HansHill wrote: ↑Sat Jan 18, 2025 3:18 pm
SanityCheck wrote: ↑Sat Jan 18, 2025 3:12 pm
How many countries did Germany occupy or invade, and how many declared war on Germany by 1945?
Or do you have a problem comprehending the difference between singular and plurals?
Don't be rude, Mr Check. We're not "conspiraloons" for observing co-ordinated atrocity propaganda efforts amongst the Allies.
"But that's just a singular example"
Fine. Katyn. Now it's plural.
Prove the coordination in 1933-1939 if you think Hektor is right that there was an "atrocity propaganda campaign" singular going on which "even started prior to WW2". Then prove the coordination from September 1939-December 1941 while the US was still neutral.
The coordination must be either total, or the reporting of atrocities in Nazi Germany, in peace or war, is not reducible to a singular propaganda campaign. Which would be entirely unprecedented in human history.
Propaganda in the most neutral sense is about spin and hype - giving extra publicity to particular reports, and encouraging a particular frame. The media, however, even when subject to strict government control (as in Nazi Germany or the USSR) or wartime censorship, always has the potential to interpret an official line or official propaganda in its own frames, it can add its own spin as well. Close control and censorship may adjust this, but there are enough irate directives from the German Propaganda Ministry about what to emphasise more and expressing complaints to show that the same raw material (wire service reports and national news agencies) could be spun and framed slightly differently.
Western governments had no control over how foreign correspondents in Germany might report on Kristallnacht. They did have the 'control check' of consular and embassy level diplomatic dispatches, which pointed in the same direction. As a breaking news story emerging from many sources (albeit with a Berlin bias given where most correspondents were based), outside interests had little ability to affect the story as it broke straight away. And there were of course reports in Sweden, Switzerland and elsewhere, future neutrals. The Nazi regime could not expect to cover such an event up or dismiss it with the usual 'Greuelpropaganda' kneejerk reflex, except in the minds of its enthusiasts in pro-Nazi movements elsewhere in the world. Everyone else reacted according to their priors or changed their priors based on the new information of a country-wide wave of property damage, violence and mass arrests of 10s of 1000s of German male Jews.
This made some difference, e.g. greater British willingness to accept refugees in 1939 in the UK, but not everywhere, e.g. the US maintaining strict immigration control, Sweden and Switzerland tightening their immigration control further, and the British issuing the 1939 White Paper restricting further immigration to Palestine. It made relatively little difference to overall foreign policy and strategy (rearmament vs appeasement), since events like the annexation of the Czech lands were the decisive ones in 1939, just as the Sudeten crisis was decisive in 1938 before Kristallnacht. Britain in particular was separating the domestic persecution of Jews in the Third Reich from diplomatic and strategic considerations; the US as well, since neutrality and isolationism prevailed.
British wartime propaganda followed a common tactic of
granting access to US media figures during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz in 1940. This seems to have made most difference to US public opinion, which naturally swung behind the victims of Nazi aggression and Britain 'standing alone', without wishing to be involved in the war directly, which was the entire paradox of 1940-41. The various governments-in-exile, especially the Polish government-in-exile, had a few things to holler about in 1939-41 but the reporting of goings on under German occupation was still subordinate to
war news. With a fairly constant series of events involving Germany, Italy, Britain plus the other western and Mediterranean European countries. Japan's machinations also mattered, and ultimately proved decisive as the US public reacted to events in December 1941. The US certainly did not go to war on behalf of 'the Jews'; there was enough prejudice and overt antisemitism to make harping on about Jewish suffering up to 1941 not a propaganda winner.
So in the immediate run up to the German declaration of war on the United States in autumn 1941, the press in Britain and the US reported on a story which the Germans were semi-publicising, an uptick in reprisals in the wake of 'Barbarossa', as unrest and resistance spread across the European continent - in Serbia, France and elsewhere. The German occupation press frequently reported on these reprisals, but the German papers were barred from circulation inside Germany and Austria. They could still be acquired via neutral countries so used to report factually on what the Germans had claimed, in addition to underground and government-in-exile reports. British and American leaders made noises about this wave of repression, without discussing the upsurge of mass killings of Jews (which the British at least knew about from signals intercepts, in part). It certainly contributed to weakening the image of German occupation authorities, which had at least in the west in 1940-first part of 1941 been very restrained for reprisals.
The ongoing story about reprisals and repression continued well into 1942, and climaxed with the news of the Lidice reprisal in the wake of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The Germans had announced Lidice, the now forming US official government propaganda agencies could join the British and other government agencies in spotlighting an admitted reprisal.
During the war, especially from 1942-1945, Inter-Allied and United Nations efforts existed, synthesising already known materials; the British MOI and US OWI and other British and US government agencies certainly also got involved in publicising atrocities, again usually synthesising or publishing already known materials. The Lidice 'campaign' was one of the first where one sees this cascading up from state to IAIC and UN publications.
Consider reports on Auschwitz in 1944 reaching the Allied press. Some came from the Czechoslovak government-in-exile even before Vrba-Wetzler report was released, some came from the Polish government-in-exile through the Polish underground and from them, the Auschwitz camp underground. The Vrba-Wetzler report was publicised in Switzerland by a variety of Allied and government-in-exile sources - offices, consulates, embassies in Switzerland. Then the US War Refugee Board HQ in Washington, DC issued the full report in November 1944 together with two other accounts received from Auschwitz escapees (Mordowicz-Rosin and Tabeau).
In this case, the WRB was not the originator of the report - that would be the authors of the accounts. Nor was it alone in publicising the gist of the report in mid-1944. It only amplified the report by publishing it more or less in full (minus some names to protect against retaliation).
By contrast, Yankiel Wiernik's A Year in Treblinka was originally published by the Polish underground in occupied Warsaw in the first half of 1944. It was smuggled out of Poland along with other reports reaching among other destinations the Jewish Agency in Palestine after May 1944, since the Jewish underground dispatched a copy to them. It reached the US and was translated into English, then was published by the American Representation of the General Jewish Workers' Union of Poland, i.e. the socialist, non-Zionist Bund, in New York. Press coverage of this appeared in New York daily newspapers like P.M. in late autumn 1944, i.e. close to the same time as the WRB Report appeared.
Wiernik appearing in English wasn't US government propaganda. It wasn't even Jewish propaganda by way of origin since the Polish underground was the original publisher. The Bund was the US publisher, and while Jewish, wasn't Zionist. Nor did the account contain any Zionist spin or arguments. The publication did not guarantee press coverage, and indeed only some New York newspapers seem to have noticed at the time, whereas most newspapers ran stories about the WRB report, as the WRB was a US government agency, and thus may have been perceived to have a more official imprimatur.
Your example of Billy Wilder and Death Mills illustrates the same problem with assuming there was a singular propaganda campaign, rather than lots of different countries, perspectives, political factions, religious organisations and others reacting to news from Germany and occupied Europe.
As is apparently news to some people on this thread, SHAEF's PWD was a multinational agency and included British officers and officials.
In 1945, the British and Americans liberated various concentration camps and also sites like Hadamar, a euthanasia centre. These were filmed evidently by both British and US camera crews; the US camera crews belonged to a subunit of the US Army Signal Corps. From there some of the footage evidently ended up in newsreels at home in the US and Britain.
PWD was disbanded at the end of July 1945, but not before the British and US separately began projects to edit together footage from the liberation of the camps into documentaries. With the disbandment of PWD, the British project was shelved.
The British version was to be entitled 'German Concentration Camps Factual Survey' with a length of 75 minutes; it was never completed or released. Alfred Hitchcock advised on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Co ... ual_Survey
The US version was 'Death Mills', lasting 22 minutes, with Billy Wilder nominally directing the English language version, but as he later said, he didn't direct anything as "there was nothing to direct".Considering the footage already existed, this is entirely correct, and also why Hitchcock was not a director but an advisor to the much longer British version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Mills
The same footage was also edited together as 'Nazi Concentration Camps' in a film lasting 58 minutes which was screened at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, breaking new legal ground in introducing film footage into court, and causing a shock to the defendants, who unsurprisingly had been unable to follow American or British newsreels during the collapse of the Third Reich. 'Nazi Concentration Camps' is credited for direction to George Stevens, who actually did lead the camera crew unit that produced much of the footage, and was a US production rather than a joint British-US production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Conc ... mps_(film)
Stevens also produced The Nazi Plan lasting 192 minutes for Nuremberg, using *only* German newsreel footage.
British and US newsreels, Nazi Concentration Camps at IMT and Death Mills undoubtedly shared common footage, but for different purposes. Death Mills/Todesmuehle had a propagandistic intent to 'reeducate' the German people in occupied west Germany. Death Mills as shown to US audiences was a government information short film, by virtue of coming from the government it was propaganda in a loose sense. Newsreels from British Pathe and other companies were broadcasting government-filmed footage that was considered *news*, whether that was uncovering a particular camp or seeing Eisenhower and Patton visit a camp.
Death Mills, unlike Nazi Concentration Camps, incorporated Soviet film footage from the liberation of Majdanek and Auschwitz. The Soviets presented their own film at IMT, and one presumes they also made some of this available worldwide for potential use in newsreels or documentaries, given the sharing with the US for Death Mills, while they also would have made some newsreels or films domestically. That would be interesting to research further.
Nazi Concentration Camps barely mentioned Jews - they are named as one of several nationalities in some camps, essentially never in their own right. Death Mills in the English version
doesn't mention Jews at all.
Nazi Concentration Camps is very restrained in mentioning numbers in the voiceover. Death Mills lacks such restraint, and the splicing and editing means it rushes through various camps, whereas in Nazi Concentration Camps each has its own clear segment - on Hadamar, Buchenwald, Belsen, etc. Nazi Concentration Camps was thus more documentarian, although it also had a voice over, because it was longer, whereas Death Mills was the YouTube short clip of its day at 22 minutes.
The overall effect of multi-media news coverage - newsreels, radio, press reporting - was long lasting on the British and American publics. But national links meant that Belsen loomed much larger in British memory while Buchenwald and Dachau loomed much larger in American memory. While we Brits are less than a fifth of the US population, this is still a large enough number to make a Brit skeptical of US-centric whining. And some of you guys aren't even American so should know better. The emphasis on the camps liberated in Germany tended to universalise Nazi crimes, which is why despite all kinds of reports in the war and in 1945 about the persecution and extermination of the Jews, it took decades for the Holocaust to emerge in its own right beyond the Jewish world (where it was called the catastrophe, Khurbn or Shoah).
The effects of multi-media news coverage in continental European countries was also different. The showing of Death Mills in the US occupation zone of what became West Germany didn't make an enormous immediate difference to West German comprehension of Nazi crimes. Much went on at a lower level and only snowballed nationally through the 1960s to 1970s, while local interest and initiatives mattered enormously in the 1970s-1980s, before being nationalised again after reunification in the 1990s. Poland followed a very different trajectory, France as well. The GDR had its own spin, the Soviet Union was reticent in some moments and more active in others, but like many of these countries tended to universalise the victims, just as the US propaganda film Death Mills had in 1945.
Ultimately, you guys need something better than the blanket 'Greuelpropaganda' reflex which annihilates the differences between countries, political factions, interest groups and different levels of publicity and which amounts to gaslighting about abuse and violence. A domestic abuser might convince his victim that nothing bad is going on, that generally doesn't work at societal levels or continentally. Not even the Soviet Union managed to gaslight the world about Stalinist violence forever. But according to revisionist logic every story about Stalinist violence or the camps is 'propaganda' including Solzhenitsyn's writings. Whether or not something is 'propaganda' is not dependent on whose ox is being gored - otherwise the one sided dismissal of reports as propaganda is indeed basically the same kind of apologism and gaslighting for rape and domestic abuse we see from abusers.
