ABSTRACT
The history of Nazi propaganda during the war is one of declining effectiveness. This is hardly surprising. War imposes considerable strains on political systems, even a so-called ‘textbook police state’ like Nazi Germany. The difficulties for propaganda were exacerbated by the distinct lack of enthusiasm for the announcement of war. This lack of enthusiasm reflected the basic contradiction between propaganda that presented Hitler as a ‘man of peace’ who had successfully ‘revised’ the Treaty of Versailles without German bloodshed, and an ideology and economy that were inexorably linked to struggle and war. However, as we have seen, the SD noted that propaganda quickly persuaded the population that war was unavoidable and had been forced upon them, and the success of Blitzkrieg only served to increase the people's faith in Hitler's protean ability. The dissemination of the core themes in the Party's ideology that I outlined in Chapter 4 did not suddenly stop in 1939, but the exigencies of war demanded that propaganda should respond to military developments. The débâcle of Stalingrad undoubtedly affected the morale of the German people. It forced them to question Nazi war aims and led to a crisis of confidence in the regime amongst broad sections of the population. Nazi propaganda had become so intrinsically linked to German military success that defeat after Stalingrad found propaganda in a difficult position. The leadership's inability to prevent the Allied bombing campaigns and its failure to hit back by means of the much-heralded ‘revenge’ weapon, further undermined its credibility, particularly in the urban centres. In the final two years of the war Goebbels was still capable of achieving some propaganda successes, but the overriding conclusion must be that propaganda failed to compensate for the worsening military situation. The complexity of German society, from which emerged a range of attitudes and responses shaped by geographical, class and religious affiliations as well as by propaganda, repression and terror, ensured that the civilian population held out until 1945 in an increasingly hopeless struggle. We should be wary, however, of drawing conclusions similar to that of Robert Herzstein, who has interpreted this willingness to fight on as proof of a Goebbels ‘victory’.1
