio stations in Germany, and from July 1942 the Reich Radio Society (the main broadcaster) was directly run by the Ministry. Broadcasts were used, as in other belligerent countries, to give practical advice to listeners on how to eke out their food rations, how to economize in their lifestyle, and generally how to cope with wartime conditions. Front-line reports conveyed a positive picture of the heroism of the troops, while in the later stages of the war, broadcasts began to urge listeners to carry on fighting regardless of bad news from the front. Radio suffered from the call-up of staff to the armed forces, however, and whole programmes and even frequencies were turned over to propaganda directed in foreign languages to audiences abroad. As before, Goebbels insisted that propaganda was far from being the only or even the principal function of German radio. In 1944, for instance, out of 190 hours of broadcasts a week, 71 were devoted to popular music, 55 to general entertainment, and 24 to classical music, leaving 32 hours a week for political broadcasts, 5 hours for a mixture of words and music, and 3 hours a week for ‘culture’. Some listeners took the view that popular music should not be broadcast in such difficult times, and, in the countryside in particular, the ‘modern offerings’ of crooners and dance-music were widely frowned on. But the broadcasters insisted (with some justification) that such programmes were popular with the troops and with Germans performing Labour Service, so they were retained. The Security Service of the SS reported that programmes with a mixture of humour and popular music were especially successful. The broadcasters took care to cater for regional tastes, and Bavarian listeners were said to welcome the broadcast of local songs such as ‘the steam-noodle song of the Tegernsee musicians’.
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Some songs, however, transcended regional boundaries and were a hit with troops and civilians alike. Sentimental numbers like Zarah Leander’s ‘I know one day a miracle will come’ comforted people in hard times and implicitly promised a better future. As we have seen, the troops at Stalingrad huddled around their radios to listen to the popular
chanteuse
Lale Andersen singing ‘It’ll all soon be over / It’ll end one day’. Like other, similar numbers, this was directed at strengthening the emotional bonds between couples and families separated by the war. Andersen’s 1939 hit song ‘Lili Marleen’ cast a nostalgic glow over its listeners as it described a soldier saying goodbye to his girl-friend underneath a street-lamp outside his barracks. Would they ever meet again? Would she find someone else? Would he survive the war? And if he did not, who would then be standing with Lili underneath the lamppost? The song encapsulated the personal anxieties as well as the lingering hopes of men far away from their loved ones. Further piquancy was added by the fact that, while the words were those of a man, they were sung by an attractive woman. Yet Goebbels disliked its pessimistic and nostalgic tone. At the end of September 1942 he had Andersen arrested for undermining the troops’ morale. Her correspondence with friends in Switzerland, including exiled German Jews, was intercepted, and her refusal to accede to Goebbels’s request to pay a visit for publicity purposes to the Warsaw ghetto was held against her. Goebbels had her banned from making any further public appearances. Eventually, from the middle of 1943 onwards, she was allowed to sing again in public, provided she did not put ‘Lili Marleen’ on the programme. At her first concert after the ban was lifted, the audience yelled for her to sing the song, and when it became clear that she was not going to, they sang it themselves. In August 1944 it was finally banned altogether. Long before this, British and American troops had started listening to the song as it was broadcast from the powerful German forces’ radio transmitter in Belgrade. The Allied military authorities had it translated into English. ‘My Lili of the Lamplight’ was sung by Marlene Dietrich, Vera Lynn and (in French) Edith Piaf, and towards the end of the war the British forces radio broadcast the German version across the enemy lines to the German troops to try to depress them, thus perhaps inadvertently confirming Goebbels’s belief that it was damaging to morale.
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By this time, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Germans to hear not only ‘Lili Marleen’ but anything at all on the radio. The cheap ‘People’s Receivers’ often broke down, and batteries and spare parts were hard to get. A thriving black market in them soon developed. Bombing raids interrupted electricity supplies in the towns, sometimes for days on end. And as the war began to go badly for Germany, listeners grew increasingly distrustful of German radio’s reports on it.
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As early as January 1942 the Security Service of the SS bemoaned the fact that people were indifferent to political broadcasts. Yet people were also worried about the lack of detailed reports of the progress of the war on the Eastern Front and in Africa. They felt they did not know what was going on. ‘An open statement on these questions, which move and oppress everyone, would get rid of the present feeling of uncertainty.’
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In the search for reliable information, German listeners turned to foreign radio stations, above all the BBC. The popular People’s Receivers, sold cheaply before the war, could only receive short-wave broadcasts, and this made it difficult to listen to foreign stations. However, they accounted for under 40 per cent of radios in Germany in 1943. Most people with a radio could receive the German-language service of the BBC without too much difficulty, and even the People’s Receivers could sometimes succeed in tuning in. By August 1944 the BBC reckoned that up to 15 million Germans were listening in to it on a daily basis.
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Germans listened to the BBC and other foreign stations at considerable risk to themselves. The moment the war broke out, tuning in to foreign stations was made a criminal offence punishable by death. It was all too easy, in apartment blocks poorly insulated for sound, for listeners to face denunciation to the authorities by fanatical or ill-intentioned neighbours who overhead the sonorous tones of BBC newsreaders coming through the walls. Some 4,000 people were arrested and prosecuted for ‘radio crime’ in the first year of the law’s operation, and the first execution of an offender came in 1941.
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A typical case was that of a Krefeld worker who was sentenced to a year in prison in December 1943 for listening to the BBC and passing on what he heard to his workmates. Like most people punished for this offence, he had formerly been active in left-wing politics. Ordinary offenders were seldom punished very harshly, and prosecutions and sentences from 1941 onwards were relatively uncommon. In 1943, for instance, only eleven death sentences were passed in the whole of the Greater German Reich for ‘radio crime’, or 0.2 per cent of the total.
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Nevertheless, people went to extraordinary lengths to avoid being heard listening to the BBC, locking themselves in the toilet or covering themselves, and the radio, with a blanket, or sending other family members out of the room. Not long after the war began William L. Shirer noted, with a pinch of exaggeration: ‘Many long prison sentences being meted out to Germans who listen to foreign radio stations, and yet many continue to listen to them,’ including a family with whom he had recently spent an afternoon. ‘They were a little apprehensive when they turned on the six p.m. BBC news,’ he recorded. The porter was ‘the official Nazi spy for the apartment house’, and there were others too. ‘They played the radio so low that I could hardly catch the news,’ Shirer wrote, ‘and one of the daughters kept watch by the front door.’
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No such precautions were needed in Britain or other countries when it came to listening to the propaganda broadcasts emanating from Germany. Goebbels ensured that increased resources were assigned to English-language broadcasts, and employed British and American pro-Germans, often with fascist beliefs, to make them: the most notorious of these was William Joyce, whose plummy accent earned him the nickname of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ from his British listeners. These propaganda broadcasters found an audience not least because their style was more intimate and relaxed than that of the stiffly formal BBC; but overall their effect on morale was minimal, and as time went on, people began to tire of Joyce’s continual sarcasm and contempt. The most surprising of these broadcasts, perhaps, were put on by Goebbels in defiance of all the Nazis’ cherished beliefs about the racial degeneracy of jazz music, when a German swing band, led by the crooner Karl (‘Charlie’) Schwedler, went on to the air with popular British and American songs, adapting the words into parodies of the original for propaganda purposes. A favourite theme was the unreliability of the BBC (‘talking the wishful talk’, as a parody of the ‘Lambeth Walk’ put it).
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