Paper
War: Nazi Propaganda in One Battle, On
a Single Day, Cassino, Italy, May 11,
1944
No editor or author listed; introduction
by Randall Bytwerk
Mark Batty Publisher, LLC, West New York,
NJ, 2005
64 pp., illus. Trade: $16.95
ISBN: 0-9762245-0-X.
The
Goebbels Experiment
by Lutz Hachmeister and Michael Kloft,
Directors
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn NY, 2004
VHS, 107 mins., b/w, col.
Sales: $398; rental: $125 US
Distributors website: http://wwwfrif.com.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University
Center MI 48710 USA.
mosher@svsu.edu
Paper War documents the immediate
use of print disinformation in one battle
on a single day of World War II. Over
Cassino, Italy, on May 11, 1944, the Germans
dropped 14 different leaflets in various
languages in hopes of demoralizing the
Allied troops they faced. These leaflets
were collected by Peter Batty (1924-2004),
a British solider who served as a liaison
officer with the rank of Captain in the
Indian army. As the German army barraged
the enemy with bullets, bombs, and paper,
Batty collected the leaflets dropping
around him. One can imagine another soldier
pondering as the archivist stuffed his
pockets ,"Oi, Batty, wots with all
the leaflets then, aye?"
Evidently the Nazis misidentified the
Allied troops, firing a total of 14 different
leaflets in a succession of four languages:
English, Polish, Urdu, and Hindi. Different
messages and different graphics were used
to appeal to, or dishearten, each intended
ethnic audience. These images played on
prejudices like Polish antisemitism, anticommunism,
or anti-Hindu racism. Others (like the
ones dropped on the Germans in retaliation
by the British) are purportedly letters
from girlfriends back home imploring them
to give up.
The leaflets are reproduced full size,
translated into English. One is immediately
struck by the preponderance of text in
the propaganda. Much like the American
LIFE magazine advertisements of
the era, it is not a central visual image
that convinces but a written story. Whereas
the magazine advertisements of the day
might provide unnamed physicians who discuss
the health benefits of Camel brand cigarettes,
the propaganda of Cassino provides a typical
English soldiers praises for the
German Armys humane treatment upon
his surrender.
An introduction by Randall Bytwerk discusses
the leaflets in the context of Hitler
and Goebbels Nazi propaganda machinery.
Bytwerk reminds us that propaganda is
not synonymous with lying, but is often
most effectively the use of selective
truths repeated often enough to crowd
out competing information. Paper War
is an enjoyable piece of military, propaganda,
communication, and design history. The
publisher Mark Batty, who has delivered
numerous fine books on typography, graphic
design, and visual culture, reminds the
design professionals among this books
readers to consider the logistics of design,
production, and delivery of print propaganda
within the heat of battle. This book might
have been published more cheaply as a
paperback, but it stands as a fine memorial
to the soldier-collector whose ephemeral
file from Cassino is worthy of study in
our war-torn and heavily propagandized
world today.
If any time of war is the appropriate
time to contemplate the Nazi propagandists,
a video called The Goebbels Experiment
further helps us to do that. Originally
a contemporary German television production,
actor Kenneth Branagh reads excepts from
Joseph Goebbels own journals as
its soundtrack. The footage, remarkably
clean (or digitally cleaned up), is from
German propaganda movies of the 1930s,
some of it in sparkling color.
We meet Joseph Goebbels as a grim young
man in a black leather jacket, full of
resentments and pettiness. He laments
the loss of a book of poems, though there
is no mention of the novel he wrote as
a teenager Michael (a name that means
the German everyman, like the US moniker,
John Doe). Goebbels rails at the Weimar
government and especially the Jews. He
consorts with women, marries, and, while
serving as a top Nazi official, has an
affair with a Czech actress he meets on
a movie set. A shortcoming of the productions
"Dear Diary" format is that history rolls
on even when our protagonist is oblivious
to it, or otherwise too occupied to write
it down. The Germans are losing the war
in the spring of 1945, and though we had
seen early glimpses of Goebbels
burned corpse to foreshadow his end, his
diary is strangely silent as Berlin falls
to the Russian troops, his wife Magda
Goebbels kills his children, and he shoots
himself.
That was Joseph Goebbels personal
life, but it is his professional mark
for which he is still remembered. His
effectiveness as a rabble-rouser, plus
the roiling politics of the Nazi Party,
made him rise quickly in the party and
brought him the role of Minister of Peoples
Enlightenment and Propaganda. In March,
1933 he soon mastered the controlled use
of the press conference and of the assiduous
filming of official speeches by Der Feuhrer
Hitler and other top Nazis to be shown
in theaters shortly after they had been
broadcast over radio. This must be the
"experiment" to which the filmmakers
title refers, the savvy discovery of the
controlled use of mass media. In his essay
in Paper War, Bytwerk points out
thatmuch to Goebbels
consternationHitler also had
other Nazi leaders generate propaganda
throughout the war.
As both Paper War and The Goebbels
Experiment demonstrate, truth is the
first casualty of war. In 2006, as the
bloody Iraq War grinds on, one might study
The Goebbels Experiment for clues
to the mass media machinations, by Karl
Rove and others, from US President Bushs
White House.