Goebbels himself had little time for Rosenberg, whose magnum opus, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, he is said to have called a ‘philosophical belch’.49 While Rosenberg’s office was a purely Party institution, Goebbels had the advantage of combining his Party strength as Reich Propaganda Leader with the power of a fully fledged Ministry of State that was at the same time politically unimpeachable because it was staffed by committed Party members. Hitler did not think very highly of Rosenberg’s political abilities, perhaps as a result of the mess Rosenberg had made of things when put in charge of the Party after the abortive beer-hall putsch in Munich in 1923. So he refused to give him a government appointment. Moreover, while he shared many of his cruder prejudices, Hitler had almost as low an opinion of Rosenberg’s pretentious, pseudo-philosophical theorizing as Goebbels did. He never admitted him to the inner circle of his friends and companions. Already by the summer of 1933 the disruption caused by the Fighting League for German Culture had begun to become politically inconvenient. 50 On 22 September 1933, Goebbels succeeded in getting a decree passed to establish the Reich Culture Chamber, with himself as President. It contained seven designated sub-sections, also known as Chambers - literature, theatre, music, radio, film, fine arts, and the press, corresponding to the divisions already established in his Ministry. Some of these specialized Chambers already existed, as with the Reich Film Chamber, or were in the process of formation; now they became monopoly state institutions. Goebbels was able to recapture German theatre from Rosenberg in this way. The legal requirement that anyone who wished to work in any of these areas had to be a member of the appropriate Chamber gave Goebbels the power to exclude anyone whose views were unacceptable to the regime and effectively marginalized Rosenberg in the cultural sphere. Goebbels also used the Reich Culture Chamber to establish better pension rights and to crack down on the untrained and unqualified, though this latter policy was softened from 1935 onwards. At the same time, he took care to present the Reich Culture Chamber and its specialist sub-Chambers as a form of cultural self-administration. The Propaganda Ministry would manage them with a light touch while the real power supposedly lay with the senior artists, musicians and writers who presided over them and ran them on a day-to-day basis. In these ways, the Propaganda Minister won the support of the overwhelming majority of those Germans who depended on culture in one form or another for their living - and their numbers were considerable: 35,000 in the Reich Chamber for Visual Arts in 1937, for example, 95,600 in the Reich Music Chamber, 41,100 in the Reich Theatre Chamber at the same date.51
The Reich Culture Chamber was inaugurated in a grand ceremony presided over by Hitler himself at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall on 15 November 1933, with music from the hall’s prestigious resident orchestra conducted first by Wilhelm Furtwängler and then by Richard Strauss, followed by a speech from Goebbels and a chorus (‘Awake! Full soon will dawn the day!’) from Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. Rosenberg was subsequently fobbed off with the grandiloquent but essentially empty title of ‘Representative of the Leader for the Overall Philosophical and Intellectual Training and Education of the National Socialist Party’, granted to him on 24 January 1934. His Fighting League for German Culture, renamed in more neutral terms as the National Socialist Cultural Community in 1934, struggled on, a kind of cultural counterpart to the brownshirts, deprived of a role now that the battle against Nazism’s opponents had been won, until it was finally dissolved in 1937.52 Rosenberg continued to make trouble for Goebbels from time to time, but in the end he was not effective enough seriously to trouble the Propaganda Minster’s dominance of the cultural scene, once Goebbels had abandoned his toleration of cultural modernism in the face of Hitler’s obdurate hostility to it.53
Rosenberg was not the only senior figure with whom Goebbels had to contend. Hitler, who had at one time earned a living from painting postcards, took an intense personal interest in the visual arts. He was an enthusiast for the music of Richard Wagner, developed an obsession with architecture, and spent much of his time watching films in his private cinema. Then there was Hermann Göring, whose position as Prussian Minister-President put him in control of many major cultural institutions run and financed by the Prussian state, though he made no attempt at influencing cultural policy in a wider sense. The Education Minister Bernhard Rust was also heavily involved in cultural policies, particularly where they affected the young. He established a panel of senior musicians, including the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the pianist Wilhelm Backhaus and others, to control and in effect censor the programmes of all concerts and other musical events in Berlin. He oversaw institutions such as music conservatories and art academies. His main concern seems to have been to keep the Propaganda Ministry from encroaching on his sphere of influence, an ever-present danger given the original claim of the Ministry to include education in its remit. Finally, the Nazi Labour Front, led by Robert Ley, absorbed a large number of artists and musicians and their organizations during its takeover of the trade unions in May 1933 and seemed determined to defend the position it had thereby gained in musical life against all comers. Demarcation disputes between these various organizations and their leaders became so violent that the Education Ministry actually attempted to ban public discussion of artistic issues on 15 July 1933, though without success.54
Whatever their differences, and however much they varied on points of detail, all the Nazi cultural organizations and their leaders were agreed that Jews and political opponents of the Nazi regime had to be removed from cultural life as quickly as possible, and that ‘cultural Bolshevism’ had to be destroyed, though they disagreed frequently about the particular individuals and works to which the concept could be applied. In the course of 1933 and the following years, some 2,000 artists, writers, musicians, film actors and directors, journalists, architects and others active in the cultural sphere left Germany, some of them because they disagreed with Nazism, many because they were Jewish and so had been deprived of the work that gave them their livelihood. Removing Jews from the Reich Chamber of Culture took some time partly because of objections from the Economics Ministry, which thought it would be economically damaging. By the middle of 1935, however, it was done.55 Purged of dissidents and nonconformists, and those whom the regime regarded as racially undesirable, German culture and the German mass media now faced a future of growing regimentation and control. The many quarrels between the leading Nazi contenders for supremacy in these areas did little or nothing to hinder its arrival.
WRITING FOR GERMANY
I
In the 1920s and early 1930s there was no doubt which newspaper in Germany had the widest national and international reputation. The Frankfurt Newspaper (Frankfurter Zeitung) was renowned the world over for its thorough and objective reporting, its fair-minded opinion columns and its high intellectual standards. If there was one German newspaper to which foreigners who wished to know what was going on in the country turned, this was it. Although its readership was not large, it was highly educated and included many key formers of opinion. Politically liberal, the paper had long remained independent of the great press empires that had grown up around figures such as Alfred Hugenberg or the Mosse and Ullstein families. Its editorial and personnel policy was determined not by a chief executive but by the collective decision of an editorial board. Under the Weimar Republic, however, it got into financial difficulties and had to make over a controlling interest to the massive I.G. Farben chemical concern, which soon began to compromise its editorial independence, above all in questions of economic policy. By 1932 its editorials were arguing that it was time to bring Hitler and the Nazis into a coalition government and to rescue Germany from the crisis by reforming the Weimar constitution in an authoritarian direction.56
The newspaper’s staff bent with the wind in the early months of 1933, editorializing in favour of the suppression of the Communist Party after the Reichstag fire and abandoning their previous criticisms of the Nazis. But their liberal reputation
prompted the invasion of the paper’s offices by an armed squad of stormtroopers on 11 March 1933 and the threat that the paper would be banned if it did not toe the line in every respect.
Soon editorial staff began to resign, and the board bowed to pressure from the Propaganda Ministry to dismiss Jews; by the end of 1936 there was none left in its employ, though two half-Jews and two spouses of Jews still remained. Seeing which way things were moving, the Jewish family of the paper’s founder, Leopold Sonnemann, sold its shares on 1 June 1934 to I.G. Farben, who now possessed a 98 per cent stake in the paper’s parent firm. At this stage, the Nazi regime could not afford to offend the giant chemical combine, whose help it needed in its programmes of rearmament and job creation. I.G. Farben had originally bought into the paper in order to generate more favourable publicity for itself at home and abroad among those whose opinions counted, but its leading figures such as Carl Bosch were also political and cultural conservatives who did not want to see the paper’s central features disappear. Quite apart from this, too, Hitler and Goebbels valued the paper’s reputation abroad and did not want to alarm foreign opinion by forcing it to change too radically. All this meant that the paper had rather more freedom of action under the Third Reich than the rest of the press did. 57
Thus the paper’s foreign correspondents continued to file stories on foreign criticism of the Nazis well into the mid-1930s. And its editors, particularly in the cultural pages of the Feuilleton section of the paper, not uncommonly failed to print stories emanating from the Propaganda Ministry, even when they were ordered to do so by Goebbels. They attempted, sometimes successfully, to carry articles emphasizing the humane values which they considered the Nazis to be trampling on. Many of the forty new members of the editorial staff appointed between 1933 and 1939 came from parts of the press that had fared badly under the Nazis, including Social Democrats, Nationalists and Catholics. Many of them, such as Walter Dirks, or Paul Sethe, became famous West German journalists in the postwar years. Two other well-known writers, Dolf Sternberger and Otto Suhr, who had Jewish wives, were also able to remain in their posts.58 Staff writers printed ostensibly historical articles about Genghis Khan or Robespierre whose parallels with Hitler were obvious to the average intelligent reader. They became adept at conveying facts and reports that were unpalatable to the regime with formulae such as ‘there is no truth in the rumour that’ and headlines that denounced as lies stories which were then expounded in considerable detail. The paper soon acquired a reputation as virtually the only organ in which such things could be found, and its circulation actually began to increase once more.59
The Gestapo was well aware of the fact that the Frankfurt Newspaper in particular contained articles that ‘must be described as malicious agitation’ and thought that ‘now as before the Frankfurt Newspaper dedicates itself to the representation of Jewish interests’.60 Until 1938, indeed, the paper continued to carry Leopold Sonnemann’s name on its masthead, dropping it only when directly ordered to by the government.61 ‘The virtuosity with which attempts are made to alter National Socialist principles and trains of thought and to change their meaning’, the Gestapo complained on another occasion, ‘is sometimes astounding.’62 Yet with time, and especially after 1936, the regime forced the paper more and more onto the defensive. Innumerable compromises with the Propaganda Ministry’s instructions were unavoidable. Direct resistance was barely possible. Already in August 1933 the English journalist Henry Wickham Steed noted that the once-proud liberal newspaper had become a ‘tool of unfreedom’ under the new regime.63 The foreign press quickly stopped citing stories carried in the paper, taking the view that they had now become mostly indistinguishable from the torrent of misinformation and propaganda pumped out on a daily basis by Goebbels’s Ministry.64 In 1938, realizing that it no longer needed to influence public opinion, since there was effectively no public opinion left in Germany, I.G. Farben secretly sold the firm to a subsidiary of the Nazi Party’s Eher Publishing House without even troubling to inform the paper’s editors or staff. On 20 April 1939 the Nazi Party’s publishing mogul, Max Amann, formally presented the newspaper to Hitler as a birthday present. Its function as a vehicle for free, if disguised, comment was over; its readership declined further, and it was eventually closed down altogether in 1943.65
That it had managed to retain even a vestige of independence for so long was remarkable. As with other areas of propaganda and culture, central control over newspaper personnel was established in the autumn of 1933, with the creation of the Reich Press Chamber under Max Amann. Working in the publishing industry was impossible for non-members of the Chamber. Amann was able to take over an increasing number of papers as head of the Eher Publishing House, by exploiting the weak financial position of the press in the Depression and by depriving rival papers of revenue by switching government advertising contracts to the Nazi press. Readers anxious not to be stigmatized by subscribing to a liberal paper switched their allegiance. By the beginning of 1934 the circulation of the liberal Berlin Daily News-Sheet (Berliner Tageblatt) had fallen from 130,000 to less than 75,000, and that of the venerable Vossian Newspaper (Vossische Zeitung) from 80,000 to just under 50,000. The Nazis expanded their press empire from 59 daily newspapers with a combined circulation of 782,121 at the beginning of 1933 to 86 papers with a total circulation of over three million by the end of the year. In 1934 they bought the large Jewish publishing firm of Ullstein, responsible for some of Germany’s most respected dailies. Fortified by new regulations of the Reich Press Chamber issued in April 1935, banning confessional or ‘special interest group’ papers, debarring business corporations, foundations, societies and other organizations from press ownership, and enabling him to close papers that were financially unsound or owned by non-Aryans, Amann was able to close down or buy up between 500 and 600 more newspapers in 1935-6. By 1939 the Eher Publishing House owned or controlled over two-thirds of German newspapers and magazines.66
While Amann was busy buying up the German press, Goebbels and his ally Otto Dietrich, the head of the Nazi press bureau, were extending their own controls over its contents. Dietrich secured the promulgation on 4 October 1933 of a new Editors’ Law, which made editors personally responsible for the content of their papers, removed the proprietors’ powers of dismissal and laid down rules governing the content of newspapers, which were not to print anything ‘which is calculated to weaken the strength of the German Reich abroad or at home, the community will of the German people, German defence, culture or the economy, or to injure the religious sensibilities of others’. Membership in the Reich Association of the German Press was now compulsory by law and subject to revocation if a journalist contravened a code of conduct enforced by professional courts. As a result, within two years of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, 1,300 Jewish, Social Democratic and left-liberal journalists had been barred from working. Thus Goebbels ensured control through the editors and journalists, while Amann established it through the Press Chamber and the proprietors.67 At a regional and local level, however, as middle-ranking Nazi officials took the initiative in assuming control over the press, both means were often used at once, particularly where a regional newspaper publishing house was established. Enforcing by one means or another the closure of rival papers not only eliminated ideological alternatives to local Nazi papers but also turned them from often struggling small businesses into thriving and profitable enterprises.68
Towering over all other newspapers in the Nazi era was the Party’s own daily, the Racial Observer. Alone amongst German dailies, it was a national paper, published in Munich and Berlin at the same time. The mouthpiece of the Party leadership, it became essential reading for the party faithful and indeed anyone else who wanted to be told what to think and believe. Teachers in particular subscribed to it so that they could use it in their classes and on occasion check out their pupils’ essays to see if they were lifted from its pages, before daring to criticize them for either style or content. The paper’s
circulation shot up from 116,000 in 1932 to 1,192,500 in 1941, the first German paper to sell more than a million copies a day. Its editor, Wilhelm Weiss, injected a stronger factual content into its pages after 1933, but he also encouraged writers to employ a hectoring, threatening, triumphalist tone in their articles, advertising on a daily basis the arrogance of Nazi power and the Party’s determination to destroy anyone who could be considered a threat to it. He was unable, however, to persuade the Party to fund a permanent staff of full-time foreign correspondents, and had to rely largely on press agency reports for foreign news instead. The Racial Observer was followed by a whole range of other newspapers and magazines, notably Julius Streicher’s sensationalist The Stormer, which achieved a circulation of something like 500,000 by 1937 compared to 65,000 three years before, largely thanks to block orders from Nazi organizations of one kind and another. It was widely sold on the streets, its front page displayed in advertising boxes for all to see. So obviously untrue were many of its stories of ritual murder and similar atrocities supposedly committed by Jews, and so clearly pornographic were its regular reports of sex scandals involving Jewish men and non-Jewish German girls, that many people refused to have copies in their houses; the Party leadership was even forced to withdraw it from circulation on occasion. On the other hand, numerous readers wrote in to the paper to denounce in its pages neighbours and acquaintances who failed to give the Hitler salute, or mixed with Jews, or uttered statements critical of the regime, and a notable feature of the paper was its organization of public petitions for the closure of Jewish businesses and similar antisemitic actions. Block orders also accounted for the high circulation figures of less sensationalist Party magazines such as The SA Man, which sold 750,000 copies a week to the stormtrooper movement in the middle of the 1930s. Individual subscriptions tended to go instead to the illustrated weekly magazines, which concentrated on less overtly political articles and pictures.69
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