How Effective Were Indoctrination And Propaganda

Goebbels said at a press conference establishing the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda on 15 March 1933: ‘it is not enough for people to be more or less reconciled to our regime, to be persuaded to adopt a neutral attitude towards us; rather we want to work on people until they have capitulated to us, until they grasp ideologically that what is happening in Germany today not only must be accepted but also can be accepted. ” He also emphasised the need to take full advantage of the latest technology in order to achieve maximum saturation to create complete loyalty and subservience.

Such a programme clearly required a considerable administrative infrastructure. The main requirement was the overall co-ordination of the transmission of ideology and influences. This was accomplished by two changes. The first was an increase in the power of an existing institution, the Ministry of Education. This was fully centralised to remove the initia tive from the individual Lander; particularism, after all, was likely to be the main threat to achieving educational conformity. The second was the establishment of the Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda. In theory this was all-embracing.

With additions made during the course of 1933, it eventually comprised a series of Chambers, including those for press, radio, theatre, music, creative arts and film. In theory the regime had the power to apply negative censorship in whatever form it considered necessary and, more constructively, to shape the development of culture at all levels. In assessing the impact of these institutions, a distinction needs to be made between propaganda and indoctrination. To an extent these were connected, since the long-term indoctrination of the population involved regular exposure to official propaganda.

Yet propaganda was on the whole more directly related to the use of channels such as the radio, cinema and press, while indoctrination was a process carried out in education, the youth movements, the work place and the armed forces. Propaganda provided the highlights, indoctrination the main body. Indoctrination as a long-term process could be most effectively applied to Germany’s youth. The methods used of indoctrinating youth were nothing if not thorough. Schools experienced a radlicalisation of the curriculum which saw the introduction of race study, eugenics and health biology, all used as vehicles for imparting Nazi ideology.

Conventional subjects, such as History and even Mathematics were given a twist: they were geared at every possible opportunity to enhancing Nazism. For example, twenty-two out of the seventy-six pages of the official Mathematics textbook contained ideological references such as calculations of the cost to produce lunatic asylums as opposed to workers’ housing. Another radical departure was the preparation of boys and girls for separate and obviously stereotyped roles. The teaching profession was also carefully organised, the Nazi Teachers’ League (NSLB) accounting for 97 per cent of the total teaching force by 1937.

And yet the process was in many ways badly flawed. Education experienced the sort of overlapping between administrative and party organs. For example, the Ministry of Education continued to use the guidelines of the Weimar Republic largely because it argued interminably with the Party headquarters about the shape to be taken by their replacement. The conflict between Ley and Rust on the one hand and Bormann and Hess on the other meant that the new regulations for elementary education were delayed until 1939, while secondary schools were served little better.

This had two unfortunate side-effects. One was that the content of the curriculum was diluted by more traditional influences than was originally intended. The other was the persistence of confusion within the schools themselves as to the precise means of delivering the curriculum. Gestapo reports contained numerous examples of unsatisfactory teachers, many of whom were quite probably confused rather than deliberately uncooperative. Indoctrination through a revised curriculum was complemented and reinforced by mobilisation through the youth movements.

At least, this was the theory behind the specialised activities provided, according to age and gender, hrough the German Young People (DJ), Hitler Youth (HJ), Young Maidens JM) and League of German Maidens (BDM). In some respects these carried widespread appeal, initially appearing as a challenge to more conservative forms of authority and giving youth a sense of collective power. But again the process suffered through administrative imbalance. This time there were arguments between the Ministry of Education and the Reich Youth Leadership as to underlying objectives and overriding priorities.

Consequently the Hitler Youth and the educational system often diverged. The whole system also began to lose the edge of its initial appeal as it was een to be enforcing the ideas of the new establishment. This trend was accelerated as the Hitle r Youth became merely a nursery for military mobilisation. As the best of the youth leaders moved into the army, the official youth programme became more routine and less imaginative. In general, education and the youth movement both lacked a completely clear exposition of ideology which, as in other spheres, remained eclectic.

As Peukert maintains: ‘the ideological content of National Socialism remained too vague to function as a self-sufficient educational objective. In practice young people selected from competing nformation-sources and values which were on offer. As it turned out, the impact of war meant that the more positive elements of the Hitler Youth disappeared altogether, while youth movements became increasingly influential. In this respect Nazi Germany – albeit unintentionally – gave birth to modern youth culture not as an integral part of conformity but as an autonomous and sometimes hostile response to it.

Nothing could have been further from the intention of the Nazi leadership. If indoctrination had a significant but limited impact on youth, could the same be said about the effect of ropaganda on the rest of the population? A further distinction needs to be made at this point between the development of propaganda channels, such as radio, cinema and press, and the attempts to influence cultural output in literature, art and music. The Nazis gave priority to the radio since this increased the impression of personal contact between the people and their leader, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of the Fuhrer cult.

Increased access to radio sets was, of course, an essential prerequisite for the success of this approach. This was achieved, with ownership of sets ncreasing from 25 per cent of households in 1932 to 70 per cent by 1939, the largest proportion anywhere in the world. For the vast majority of the population the radio provided the most abiding impression of the Fuhrer that they were ever likely to have. As such this component of propaganda must go down as a considerable success. Film proved a more difficult medium, and the regime used it less effectively than they did the radio.

The most accomplished film was not necessarily the most influential. Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was commissioned by Hitler himself as a record of the Nuremberg rallies of 1934. Technically a brilliant achievement, it created a multi-layered image of Nazism which brought in all elements of society and directly fostered the Fuhrer cult. On the other hand, it was too long for most audiences, who sometimes reacted negatively to the repetition of the same types of scene. During the war, film-based propaganda was radicalised and the anti-semitic component became more extreme.

But it soon became apparent that Hitter’s vision -of what was likely to engage the public was less effective than Goebbels’s. The Eternal Jew, commissioned by Hitler and directed by Hippler, was so crude that udiences were repelled by the images created. The anti-semitic message was conveyed more effectively through a feature film, Jew Suss (Jud Suss). By this stage, Goebbels had learned how to introduce propaganda as a subliminal message within the context of a story with which the viewers could identify. This applied also to his attempts to engender a spirit of resistance to the Allies with his film on Frederick the Great.

But such developments came too late for anything but a peripheral effect on the morale of a population facing imminent defeat. Channelling the press for propaganda was also problematic. Because it was based on a more traditional technology, it had had longer than the radio to develop within the structure of private ownership; radio, by contrast, could be taken over relatively easily by the State. The proliferation of newspapers during the liberal era of the Weimar Republic accentuated the difficulty: by 1933 there were about 4,700 daily newspapers in Germany, representing a wide variety of political and regional views and loyalties.

To an extent, the regime achieved effective administrative control. Between 1933 and 1945, for example, the number of State-owned ewspapers increased from 2. 5 per cent of the total to 82 per cent. The German News Agency (DNB) provided an effective control over the means whereby news was to be presented; news agencies were amalgamated to ensure a single source of information; and journalists were made responsible to the State rather than to their editors. But the result was a bland form of journalism which produced a decline in public interest.

Throughout the period, the regime was never able to use the press to generate support. The emphasis of its censorship was therefore preventive rather than creative. The Nazi relationship with culture was ambivalent. On the one hand, it distrusted some of the traditional content while, on the other, never quite succeeding in providing an alternative. In the three major cases of literature, art and music, censorship created a contemporary vacuum which a new and distinctive Nazi culture was intended to fill. The results differed in intensity.

Literature produced a complete void; music was less affected; and the vacuum of art was most filled – but with work of distressingly low quality. The focus on literature was preventive censorship. This meant the massive book-burning sessions in which the SA took part, and the removal of over 2,500 German authors from the approved lists. To some extent destruction was cathartic. It could never seriously have been the preliminary to an alternative Nazi literature since Nazism itself was anti-intellectual. It discouraged any diversity of viewpoints and individual experience, seeking instead to stereotype collectivism.

Within this atmosphere any chance of creating an ‘official’ literature disappeared – even supposing that the population would have been allowed any time to read it. If the Nazis gave up on literature as a form of propaganda, they made a deliberate effort to use the visual arts to put across basic blood and soil values. Painters like Kampf and Ziegler were able to provide pictorial stereotypes of physical appearance, of women as mothers and home-minders, and of men in a variety of martial roles.

Such images reinforced the roles inculcated through the institutions of youth indoctrination, such as the BDM and the H. J. On the other hand, the result was a form of art which was bland and lacking in any obvious talent. The vacuum produced by preventive censorship was filled with mediocrity. Much of the ‘Nazi’ art was derivative and eclectic: for example, Kamp’s study of Venus and Adonis was a thinly disguised copy of earlier masters such as Rubens and David. The effect of such plagiarism on the public cannot have been anything more than peripheral, especially since there was always more interest in exhibitions of non-Nazi art which were officially classed as ‘degenerate’.

The Nazi regime ended the period of musical experimentation which had been a major cultural feature of the Weimar Republic. The works of Schoenberg and Berg were considered un-German, while those of Mendeissohn were banned as ‘Jewish’. Yet the majority of German or Austrian composers were unaffected and retained their place as part of Germany’s cultural heritage. The Nazis did, however, use certain composers as the spearhead of their cultural penetration: foremost among these was Wagner, whose Ring cycle was seen by Hitler as the musical embodiment of volkisch values.

Contemporary composers like Richard Strauss and Carl Orff had ambivalent attitudes. They managed to coexist with the regime and produce work which outlived the Reich. In this sense the quality of the Reich’s musical output was superior to the work of painters like Kampf and Ziegler, but the result as less distinctively Nazi. Overall, Nazi culture was ephemeral and, unlike Socialist Realism in Russia, had no lasting impact on culture. The ultimate test of the success of Nazi propaganda must be the degree to which the people of Germany could be brought to accept the experience of war.

Throughout the Nazi era there were really two levels of propaganda. One level put across Hitler’s basic ideology, the other made pragmatic adjustments to fit the needs of the moment. During the period 1933-9, pragmatism frequently diluted ideology, giving rise to considerable theoretical nconsistency in Hitter’s ideas. During this period Hitler was presented as a man of peace and yet all the processes of indoctrination and propaganda emphasised struggle and its martial refinement.

The period 1939-45 tended to bring together more completely the man and his ideas. This occurred in two stages. The first was the acclimatisation of the people to the idea of war, achieved through the emphasis on Blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning’ war. Logically this fitted in with the notion of easy conquest achieved by the ‘master race’, and while it lasted it was a onsiderable success: Hitler probably reached the peak of his popularity in 1940, at the time of the fall of France.

During the second stage, however, propaganda had to acclimatise the people to the experience of war. At first Goebbels scored a propaganda success in his ‘total war’ speech in 1941 but, in the longer term there was a clear decline in popular enthusiasm. From 1943 the main characteristic shown by German civilians was fortitude in the face of adversity and destruction, not a fanatical desire to achieve a world vision. By this stage, Nazi propaganda and indoctrination had not so much failed. They had become irrelevant.