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Censorship in Nazi Germany was extreme and strictly enforced by the governing Nazi Party, but specifically by Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Similarly to many other police states both before and since, censorship within Nazi Germany included the silencing of all past and present dissenting voices. In addition to the further propaganda weaponization of all forms of mass communication, including newspaper, music, literature, radio, and film, by the State,[1] the Ministry of Propaganda also produced and disseminated their own literature, which was solely devoted to spreading Nazi ideology and the Hitler Myth.
With disturbingly close similarities to Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union, crude caricatures were used to dehumanize and stir up hatred against the single party state's both real and imagined opponents. This lay at the core of the Ministry's output, especially in anti-Semitic propaganda films such as Jud Süß and The Eternal Jew. Also similarly to the Soviet film industry under Joseph Stalin, the Ministry also promoted a secular messianic cult of personality surrounding Adolf Hitler, particularly through films such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.
What is worse, a highly ironic parallel to the many cases of Stalinist damnatio memoriae and censoring of photographs exposed in David King's The Commissar Vanishes, may be seen in the events surrounding Leni Riefenstahl's 1933 Nazi propaganda film The Victory of Faith. It was almost immediately banned, however, after high level Nazi Party member Ernst Röhm, whose close friendship with Hitler is very visible and prominently emphasized in the film, was shot without trial in the 1934 political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.
Meanwhile, as many other Orwellian political parties have done both before and since, the Nazis set out in many other ways to completely rewrite German history and the history of German literature to conform to Nazi ideology and condemned everything that contradicted their fictitious claims to "the memory hole" of historical negationism. They were harshly criticized for this at the time by figures including Clemens von Galen, Sigrid Undset, Dietrich von Hildebrand, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Among the thousands of books burned on Berlin's Opernplatz in 1933, following the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, were works by one of the most iconic individuals ever to write in the German language, the German Jewish Romantic poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). To both memorialize and criticize Nazi ideological censorship, the oft-quoted and eerily prophetic lines from Heine's 1821 stage play Almansor, were put in a plaque at the site: (German: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.") ("That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.")[2]
Even though the German people are traditionally stereotyped as blindly obedient to authority, excessive government censorship stirred up the same backlash commonly seen in many other countries. Despite the extremely high risks involved, public demand created a black market for banned literature, which continued to be published throughout the global German diaspora by Exilliteratur firms, and especially for allegedly "degenerate" American Jazz and Swing Music, which were acquired anyway and devoured in secret by the early beginnings of an anti-Nazi youth dissident movement.
Moreover, Nazi ideological censorship triggered a brain drain that proved devastating to Germany and Austria's once dynamic literary, artistic, and cultural life and to the once radically innovative and pioneering German film industry. Many cities throughout the world became population centers of anti-Nazi German and Austrian refugees, including many highly important poets, writers, scientists, and intellectuals who had fled to maintain their freedom of expression. Many of Germany and Austria's best actors, directors, and film technicians, including Fritz Lang, Max Reinhardt, William Dieterle, Fred Zinnemann, Conrad Veidt, Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamar, Peter Lorre, and many others like them often emigrated for very similar reasons and continued their careers by aiding the Allied war effort as anti-Nazi filmmakers in Hollywood. It was even more damaging to Austria and Germany's intellectual, literary, and cultural life that, despite the eventual end of Nazi Party rule in 1945, most of these highly talented refugees never returned.
Even so, many Allied policy makers and propagandists took the claims of Goebbels Ministry about German history and culture at face value, particularly following the outbreak of World War II. This lack of insight led to both widespread Anti-German sentiment and calls by influential figures like Ilya Ehrenberg, Edvard Beneš, Theodore N. Kaufman, and Abba Kovner, for total war tactics and even for ethnic cleansing even genocide against the German people following the end of the war, which were far more widely carried out in the postwar Soviet Bloc, than in what became West Germany.
In actual practice, giving German POWs easy access to banned art, music, motion pictures, and literary works was found in the United States to be a very effective tool of deprogramming them from Nazi ideology. For this reason, several former POWs held in the United States went on to highly influential positions in the literary and cultural life of the Federal Republic of Germany, where the Marshall Plan, instead of a second Versailles Treaty or the even more vengeful Morgenthau Plan, helped set the stage for the West German economic miracle. Also following the end of Nazi Party rule in 1945, the deliberate falsification of history, art, literature, and current events by the Ministry of Propaganda were satirized as the ironically named Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.[3]
Ever since it opened in 1980, the Memorial to the German Resistance in Berlin has included exhibits about Nazi propaganda, censorship, and those, like The White Rose student movement, who defied them at extremely high risk and often with terrible costs.
- ^ "Control and opposition in Nazi Germany". BBC Bitesize.
- ^ Heinrich Heine, Gesamtausgabe der Werke; Hrsg. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg 1973-1997), Bd. 5, page 16
- ^ Lynskey, Dorian. "George Orwell's 1984: Why it still matters". BBC News. Archived from the original on 12 October 2023. Retrieved 7 October 2023 – via YouTube.