Nazi and British Propaganda During World War 2

Nazi and British Propaganda during WWII

In this paper I will discuss the use of propaganda before and during the World War II and how it affected British and German society. I will first note that differences in the countries' war aims had a great effect upon the success and content of propaganda. Then I will examine how propaganda affected morale. I will describe how hatred and violence were successful parts of the German, but not British, propaganda campaign. I will then examine how propaganda saturated every aspect of civilian life. Throughout this paper I will prove that British propaganda was more successful towards the war effort than German propaganda.

It is important to note that Britain and Germany had different aims and ambitions in mass persuasion. The Nazis talked of "fighting on the battlefields of the mind," but this idea never took hold in Britain because Britain was not suggesting major changes in society as Germany was (Briggs 6). German propaganda:

"had set itself the task of educating the German people for a new society based upon a dramatically restructured value system. The Ð''revolutionary' task of German propaganda contrasts starkly with the Ð''conservative' basis of British propaganda aims" (Kershaw 182).

The Nazi's main propaganda aim was to keep the keep the people of Germany from seeing or reading anything that was damaging to the Nazi Party and to present the Nazi ideals to the public in the most persuasive way possible. One effect of this exclusive method of mass persuasion was that stifled and prosecuted people such as artists and intellectuals fled to other countries (Propaganda in Nazi Germany -WEB). British propaganda has no such exclusivity. It focused on the total involvement of society in the war effort and giving people a sense of unity and enthusiasm. "In German home propaganda, the Nazi's found it difficult at critical moments to strike the same motes as the British had been able to strike with little fuss in 1940". Germans went to war with "reluctant loyalty" (Balfour 148). When Germany began to lose the war, "the task of upholding morale was incomparably greater than that of British propaganda." Because it was promoting more drastic changes, German propaganda had to work harder than British to gain support for the war (Kershaw 182).

Both countries directed their propaganda at the masses, although with different attitudes toward them. Hitler thought of the masses as malleable and corrupt and had an utter contempt for public opinion. The British government saw the people as malleable but did not view them with such great disdain. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. There was no point in trying to influence the intellectuals: Hitler conceded that they would be capable of forming their own opinions. Hitler believed that the proper task for propaganda was to bring certain subjects within the field of vision of the masses. It concentrated on as few points as possible and hammered them home repeatedly (Propaganda in Nazi Germany -WEB)

One of the main duties of propaganda in Britain was to maintain a high level of civilian morale. This was the prime duty of the Ministry of Morale, which was formed in 1935 and had departments devoted to news, control, publicity, collecting, and administration. Unfortunately, the Ministry of morale was almost comically ineffective, but morale was boosted by other means and remained remarkable high during the war. The British film industry used drama, political films, and comedy to raise morale as well as shaping peoples values and worldview (McLaine 2). In both countries, morale was heightened by public spectacles and speeches, and by the wireless.

Both styles of propaganda were highly emotional and both sides presented ideas in terms of black and white; but a key difference was in the arousal of hatred in the civilian population. Hitler thought that a politically uneducated mass public was bound to be receptive to emotive appeal rather than to rational argument. In his eyes, propaganda could afford to make no concessions to the other side. Britain produced propaganda to incite hatred of Germans, but in May 1941 the Policy Committee of the Ministry of Morale had to formally propose an anger campaign because the British people lacked personal anger towards the Germans. This campaign was implemented on a small scale and did not significantly alter British attitudes (McLaine 103). The Germans, however, were persuaded to hate the British from the first (largely because of residual anger of the Treaty of Versailles), though it took time to make them hate the Jews.

The wireless played an important role in both Nazi and British propaganda. In the summer of 1932, the Nazis gained access to the German broadcast system. In 1939, 70 per cent of German households owned a wirelessÐ'--the highest percentage in the world. Not long after the war began, Germany banned all foreign broadcasts; listening to one could result in receiving the death penalty (Balfour 145-149). "We spell radio with three exclamation marks', said one Nazi, "Because we are possessed in it of a miraculous power (Briggs 5-6)." In Britain the BBC functioned as an instrument of social control by fostering a feeling of communal identity among their dispersed audiences. It warned against apathy and promised a new world would come with victory (Briggs 142). Yet the Director General of the BBC, F.W. Oglivie, "certainly did not conceive of his job as that of a propagandist (Briggs 6)." The BBC was praised for allowing at least some opposing opinions and "a Ð''League of Nations' of foreign refugees had assembled in the BBC's studios and offices in London," adding their own perspectives to the BBC's output (Brigss 10). The BBC grew during the war and reached its peak figure of 11,663 staff in March 1944. The BBC was pure "white" but the Political Warfare Executive also had power over the radio waves as was responsible for the more than sixty "black" broadcasts during the war, which falsely purported