Foreign News: Fact & Fiction

What is propaganda? Once the word meant nothing more than the legitimate promulgation of ideas. World War I and the methods of totalitarian governments later gave the word a new meaning, linked it to organized, wide-scale lying, the deliberate manufacture of atrocity stories, misrepresentation of enemy aims, minimizing of enemy successes, exaggeration of enemy defeats, the conscious manipulation of sentiments to arouse war spirit, hatred of the enemy at home and sympathy among neutrals abroad. The pattern of propaganda remains the same, though varying in degree and accent according to the country it comes from. The threefold task of propaganda ministries will still be in World War II as it was in World War I: 1) to undermine enemy morale; 2) hearten home forces; 3) give neutrals the very best impression possible.

Great Britain and Germany came out of World War I with diametrically opposed attitude toward propaganda. Defeated Germans, unwilling to believe in military defeat, believed that Allied cleverness in propaganda, their own clumsiness in it, was largely responsible. On the subject both Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg were almost pathological. Manifestoed Hindenburg: “The enemy . . . seeks to poison our spirit. . . . His airmen throw down leaflets which are intended to kill the soul.”

British situation was the reverse. Great Britain came out of World War I with a group of battle-scarred veterans of propaganda and a world-wide reputation for amazing cleverness in molding public opinion. For many a post-War year the seediest remittance man in South America was judged a secret agent; the hungriest British novelist lecturing to the U. S. was thought by many to be a Foreign Office spokesman. Britain’s propaganda office was not organized until long after the invasion of Belgium, nevertheless reaction gave neutrals an enduring suspicion of Britons bearing news.

Shadow. But the wheels of propaganda were beginning to buzz in their various ways last week as two novelists and a Scottish lawyer fought to reach the eyes and ears of the world with the best cases they could make for the conduct of their warring countries. One novelist was Paul Joseph Goebbels, author (at 24) of Michael, probably as bad a book as has ever been published, and operator (at 41) of the most powerful, most smoothly organized publicity machine the world has ever seen.

The other novelist was Jean Hippolyte Giraudoux, author (at 39) of Suzanne and the Pacific, one of the funniest and freshest of modern French novels, and director (at 56) of France’s brand-new, slow-starting Bureau des Informations.

But because of its past pluperfect grade performance and present eccentricity, most interest centred last week on the propaganda plant of the Scottish lawyer. When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made Baron Macmillan of Aberfeldy Britain’s Minister of Information, he gave the 66-year-old peer one of the toughest, one of the most delicate, of Britain’s wartime jobs. It was one of the undeveloped “shadow ministries.” Lord Macmillan had to organize a staff to sift and relay war news after war news had already begun to come in. He had to establish censorship after censorable news was already jamming the wires (see p. 59).

An amiable war horse of British political life, the sort of indulgent after-dinner speaker who keeps a card index of good jokes, stuffs his pockets with them when he goes to a banquet, Lord Macmillan was a youthful prodigy at the University of Edinburgh, was admitted to the Scottish bar at 24 and became editor of a legal review at 27. Then his career hit an eleven-year gap of unpublicized performance from which it emerged in 1918, to reveal the young lawyer as Assistant Director of Intelligence in Britain’s Wartime Ministry of Information. After the War, Scot Macmillan was a congenital committee chairman: of committees investigating lunacy and mental disorders, street offenses, the coal dispute, the wage dispute in the wool industry, income-tax revision—plodding jobs that won him the confidence of British officials.

If Lord Macmillan’s first task was to undo Britain’s reputation for cleverness, he could not have started more brilliantly. Nobody could accuse Britain’s propaganda of functioning smoothly last week. It was clumsy, amateurish, slow-starting, gave an impression like that of a sincere but badly staged show in which stagehands dropped things during big speeches, and the curtain came down at the wrong time.

Britain’s first air-raid scare produced two flatly conflicting stories passed through the censor to the U. S. before the War Office’s own propaganda agency (under oldtime Hackwriter Ian Hay) got out the third or “official version” (see p. 15). Foreign correspondents were driven into a frenzy by the slow and clumsy handling of news of the torpedoing of the Athenia; Britain’s feat-of-the-week, the bombings of German naval bases, was announced as laconically as the results of target practice; in line with British belief that false hopes should not be raised, French troop movements on the Western Front were reported with so little detail they sounded downright dreamy. While Germany’s Propaganda Ministry (see col. 2) exulted over the capture of each unpronounceable Polish town, and handed over photographs of Hitler at the front, Hitler comforting the wounded, Hitler sitting in an automobile, Hitler peering through a telescope, Lord Macmillan at first clamped down on all wire and radio photos. Main channel of Britain’s publicity appeared to be the radio, over which announcers with an air of detached candor and without heat discussed military operations; and the cinema. Moving newsreels of evacuation of children from London, of mothers weeping at the separation from their children, placed the responsibility for Europe’s anguish where Britain wanted it placed: on Adolf Hitler, who in German photos was shown smiling at the sound of guns.

Main line of Britain’s publicity as it appeared outside Great Britain during Lord Macmillan’s first week was not to arouse hatred against Germany, but to show that normal European life was impossible unless Hitler was overthrown; not to arouse awe of Britain’s military might, but to win confidence in Britain’s aims.

Speed. While Britain drowsed in the propagandist shadows last week, whipped to full speed was Dr. Goebbels’ powerful Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, which even in peacetime spends some $100,000,000 a year, employs 25,000. Twenty-four hours after German troops entered Poland, neutral newsmen had photographs of German troops on the march. Tanks, big guns, bombers, ruined villages, prisoners, wounded, mutilated bodies, charred houses, refugee children, smashed bridges, all added up to create an impression of overwhelming military strength, dramatized the speed of Germany’s advance.

But not only striking photographs and detailed accounts of the capture of cities demonstrated Dr. Goebbels’ swift work:

> Forty-eight hours after Poles announced that the “holy city” of Czestochowa had been bombed, high-speed operators had photographs of Polish women and children worshipping at the shrine in the presence of a German soldier. This piece of propaganda hit three ways: defensively, it gave the lie to Polish charges; appealed to neutral opinion; was an attempt to convince Poles that Germans were really their friends who respected their relics.

> Basic Nazi technique of systematically shocking and sickening the population, making it apathetically submissive to totalitarian control, was worked hard. Last week Germans took United Pressman Fred Oechsner on a tour of captured Polish villages, showed him the bodies of 25 villagers, claimed they had been mutilated and killed by retreating Poles.

> Third great line of German propaganda: to prepare for a peace move after the conquest of Poland. This was done not only in Marshal Goring’s Berlin speech-of-the-week, but through the papers of Axis chums in Italy. If peace did not come, the gambit had another usefulness. Germany had no way to escape the guilt of firing the first shot of the war, but the Nazis hoped to create the impression that the British and French could stop it.

France. Hidden in secrecy was France’s Bureau des Informations. But the main French policy has long been known: “The brutal propaganda of the Axis powers has not always been favorable to their reputations. . . . We will not stoop to the showy advertising to which our rivals have resorted. . . . The propaganda of France must be of an informative character.”

Also well-known is Director Jean Giraudoux, who seemed likely to make France’s war news exciting if any Frenchman was going to. But French official war communiques, while a little newsier than the British, were as guarded as Devil’s Island. It was as though the French were reluctant to make big claims lest they have to retract them later.

A diplomat, dramatist (Amphytrion 38), novelist and profound student of national characteristics, Author Giraudoux came out of World War I a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Typical Giraudoux observation of current interest to U. S. readers: “The Americans . . . always fight themselves. When they were English, they fought the English, as soon as they were Americans they fought each other. When their culture became sufficiently Germanic, they fought Germany. The first American who took a prisoner in 1917 was named Meyer. So was his prisoner.”

Effect. War being what it is, War II’s propaganda emphasizing isolated horrors seemed likely to undershoot the mark. The generation of 1914 had little comprehension of war’s atrociousness. It was consequently more receptive to “atrocity” tales than the generation of 1939, shocked by one war after another during the 20-year “peace,” could possibly be.

An atmosphere of sweet reason will probably have the greatest effect in the propaganda of World War II.