Nazi Propaganda's Influence in America

In the mere twelve years during which it held power, Hitler's National Socialist dictatorship managed to destroy the remnants of Germany's fragile Weimar Republic, repress and persecute a large proportion of its populace, start a war with nearly every major democracy in the world and inflict untold suffering on millions of soldiers and civilians across a wide swathe of Europe. The brutality of the Nazi regime was rivaled only by that of Stalin's Soviet Union, its great enemy to the east. For these reasons it is Hitler's physical legacy-World War Two, the Holocaust, the reshaping of the European political map and even the eventual rise of the European Union (which began, among other things, as an uneasy economic alliance structured implicitly to check German influence in Western Europe)-that to this day commands the lion's share of the scholarship and attention focused on mid-20^th century Germany. But equally impressive, if more difficult to isolate, was the psychological and political impact of Hitler's and Goebbel's masterful propaganda machine.

Although Hitler's accession to power in January 1933 provoked little immediate interest outside Germany, he quickly pursued policies which did draw international attention. The increasingly repressive and anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime coupled with noteworthy events like June 1934's Night of the Long Knives and, later, 1938's Kristallnacht produced varying levels of wariness, incredulity and outrage among the democracies of Western Europe and North America. Quickly apparent as well was Hitler's desire to reassert German military dominance in the region. The Fuhrer's quick drive to rearm provoked concern in Britain especially: as early as 1934 a British intelligence report remarked that while Germany was not yet in the position to threaten Britain with force, it would be in "a matter of a few years" and as such the deterrence of Hitler should be Britain's "ultimate long-term foreign policy objective." Indeed, by the middle 1930s it had become clear that it was only a matter of if, not when, Germany would once again menace wider Europe. One of the major questions, then, which this paper will seek to answer is whether the massive outpouring of German propaganda abroad-through popular state-sponsored radio programs, press releases which made their way into democratic newspapers, more informal journalistic contacts and official statements-factored into the sometimes ambivalent public opinion and official hesitancy regarding the Nazi regime in the countries which would come to comprise the Allied bloc. This report will dissect the various types of German propaganda and the media used and examine contemporary parliamentary/congressional debate and legislation, public and academic discourse, and state policies in democratic states for evidence of its influence.

The Nazi foreign propaganda operation, led by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, was especially subtle, varied and effective in the English-speaking world. Goebbels utilized several different media, taking advantage of the unique properties of each to maximize the efficiency of the regime's message-the bulk of Nazi radio propaganda, for example, was comprised of American-style comedic talk shows and light dramas, whereas print media combined tight journalistic controls with prolific, concise press releases to produce a focused narrative.

Although by the mid-twentieth century television and radio were beginning to come into their own as viable sources of entertainment and news, the press, especially what Sidney A. Freifeld terms in "Nazi Press Agentry and the American Press" "major metropolitan dailies [newspapers]," remained the most credible source of in-depth news and analysis and thus formed the backbone of most literate Americans' information intake. Indeed, since the tragedy of World War I most big newspapers had significantly beefed up their foreign reporting-before the war most papers had one or two correspondents in each major world capital (and "not a great deal of contact...with foreign offices" in the words of Arthur Willert); by the eve of World War II this number had increased to ten on average-in an effort to increase public knowledge about foreign events, which knowledge, it was thought, would prevent any would-be rogue nation from acting irrationally on the world stage. While this theory, unfortunately, proved unfounded, it did spur a significant increase-especially in American papers-in column inches devoted to international affairs. Competition between local newspapers rose proportionally with this increase in reporting resources, with each paper vying for exclusive scoops and interviews. This exposed a major weak point in journalism's disinterested veneer: while reporters in theory held themselves to the highest ethical ideals, newspaper publishing was also a business in which success was defined as the steady growth of readership-even at the expense of other papers.

Into this opening stepped the shrewd Nazi propaganda machine. Although the Hitler regime's propaganda was unusually subtle and clever, it certainly did not fool many reporters, and Goebbels' crew did not worry itself too much about dressing their spew up any more than was necessary for it to pass basic journalistic muster. They rather utilized a simple but effective principle, aped by many dictatorships hence, called "fair news." Foreign journalists working in Germany were kept on a tight watch: their dispatches to their home office in most cases had to be cleared with Nazi censors and examined to ensure that they passed some basic tests. In short, news was "fair" only if it cleaved very closely to the official party line as determined by voluminous press releases and official statements. Examples of "unfair" newsgathering techniques included "personal investigation," non-sanctioned or privately-arranged interviews, and use of "independent news sources"-indeed, just about any sound journalistic practice. Although such limitations were anathema to the honest newspaperman, German correspondents had little leeway: the authors of divergent articles were expelled, usually after a warning, from the country. In a simpler time, this might simply have meant a wholesale media blackout over Germany, with all the attendant consequences which that would have had for the Nazi regime. But the increased competition between dailies made this impossible: during the mid-late 1930s the world kept one eye fixed on the often startling developments coming out of Germany, and no reputable paper wanted to be left out of the action. Goebbels recognized this: on top of the restrictive sticks with which he tormented them, he also dangled tempting carrots in front of German correspondents in the form of "exclusive" interviews with high-ranking Nazi officials. Even Hitler himself gave a few during his time in office. The fact that these interviews were every bit as much of a charade-merely an opportunity for Nazi officials to spout propaganda-as government press releases mattered little: what competitive-minded publisher in his right mind would turn down an exclusive interview with Hitler, Heinrich Himmler or any other member of the Third Reich's cabinet?

Nazi newsprint propagandists did not rely solely on foreign journalists to do their spadework for them. Counter-propaganda-the spinning of Allied governments' news releases-factored into the operation as well. Goebbels' department also cabled press releases directly to American newspaper offices, a more direct form of "psychological warfare" which nevertheless exploited the same basic principle of "fair news"-bad news is better than no news. In the absence of any meaningful objective analysis coming from their correspondents in Germany, newspapers often had no choice but to print, with minimal changes, these cabled releases. Thus incongruous headlines bearing Nazi talking points would appear in major American newspapers in the run-up to the war on the continent: "President Roosevelt intends to push...[United States] arm in arm with Bolshevism into war," and "Selective Service is designed to make American soldiers cannon fodder on the Continent for the sake of Jewry" were but two examples. As a reference point it should be noticed that similar cables released by the American government were usually trashed and dismissed as non-newsworthy propaganda. Editors usually explained this away with the argument that such blatant Nazi propaganda was useful if only "to show [readers] what Axis subjects were being made to think." More controversial at the time (the practice provoked considerable outrage in Freifeld's article) was the press' tendency to leave official Nazi statements and speeches unqualified: "Nazi Press Agency" notes that excerpts from Hitler's speeches were often printed verbatim in newspapers without any context. Contemporary observers were clearly frustrated by the seeming ease with which German propaganda crossed the Atlantic: while it would strike us as vividly undemocratic today, Freifeld argues in all seriousness that newspapers should print Nazi speeches only after they had been purged of anti-American language.

In large part owing its official policy of neutrality with respect to the looming conflict in Europe, the United States also bore the brunt of German radio propaganda. This type of information subterfuge covered a wide range of topics and broadcast itself in a number of different ways. By 1939, on the eve of the Nazis' invasion of Poland, Berlin's short-wave broadcasts to America totaled over eleven hours per day (in two blocks during the morning and evening peak listening times). According to Harold N. Graves' "Propaganda by Short Wave: Berlin Calling America," about one-third of these eleven hours was devoted to straight talk programs; the remainder was a hodgepodge of "operettas, variety entertainments, dance music and comic bits." English, of course, was the principal language of these programs, but it is a mark of the Nazi propaganda machine's strength that most of them were also accent-free: the propaganda ministry enlisted several Americans of varying degrees of fame to star in or host pro-Nazi programs. Fred W. Kaltenbach hosted a homey popular-news segment in which he would address "the folks back home in Iowa"; other notable figures included the actor Edward Delaney, Hunter College professor Otto Koischwitz, and (it was claimed, for the actress' credentials were never fully verified) Philadelphia socialite Constance Drexel. These programs shared the mission of Goebbels' press propaganda, although the message was generally clearer and less open to interpretation in the less information-intensive medium of radio: to instill enough doubt in the mind of the average American about the evil of the Nazi regime to ensure that public pressure to remain neutral would remain a key political consideration of a Roosevelt administration inching ever closer to an alliance with Britain and France.

Towards this aim the programs utilized a few well-studied tactics. In the early stages of the radio propaganda campaign, hosts and performers were unrelentingly friendly and benign, striving to come across as "ordinary" representatives of varying American classes-one program might cater to the blue-collar Rust Belt, another to Eastern elites, but all made sure to be as disarming as possible. And with each program came a different obfuscating technique. Recognizing the very real isolationist streak of a large portion of the country's voting public (a relic of WWI and the Depression), Nazi radio heaped lavish praise on American nativists in their blue-collar broadcasts, the not-so-subtle message being that those who wished to mind their own business (and their own continent) were on the right side of history. Goebbels countered the Roosevelt government's increasingly cozy relationship with Britain with programming which reminded Americans of their nation's "historical enmity toward Britain," often caricaturing the British as effeminate, tea-drinking ninnies who had no business dictating policy. After all, listeners were reminded, contemporary Americans' forebears felt strongly enough on this point to boot them off their land a century and a half earlier. Those Americans who did favor Britain were excoriated, predictably, as "Jews," "capitalists," or "British agents." Indeed, in the world of Berlin propaganda radio Americans were deified as the world's most exemplary "race" (save for the Germans themselves, of course) unless in addition to being American one also happened to be a Jew, a capitalist, a journalist or a politician. The final major tactic Nazi propagandists used, a concerted effort to square Nazi ideology with American values, also involved a considerable amount of oversimplification and truth-stretching. The Germans portrayed themselves as ensuring-through the unwelcome invasion, subjugation, and cultural repression of the various nations of Europe-the "unalienable liberties" of both the German people and the people of wider Europe. Many examples and analogies were employed over the years, but the historically wrongheaded comparison of the German anschloss to America's 1848 conflict with Mexico over Texas stands out in particular.

This multifaceted propaganda offensive provoked a number of different reactions, responses, and concrete policy changes in both America and Britain. Arthur Willert covers the less drastic end of the reaction spectrum in "Publicity and Propaganda in International Affairs," which details several ways in which the British and American journalistic establishments passively combated the propaganda onslaught. While-as described above-the cables Berlin sent west were often incorporated directly into print media with little critical oversight, foreign correspondents able to gather information firsthand and who possessed what Willert describes as "basic common sense" had some options available to them to infuse balance into their stories. One was to take a risk and attempt, in writing final copies to be sent back home, subtly to draw attention to the misleading, false or simply anti-democratic bits of their stories. This gambit, of course, relied on the complacency of Nazi censors and did not always prove successful. Another tack was a bit more overt: journalists would write accounts which contradicted the Nazi party line and then retreat to the cover of their diplomatic missions to avoid expulsion. This was more successful during the early years of the regime, when the government was more skittish about inflaming international tensions by expelling foreign nationals in Germany on official assignments for trivial offenses-and, in any event, this line of attack quickly stopped being viable once war broke out. Collegial ties also proved crucial: in Willert's account, each nation's correspondents, regardless of professional affiliations, presented a united front in the face of adversity and often used back-channel methods to redress grievances in the hopes that lower-level Nazi officials would be willing to make some exceptions to the rules-again, with mixed success. And as far as gathering information outside of official means went, other journalists as well as informal contacts-friends and officials (whose jobs, obviously, were at great risk should they be found out) often provided correspondents with whom they had made contact before Hitler came to power with a more realistic picture of how things looked under National Socialism.

But passive resistance on the part of a small, relatively powerless group could only do so much. Willert, writing from late 1938, outlined a number of steps Britain in particular should take to counter the Nazi information war. Firstly, he noted the rise in power of state wire services and their increasing employment in propaganda activities. Britain was at a competitive disadvantage here, having no state and only one major private news agency (Reuters). If the country was to be an effective player in this new game of psychological warfare (in a particularly far-seeing passage he predicted that such effectiveness would be needed to combat Soviet propaganda after the Nazis were gone), he reasoned, Reuters needed to submit to greater state control or at least "direction" and expand its reach into emerging markets like South America as well as beyond the borders of the toeholds it already possessed in southeast Asia. By this time Britain had fallen far behind in this regard even among fellow democracies: France's news agency had a much larger budget and as such covered a far greater portion of the globe. "Cultural propaganda"-schools, libraries, and lectures which celebrated British culture and achievements as well as art displays, periodicals, and concert tours originating on the island-was also key. Such things already existed to an extent in former colonies, but Willert argued that more aggressive action in places beyond the third world-even the United States, if only for the purposes of establishing cross-pond cultural affinity which might strengthen what was at that time a rocky alliance-was necessary. The Nazi's sophisticated short-wave operation in America did not go unmentioned here: Willert finally proscribed a similar British campaign, of course with an opposite result in mind, directed westward.

Allied response to the Nazi's information war certainly was not all talk. In America the congressional sponsors of three separate pieces of legislation passed during the run-up to the country's entry into World War II employed Nazi propaganda or the fear thereof as part of their appeal for passage. The first, the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, required the "disclosure of foreign propaganda agents [working inside the United States] subsidized or directed from foreign sources." In the interest of passage a "foreign agent" was specified to be any non-American, but it was clear that the primary targets of the bill were German. More specifically, FAR purported to monitor a) "promoters of disunity," i.e. those distributing literature or otherwise projecting a message which aimed to divide Americans along racial, religious, or demographic lines (a common Nazi tactic in later years); b) "subverters of democracy" who broadcast "doctrines alien to democracy," i.e. communists and fascists; and c) foreign policy propagandists-individuals often in the direct employ of the German government and thus possessing sufficient resources to affect domestic opinion. Exemptions to the act included diplomats, some businessmen, academics and clergymen. It is a measure of the level of concern in America regarding German subversion that many segments of the population felt that FAR did not go far enough-resulting in such pressure, indeed, that in 1941 Congress appended an amendment, the McKellar-Sumners Act, to the law which closed many of its loopholes and strengthened its language. Many of the provisions of McKellars-Sumners, for example the greatly heightened scrutiny under which it placed visiting university professors, smacked of paranoia. Yet even if it did not achieve its stated aim-preventing American entry into the continental conflict-this and other provisions should be taken as evidence that Nazi propaganda was instrumental in creating a fear among America's policymakers which drove them to take steps which were anathema to the spirit of liberal democracy. The naïve and aggressive nativism evidenced here certainly posed a serious threat to the rule of law stateside: indeed, many lawyers examining the amendment after the fact concluded that it defined "agent" too broadly-generous readings could interpret it as encompassing the relationship between naturalized immigrants and their relatives residing abroad-for the law to be enforceable.

A similar attitude informed the debate surrounding and passage of the Voorhis Act of 1940. This vaguely-worded bit of legislation mandated "the registration of all subversive organizations," foreign and domestic. The act identified four types of organizations: 1) those political in nature and "subject to foreign control," many of which were also covered by FAR; 2) domestically-based groups "engaging in both civilian and military activity;" 3) foreign-based groups of the same nature; and 4) organizations of any nature which "aim to use violence to overthrow governments." Like FAR, the act's enforcement placed a greater onus on foreign and especially German organizations. And the registration requirements were considerable, forcing organization heads to complete stacks of paperwork with no guarantee that doing so would allow them to remain in business. Some of the required disclosures were rather invasive: one asked for "the meeting places of the organization and its branches" as well as meeting times; another required a "detailed statement of the assets, liabilities, and income of the organization." The murky gray area into which the tensions with Germany, exacerbated by its forcible program of propaganda, threw America's relationship with the civil rights it so revered was made clear by the House Judiciary Committee's report on it, which said in part: "Without in any way interfering with freedom of political activity, the passage of this legislation...[would make any] political activities inimical to the constitutional government to be carried on unless the full facts concerning such activities are made known." Such tight governmental oversight certainly would not have been politically palatable were it not for the very real fear, acquired through experience, that German subversives could influence public opinion and political discourse within America.

The Alien Registration Act of 1940 was a third piece of legislation influenced by the Nazi propaganda machine and represented the zenith of anti-German wartime hysteria. The act mandated all non-US citizens staying in the country for more than thirty days to submit to fingerprinting and give the date and place of their entry, activities in which they intend to engage, the length of their stay, prior criminal records and "such additional matters as may be prescribed by the Commissioner." This law was probably the least enforceable of the three described, but its passage hints at an important political reality: namely, the need for the country's politicians to reassure its citizens that the nation was impervious to foreign influence. Having been subjected to a calculated barrage of propaganda for the previous half-decade, Americans were aware in a way our generation can hardly imagine of the potential for shrewd, malevolent forces to foment unfavorable change on their home turf. Whether or not this awareness was grounded in reality or whether it was merely paranoia-and, after all, Nazi propaganda did fail in its primary goal, i.e. keeping America on the sidelines long enough to enable Germany to conquer Britain and Russia-is beside the point.