Abstract
Daniel Uziel, The Propaganda Warriors: The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front, Peter Lang: Oxford and Bern, 2008; 463 pp.; 9783039115327, £49.00 (pbk)
The ‘propaganda troops’ of the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) in the Second World War have been unaccountably neglected by historians, with merely piecemeal references to them in a variety of books and essays. Yet they loomed large in the public consciousness during the war, as the sole purveyors to the German public of information about the Wehrmacht’s progress. Their means were newspaper articles, radio reports, still photographs and film. The exploits of their field agents in the Propaganda Companies (Propagandakompanien – PKs) at the front in gathering news about military campaigns and presenting it in a user-friendly manner aroused admiration in the population, yet scarcely any of them recounted their experiences after the war. George Schmidt-Scheeder and Hans Ertl were among the few exceptions, in both cases writing a memoir some decades after 1945.
Daniel Uziel has produced an exhaustive and well-researched account of the precursors, origins, organization, personnel and activities of the propaganda troops. He shows how the First World War was crucial in bringing home to the army how deficient its information and propaganda had been in energizing the home front in its support, especially when compared with the imaginative and innovative techniques used by the British. With the armed forces severely restricted after the Versailles Treaty, military leaders saw it as one of their most important tasks to maintain a visible profile. The issue of engaging the public became acute in 1932 as the prospect of rearmament loomed. Thereafter, there was a strong identity of interest between the army leadership and the new Nazi government, leading the army to work closely with Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, at both central and regional levels, even if there were the usual Third Reich jurisdictional feuds between them, especially during the war. Uziel devotes quite a bit of space to these. Both Goebbels and the army leadership were convinced that failing morale on the home front had made a major contribution to defeat in 1918. Uziel is aware of this and devotes some discussion to it, but does not investigate the concept of ‘total war’ that developed in the interwar years to deal with this problem in future wars. He does, though, emphasize the belief of both the army and Nazi leadership that the civilian population had to be psychologically prepared for war and that morale would have to be maintained during a war.
The members of the PKs were print, photo, radio and film journalists who had undergone basic military training and were subject to military discipline. A significant proportion of them belonged to the NSDAP, a requirement for officers in the PKs. PK work was not for the faint-hearted. It involved racial stereotyping of enemies – for example, French colonial POWs and Jews in Warsaw – and it could also be dangerous. Hundreds of PK reporters died on military campaigns. Recruiting members of the propaganda ministry’s regional offices into the PKs had the disadvantage of diminishing the number of functionaries available for disseminating propaganda to the civilian population. In addition to preparing reports – which were carefully edited in the Propaganda Ministry – to inform and engage German civilians, the propaganda troops were charged with providing materials, such as leaflets, loudspeaker messages and posters, to demoralize the enemy’s frontline troops. According to Uziel, these ‘PK active propaganda operations caused the defection of thousands of Soviet soldiers and were soon considered to be a true “blood-saving weapon”’ (122).
Uziel deals comprehensively with the formation, organization and deployment of the propaganda troops. It takes a long time to reach much on ‘the Consolidation of the German Home Front’ of the sub-title, and then there is relatively little on it. This ‘consolidation’ was to be achieved by regional propaganda networks, which used serving soldiers – preferably decorated war heroes – who lectured on their own exploits, experiences and impressions, always with a heavy infusion of morale-boosting propaganda. But the audiences consisted heavily of ‘NSDAP members, factory workers and youth’ (220) – the kind of people who could be dragooned as a ‘rent-an-audience’, one might think.
This book is based on impressive archival research. There was also an interview (in 1998) with Dr Fritz Hippler, Reich Film Inspector and producer of the infamous film Der Ewige Jude. He was in charge of the training of PK film cameramen. There are a couple of technical drawbacks: the barrage of initials can at times be overwhelming; and the provision of an index only of people’s names reflects the worst, and most unhelpful, feature of German publishing practice. And how anyone engaged in research on Germany could produce ‘Baden-Würtmeburg’ (151), which, even in its correct form of Baden-Württemberg, did not exist as an entity at the time in question, is a mystery.
University of Edinburgh