Robert Ley was the party’s Reichsorganisationsleiter (Reich organization director) after 1932. That gave him considerable say in the party’s educational system. He also headed the DAF. The DAF, which eventually had 25
million members, provided every manner of service, some of them propagandistic in nature. As Reich organization director, Ley had party training under his control. He also established a variety of training courses and schools. He and Goebbels got on rather well. Ley knew better than to disagree with Goebbels often.
Alfred Rosenberg was the Nazi Party’s “theoretician,” though his books were unreadable, even for Hitler. He headed foreign affairs for the party but despite his wishes did not become foreign minister. Still, in 1934 Hitler gave him the grandiose title of Führer’s Deputy for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction of the National Socialist Party.
His vague responsibilities had to do with ideological education within the party. In cooperation with the RPL, his office published Die neue Gemeinschaft, a monthly for those conducting party and state holidays and ceremonies. He also became minister for the occupied eastern territories on 17
July 1941, just after the attack on the Soviet Union. This gave him control of propaganda to the East. Since Hitler had given him authority over ideological matters, which he thought included just about everything, Rosenberg regularly sought to expand his reach. He also had grand plans to This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:38 UTC
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found a party university.24 Goebbels thought him incompetent. He had limited influence on day-to-day propaganda.
Joachim Ribbentrop was foreign minister from 1938 to 1945, which gave him considerable authority over foreign propaganda.25 He lacked the party base of others (he was not a party Reichsleiter) but was willing to do what it took to increase his hold on international propaganda. He had primary control over shortwave broadcasting, for example. Several days before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels noted in his diaries:
“Ribbentrop is getting involved in all sorts of things that do not concern him. I shall now take the offensive against him. People like him are only impressed by impudence.”26 Goebbels was capable of that.
Philip Bouhler, among other assignments, headed the Nazi Censorship Committee for the Protection of National Socialist Literature, which certified that books contained nothing objectionable from the party’s standpoint. He had claim to censorship authority over all books published in the Third Reich.27 Goebbels was not pleased. A June 1941 entry in his diary noted: “Gutterer has talked with Lammers: he shares our views regarding Bouhler and his bizarre censorship committee. It is not to be allowed independent power to ban books.”28
Max Amann was the head of the Franz Eher Verlag, the party’s publishing house. He was also president of the press section of the RKK. Primarily interested in the business aspects of publishing (he managed to secure control of about 80 percent of the German press by 1945), he nonetheless did not hesitate to get involved in editorial matters when he chose. Amann did not have the official authority to appoint editors, but he had the practical ability to do so when he wished.29 He was not a pleasant man to offend.
In short, Nazi propaganda was made by a confusion of people of varying degrees of competence who sometimes did not like each other very much.30 Why did such a byzantine system function at all? The critical fact about the system was that it was going in the same general direction, working hard to determine (and influence) Hitler’s desires. Whenever battles raged too strongly, Hitler would step in and make some sort of peace, generally not a lasting one.
Ian Kershaw uncovered a statement from 1934 that illuminates what held the system together: “Everyone who has had the opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realise sooner or later. . . . [I]t is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:38 UTC
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works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.”31
Although leading Nazis differed on all kinds of matters and did all they could to increase their power at the expense of their rivals, loyalty to Hitler was as absolute as anything could be in the Third Reich. And under the
“leadership principle,” their power depended ultimately on his. They might disagree with a particular decision, and certainly they did not always follow the Führer’s directions on jurisdictional matters, yet all followed Hitler’s fundamental opinions on propaganda, as in other matters. Hitler was clear when he needed to be clear, and the general direction of Nazism was discernable to nearly everyone involved.
The Architecture of Socialist Propaganda
In contrast to the tangles of Nazi propaganda, GDR propaganda was organized and orderly. Lines of authority were known, and although perfect amity did not prevail, it was generally clear who had authority over what.
It took time to work out the organizational details, but by the early 1970s the basic structures that remained until 1989 were in place.32 Throughout the period, the changes were more the result of efforts to find more efficient ways to structure the system than of battles between SED leaders.
The SED controlled propaganda, leaving only a minor role for the state.
Theoretically, party authority came from the SED’s members. According to the principle of democratic centralism, decisions were to be made at each level with the democratic agreement of the members, after which all were obligated to follow them—but the system was far more centralized than democratic. The real decision-making authority was with the head of the party (Walter Ulbricht from 1950 to 1973 and Erich Honecker from 1973
to 1989), with significant input from the Politburo members.
The full Central Committee (ZK) was more than a rubber stamp, but not much more. Its various departments, each under the supervision of a Politburo member, were loci of real power. ZK department heads were of equal standing with government ministers, but although no minister would make a major decision without first checking with the ZK department, the converse was not always the case. The two primary departments influenc-ing propaganda were Propaganda and Agitation, although the departments dealing with foreign information, foreign relations, bloc parties and mass This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:38 UTC
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organizations, women, youth, church matters, culture and education, agriculture, and sport also had influence.
The Departments of Agitation and Propaganda were generally separate, although they were merged from 1957 to 1961.33 There were corresponding departments at the district ( Bezirk) and county ( Kreis) levels. Consistent with the Marxist distinction between propaganda and agitation, the Agitation Department supervised the media, speakers, and visual material.
The Propaganda Department controlled party training courses and schools, the area that was predominantly Robert Ley’s domain during the Third Reich. In comparison to the Nazi bureaucracies, they were economically staffed. The Propaganda Department had only thirty-three staff members in 1983.34 Agitation had sixty-nine in 1987.35
The Agitation Department was the more significant of the two. It came to have eight sections by 1989. Their respective areas were agitation, visual agitation, WAS und WIE (the monthly periodical for agitators), a library and archive, foreign correspondents, the “B-Sector” (concerned with plans for military mobilization), press, and radio/television.36 Its major
figures were its secretaries: Horst Sindermann (1954–1963), Rudolf Singer (1963–1966), Werner Lamberz (1966–1971), Hans Modrow (1971–1973), and Heinz Geggel (1973–1989).
The department was supervised by Albert Norden from 1955 to 1967, followed by Werner Lamberz until his death in a helicopter crash in Libya in 1978 and Joachim Herrmann until 1989. One GDR media figure characterized this trio of Politburo members in these ways: “Norden wanted the media to educate entertainingly and to entertain educationally. Lamberz wanted the content to focus on the image of ourselves, the image of the enemy and the image of the world. Herrmann had only the propaganda of success in mind, and measured to the centimeter the size of Honecker’s photograph in comparison to those of other Politburo members.”37 By general agreement of GDR propagandists, Lamberz was by far the most capable of the three, and many hoped he would be Honecker’s successor. Some suspected that Honecker arranged for the less able Herrmann to take on the role after Lamberz died as a way of ensuring that no one as attractive could threaten his position.38
A final entity was the Agitation Commission, established in the 1950s. It was headed by the responsible Politburo member and included the heads of the Agitation Department, GDR television, and the government Press Office, as well as representatives from industry and agriculture. The task of the Agitation Commission was to plan long-term strategy, whereas the ZK
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Departments of Propaganda and Agitation were responsible for more immediate matters. This did not always work out in practice. During Norden’s period, for example, both the Agitation Commission and the Department of Agitation issued directives to the press.39
The state’s propaganda role was limited. There was a government Press Office, headed by Kurt Blecha from 1958 to 1989, but its fifty staff members had little power. It lacked authority to approve reports of even such routine matters as the introduction of daylight saving time without first clearing it with the relevant party offices.40
The Press Office did have authority over religious periodicals, including the five Protestant weekly newspapers. The editor of the Potsdamer Kirche describes the process. The church lacked its own publishing plant. On Tuesday, the proofs were read and permission to print received from the publishing house. But it was printed on Wednesday. In between, a copy went to the Press Office: “There was a double approval. This was not officially declared. We knew it, however. Wednesday morning between 9 and 10
A.M. a call came from the Press Office. ‘Mr. Borgmann, come to the Press Office.’ I had to go there. Depending on the severity of the offense, I might be given a good dressing down, or treated more or less politely.”41 The church was sometimes able to win an argument and occasionally published papers with blank spaces, but the rules were reasonably clear, and the church generally followed them.42
The single official GDR news agency, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst (ADN), was a state organization, as were the radio and television systems, but in practice they were controlled by SED functionaries. This had disadvantages. Joachim Herrmann complained in a 1988 memo to SED economic chief Günter Mittag that although the electronic media and ADN were directly subordinate to the SED political leadership, their location within the government apparatus put them at a funding disadvantage against party newspapers such as Neues Deutschland. 43
Summary
Nazi Germany survived twelve years, the GDR forty, which gave it significantly more time to build its system. Still, the systems turned out to have more similarities than differences.
Both developed elaborate bureaucracies with offices at every level from the local to the national. The leadership principle and democratic centralism had much in common. Both obligated subordinates to follow the This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:38 UTC
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orders of their superiors without question, even if in theory authority was from the top down in Nazism and the bottom up in Marxism-Leninism. Either system fit comfortably into German authoritarian traditions.
The NSDAP system was the looser of the two. Nazi leaders fought to increase their personal power in the field of propaganda, as in every other area. Propaganda was a set of quasi-independent entities heading generally, though not always, in the same direction.
The SED’s principle of democratic centralism provided a facade of legiti-macy to decisions from the top. Having allegedly participated in making the decisions, one was bound to follow them. One GDR journalist expressed the results in this way: “It was a system designed to produce anxiety.”44 The NSDAP system produced its share of anxiety, but it was easier for a propagandist to get into trouble in the GDR than in Hitler’s Germany.
The NSDAP put substantially more control in the hands of state agencies. The Propaganda Ministry and other organs had the clear say as to the content of media. The GDR had no equivalent of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. Party offices held the reins.
The Nazi system was more confusing than the GDR’s. One generally knew where to go for an answer in the GDR, whereas the convoluted Nazi system of battling party leaders and organizations made getting answers more challenging. In both systems, however, it was clear to the public, and to all involved in the shaping of public opinion, that there was firm control over what was said and done. Every attentive citizen learned early on what could and could not be said. The authorities for what could and could not be said were sufficiently clear, and the relevant offices were sufficiently distributed to make it difficult to escape or ignore them.
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4
Evangelists
M M M M
Both the Nazis and the GDR developed substantial central propaganda bureaucracies that determined the general content of propaganda. These bureaucracies alone could never have maintained thorough systems of control. To do that, both systems depended on large numbers of propagandists at lower levels to carry out their activities. Participating in the system implicated larger numbers of citizens, increasing their commitment to the system (or at least making it more awkward for them to express critical attitudes) and simultaneously provided large numbers of people to make propaganda.
Propagandists were the evangelists of and for the new society. As true believers, they were to bring the message of their parties to every citizen both by word and deed. How did the propaganda systems look to them?
What did a Nazi speaker or local group propaganda leader read and do?
What was the work of a GDR agitator? As we shall see, at the local level these evangelists personalized the propaganda of state and party just as a parish priest might personalize the faith of a church.
Life as a Nazi Propagandist
The Nazi Party was organized hierarchically. There were forty regional districts ( Gaue) in 1939. Each was divided into Kreise, or counties. Kreise 71
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consisted of Ortsgruppen, or local groups. There were 28,376 local groups in 1939.1 Larger local groups were subdivided into cells comprised of four to eight blocks. Blocks were supposed to have forty to sixty households. Party officials at the Gau and Kreis level were salaried, those at the local group level were not (although they sometimes had well-paid government jobs).
There were propaganda leaders at the Gau, Kreis, and local group levels.
They had subordi
nates responsible for active propaganda (speakers and public meetings), film, culture, radio, and sometimes other areas. There were 14,000 party functionaries in propaganda offices in February 1934, but these were only the official staff.2 Significant numbers of party members were put to work making propaganda, even if they lacked a title. For example, 25,000 people assisted with party film propaganda alone in 1936.3
Several hundred thousand others served as block wardens for the party and its subsidiary organizations, providing a personal link between the individual citizen and the organization.4 They were supposed to hear the concerns of their neighbors and act as intermediaries when necessary, providing fast and unbureaucratic assistance to citizens with problems, but also to fulfill propaganda functions.
Block wardens were critical in campaigns such as the Eintopfsonntag collection, which was part of the Nazi Winter Relief charity.5 Everyone in Germany (including Hitler) on the first Sunday of the month was to have a dinner of a simple stew or soup prepared in a single pot, contributing the money saved to the charity. Block wardens or others were to visit each home that day to accept contributions. The guidelines for Berlin in 1933
noted that every family was expected to participate and that functionaries would be held accountable for any family that did not contribute. At least the guidelines stated that the collectors were not to inspect the content of pots on stoves to be sure the family actually had a one-pot meal.6
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic Page 10
