PROPAGANDA: Heavy Blows

PROPAGANDA Heavy Blows

World War II entered its fourth week and still the fiercest offensives between the Allies and Germany were on psychological rather than physical fronts. Propaganda ministries in London, Paris and Berlin worked overtime to deliver smashing blows at their enemy’s popular morale.

Blow of the week was struck by the British, who put out a story which, if widely circulated in Germany, might do more than 100 Allied divisions to put skids under A. Hitler & Co.

“Representatives of one of the oldest and most famous institutions of its kind in the world” (obviously the Bank of England) revealed to news correspondents, as the results of a two-year search, that all the top men in A. Hitler & Co., with the sole exception of A. Hitler, long ago took care to deposit fortunes and take out big insurance policies outside of Germany. Hermann GÖring, Rudolf Hess, Paul Joseph Goebbels, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Robert Ley, Heinrich Himmler and Julius Streicher were all specifically named.* The total of their holdings was categorically fixed at $34,873,500. Banks of the U. S., South America, Japan, Luxembourg, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Egypt, Estonia, Latvia and Finland were named as depositories.

Göring was credited with $3,025,000 insurance on his life, $907,500 on his wife’s life, $3,575,000 in cash. Goebbels was given a total of $8,990,000, of which $4,635,000 was said to be cash. Ribbentrop’s figure was $9,740,000. The report named securities held for GÖring by “a German shipping firm in New York”: $750,000 worth of bonds, mostly Pennsylvania R. R., Illinois Central, Cities Service, Bethlehem Steel. It gave him three ranches in South America; $1,225,000 in a bank at Sao Paulo, Brazil; $1,000,000 in Swedish kronor, Danish kroner, Dutch guilders and Belgian francs in Banco di Sicilia’s branch at Trieste and A. B. Svenska Handelsbanken’s branch at Malmö, Sweden. He was said to have safe deposits in Zürich, Chicago ($450,000) and at Sumitomo Bank, Ltd. in San Francisco ($600,000).

If true, the report constituted an amazing piece of research. Whether true or not, it constituted a terrific piece of propaganda, not only as showing the Nazi chiefs prepared to run, but because hoarding money outside Germany is a crime in Germany, punishable by death. Sure to be whispered inside Germany, its effects may easily be serious.

> Club-footed little Dr. Goebbels, chief Nazi propagandist, was conspicuous by his obscurity in the first weeks of World War II. Last week he emerged. Besides laughing off the deposits-abroad story, his biggest job was to reiterate publicly that Germany would not invade Belgium and The Netherlands. They immediately showed how much they trusted him by completing mobilization of their full manpower, and testing their defensive self-flooding systems (see p. 20). He did a better job in exploding reports of anti-Nazi rioting in Bohemia and Moravia. At A. Hitler’s personal order, news correspondents were invited to Prague, where Secretary of State Karl Hermann Frank told them the riot storieswere “British wishful dreams.” Wishful or not, the Czechs have been trusted only in German labor battalions. Policing their district undoubtedly constitutes a strain on Heinrich Himmler’s Gestapo, which has plenty to do in glum Ostmarkand will have plenty more to do in raped Poland.

> On London bookstalls appeared a “Blue Book,” price one shilling, filled with official telegrams, speeches and letters which traced the origin of the war to A. Hitler (see p. 26). They sold 1,000 an hour.

> A story which Allied Army officers were at some pains to squelch was that British Territorial corporals have to serve tea to their squads. This was said to have made French poilus wonder why their corporals shouldn’t wait on them with red wine.

To persuade people that German soldiers have plenty of food, Berlin released official photographs taken “in the chief food supply of the Army. . . . The pictures naturally show only a small part of the huge rooms of the giant provision warehouses where pork is stored.” Likewise the British released a picture of a bustling London market with food of all kinds piled high on warehouse platforms and lorries. The British Ministry of Economic Warfare announced seizure of two tons of coffee consigned to A. Hitler personally from Aden on the Red Sea.

> France’s propaganda chief, Novelist Jean Giraudoux, retorted to A. Hitler’s Danzig speech (see p. 21) with a radioration in which he said: “The economic situation [in Germany] is already worse and at a point where the German worker has assurance of only a third of the food and goods [enjoyed by] the Allied worker.”

> Smartest French propaganda trick was playing over the radio, on German wavelengths, phonograph recordings of A. Hitler’s speeches, in his own voice, cursing Russia, praising Poland, guaranteeing the latter’s frontier, etc., etc. From Essen via Basel last week came word to Paris that Mein Kampf and other books containing anti-Soviet diatribes had been withdrawn from circulation by public libraries lest they impair present Nazi-Soviet relations.

> Berlin announced the death in action, and burial by the Germans with full military honors (to appease the French), of Lieut. Louis Paul Deschanel, 30, son of France’s onetime (1920) President Paul Deschanel.

> Italian secret police three weeks ago arrested Professor Guido Gomella, editorial writer for the semi-official Vatican City daily, Osservatore Romano, apparently because he wrote a series of articles impartial toward Britain and France. By last week the Roman circulation of impartial Osservatore Romano had jumped from 40,000 in August to 117,000.

*Simultaneously with this British story, the secret radio of the German Freedom Party broadcast that Big Nazi Julius Streicher, chief Jew-baiter of Hitler & Co., quarreled last week with Hermann GÖring over their respective scales of living, that Streicher had been flung into a concentration camp, saved from execution only by the personal intervention of A. Hitler. When interrogated about the alleged GÖring deposit, Tamotsu Nishida, manager of Sumitomo Bank, Ltd., declared: “Oh, there must be some mistake. We are only a foreign branch for the home office at Osaka. . . . We don’t accept deposits.” In Washington, SEC admitted having received the British information on A. Hitler & Co.’s foreign holdings prior to its publication, having used it in checking the registration of a proposed German bond issue (TIME, Aug. 14), now withdrawn. Washington credited A. Hitler, too, with having money abroad: about $1,000,000, mostly from royalties on Mem Kampf.