Saying black or grey propaganda doesn't apply to the Holocaust is a comment on the origins of reports about the extermination of the Jews. These reports weren't laundered through neutral sources - the role of the neutrals was to serve as listening posts for the Allies and Jewish organisations, who then did or did not publicise what they received from occupied Europe. They also weren't passed off as German claims.HansHill wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 1:04 pm Couple of observations gentlemen:
1) This has gone slightly off topic, and there seems like the want and need for a dedicated Black / Atrocity Propaganda / Demoralisation / Psyop thread, perhaps in the research forum rather than the debating forum.
2) Technically yes I agree with Sanity Check here that Black Propaganda has a very specific meaning, however Im also quick to pick up on some things he attempts to slide very deliberately. He says in one of his posts that "Black propaganda does not apply to the Holocaust". What a ridiculous thing to say. It's possible that Black propaganda does not apply to whichever niche point you specifically were mentioning in the moment, but to blanket the entirety of the holocaust as not pertinent to Black Propaganda is ridiculous.
To illustrate, a very quick google has shown the following article, which highlights very specific Psy-Ops as orchestrated by the OSS (fore runner to the CIA). While not specifically related to the Holocaust, one of the items displayed contains the stamp "Out With The Jews" which I'm sure our exterminationist friends would interpret as being genocidal (had it been genuine). So yes, Black Propaganda does feature here, we just need to be crystal clear in what we are looking at / for.
https://www.psywarrior.com/OSSBlackOpsPC.html
3) If i didn't know any better, my younger more argumentative self would have called Ad Hominem there, when Sanity Check seemingly implied Mr Stubble misused the phrase "Black Propaganda" as it sounds sinister, in an attempt to be manipulative. As much as Mr Stubble does not sound like a manipulative sort, I will let this go for now, as Sanity Check also does'nt seem the sort to rely on Ad Homs, however I will note that in my future dealings with Mr Check!
The point itself doesn't even make sense, as the phrase Mr Stubble can and arguable should be using is "Atrocity Propaganda", which sounds even better I think you're all agree!
The open source intelligence effort was considerable, and enough copies survive of German and Axis publications to show that OSINT reports such as highlighting a Hitler speech or Goebbels article were reporting their actual words. But the German and Axis press never overtly discussed specific cases or methods, and typically censored reports of publicised reprisals in the occupied territories published in newspapers outside Germany. So OSINT corroborated the reports from undergrounds and governments-in-exile, since when Dolfy kept on referring to the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe in parallel to all kinds of reports about mass killings, eventually people started to believe he really meant what he said.
In opinion/mood reports, intelligence and home intelligence reports, whether done by propaganda ministries or their Allied equivalents (MOI, OWI), the intelligence services or indeed anyone, a great deal of attention is paid to rumour, most of which bubbled up organically from below and which was obviously wrong. The effectiveness of specific propaganda campaigns via leafleting and the like, as well as the monitoring of outright black propaganda efforts such as Sefton Delmer's operation, was also measured and discussed. The Allies certainly did use overt propaganda - leaflet drops which did sometimes mention summaries on atrocities - but sparingly.
The black propaganda side that I have looked at certainly did occasionally mention the persecution of the Jews but in very general terms, sometimes as established fact, and was not the source of the specific claims about specific sites and camps - those came from undergrounds, and were also recorded independently in diaries and letters, before anyone might have reported on them.
Overt propaganda also included radio broadcasts to occupied countries, and one can trace this in diaries; the BBC reporting of the Bund report reached the Warsaw ghetto (so Ringelblum was pleased that his group's efforts compiling reports had been given some publicity) as well as the Netherlands and France, Anne Frank in her diary in mid-1942 had heard of gassing, but did not believe it.
'Atrocity propaganda' is also an unhelpful term, since the German reflex from the 1930s was to dismiss everything as Greuelpropaganda in much the same way that Trump dismissed anything he disliked as fake news. It was kneejerk and represented a fundamental refusal to concede anything.
The track record with reporting, and thus propaganda, about atrocities across wars shows fewer cases of invention than might be thought, alongside a lot of partisan dismissals of atrocities, from both left and right. If one's priors are to dismiss all atrocity reports outright, or do so on a partisan/nationalist basis, you're very likely a twat, as we've seen recently with the collapse of the Assad regime causing many tankie tears to flow, despite their shilling for a murderous dictator, and as was seen on the left with Stalinism. That still allows for acknowledging cases where things were exaggerated at the time or embellished, but the pattern with such things is not really as clear-cut as the 'spun to justify western imperialism' line as some have claimed, based on a bit of cherrypicking.
It also doesn't factor in the atrocities that emerge from western wars or how these can coexist with atrocities on the other side. Abu Ghraib in the Iraq war/occupation happened, so did suicide bombing and eventually the expansion of ISIS. My Lai happened in Vietnam not long after the Hue massacres by the NVA and Vietcong. The rights and wrongs of both wars were relatively independent of atrocities. The US tolerated massive killing campaigns against communists in Indonesia and Latin America, at the same time as communist China was convulsed in violence, and not long after the Khmer Rouge had autogenocided the Cambodian people (while also targeting ethnic minorities for especial attention).
You'll not find many who will deny there was a massacre of Polish officers at Katyn - just Russian nationalists and tankies clinging to the Soviet deflection of blaming it on the Germans. Katyn was 'atrocity propaganda' and the Nazis were technically right, even if they exaggerated it ever so slightly. The Nazis exaggerated other genuine atrocities, such as Polish killings of ethnic Germans in 1939 (multiplied tenfold), the bombing of Dresden, and more. Or spun things in a dubious way, such as blaming NKVD prison massacres in eastern Poland in 1941 on 'the Jews'.
The Wiki page is not bad in pointing out the known/accepted cases of distortion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda
One thing with 1942 that was noted at the time in the war and subsequently is the massive discrepancy between the Allied propaganda campaign around the Lidice reprisal, and how much attention the killings of Jews received. The Germans had announced the reprisal and thus Allied propagandists could run with this admission. This built on a wave of publicity in 1941 for the increased rate of repression and reprisals across occupied Europe, which the Germans had publicised at the very least locally. Again, this eclipsed reporting on the fate of the Jews, and continued to do so into 1942, since ongoing reprisal executions were a reliable source of in brief news stories, since the Germans were not shy about announcing them for Serbia, France, etc. Allied propagandists had even said to themselves, as the British Ministry of Information did in 1941, to downplay atrocity reports and especially not with Jews.
The entire theme of atrocity reporting in WWII needs contextualising, since the reporting included violence against non-Jews, and especially for the US also reporting on Japanese atrocities. But some famous cases were delayed and censored, as with coverage of the Bataan death march.
In the end, the general propaganda of each side also needs acknowledgement, since the logic of liberating a country from Axis rule was that the country did not necessarily wish to be subjected to Axis domination and salami-sliced with annexations (in Europe), while the Axis did have a potentially logical case to make against Soviet communism and western imperialism. The Axis just blew it, especially Nazi Germany, who managed to piss off the whole of Europe including most of their former allies by 1944.
I'd also highlight how several major campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Europe during WWII were almost entirely ignored at the time; western reporting on Croatia was minimal, whereas German and Italian internal reporting was crystal clear about what the Ustashe was up to. The Polish underground press reported on the UPA in Volhynia, but this had virtually no legs in the Allied press internationally.
There's finally an issue with bandying around propaganda a lot when one needs to consider censorship and media interest dynamics. Reports from the Polish underground about Auschwitz were conveyed regularly to London to the government-in-exile, including various very detailed reports, but these were not given much publicity, leading one historian, Michael Fleming, to conclude that they were censored or downplayed explicitly, which had various causes (the British government was trying to backpedal to avoid dealing with refugees, the Polish government-in-exile was concerned about the fate of Poles). The reports did however make it into relatively obscure Polish Jewish newspapers in London, and the underground press in Poland publicised them as well.
When the Vrba-Wetzler report reached Switzerland, it was transmitted to the UK and US and received publicity, alongside printing more of the Polish government-in-exile reports on Auschwitz that were independent of the Vrba-Wetzler report. Politicians in the UK and US had already weighed in with warnings about Hungary, before the report broke, and there was more coverage of the suspension of deportations after further back channel and public warnings from a variety of provenances. But in practice, there was so much else going on in the summer of 1944, not least the Normandy campaign and the Soviet offensives in the east, that as with earlier reports, there was massive competition with news from the battlefields.
In Switzerland, the report received extensive coverage, in comparison to a fairly tight censorship regime especially in 1943. Coverage in the media of a neutral country can't be reduced prima facie to propaganda; neither the Allies nor Jewish organisations could dictate to editors what to say, they could only put a story out there, and apparently according to scholars who've counted the number of stories, the story resonated.
It probably wasn't until the wave of publicity for the liberation of the camps in spring 1945 that Nazi atrocities really cut through - because these could be reported more conventionally, with journalists on-site, the opportunity to film for newsreels, do interviews, and so on.
Some things just resonate, otherwise Solzhenitsyn would never have had as much coverage internationally, even though publicising him was 'effective' anticommunist propaganda (both for current repression and past atrocities).
