The British-German Radio War.
Figure 14: Radio Program Leaflet, Anzio, 1944. These leaflets were dropped by the Germans on American troops at Anzio in April 1944. They show an interesting tie-in between two forms of propaganda. The counterpropaganda to the British Broadcasting Corporation is slight; chief emphasis is on entertainment value of the German radio programs. (From photograph taken by Signal Corps and released through War Department Bureau of Public Relations.)
The Germans showed evidence of real planning. Their public relations facilities were perfectly geared to their propaganda facilities. When the Germans wanted to build the British up for a let-down, they withheld military news favorable to themselves. During the fight for Norway, they even spread rumors of British successes, knowing that if British morale went up for a day or two, it would come down all the harder when authentic bad news came through the War Office. When the Germans wanted to turn on a war of nerves, their controlled press screamed against the victim; when they turned it off their press was silent. The Germans thus had the advantage of not needing to make much distinction between news, publicity, and propaganda. All three served the same purpose, the immediate needs of the Reich.
Figure 15: Radio Leaflet Surrender Form, Anzio, 1944. Willingness of prisoners to surrender sometimes involves speedy communication of their names to their families, as in the preceding illustrations. At other times, prisoners are very unwilling to be identified and want their faces masked. This leaflet combines radio program announcements with the standard surrender pass.
The Germans put on the following types of news propaganda:
- (1) Official OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or Wehrmacht HQ) communiqués. (These rarely departed from the truth, though they naturally gave favorable situations in detail and unfavorable ones scantily.)
- (2) Official government releases, marked by considerable dignity, possessing more political content than the military communiqués.
- (3) News of the world, part of it repeated from the British radio, part plain non-controversial news (for stuffing), and part (the most important part) news of genuine curiosity value to the listeners but which, at the same time, had the propaganda effect of damaging belief in the Allied cause.
- (4) Feature items, comparable to feature articles in newspapers, which tried to concentrate on a single topic or theme.
- (5) Recognized commentators, speaking openly and officially.
- (6) Pseudonymous commentators, pretending to speak from a viewpoint different from that of the German Government, but who were announced as being broadcast over the official German radio system. (Of these the British traitor William Joyce, since hanged, known as "Lord Haw Haw," was the most notorious. His colleagues were the American traitors Fred Kaltenbach and Douglas Chandler. At the end of the war Chandler was tried in Boston and sentenced to life imprisonment but Kaltenbach fell into Soviet custody and died.)
- (7) Falsified stations, which pretended to have nothing at all to do with Germany. (The "New British Broadcasting Company" transmitted defeatist propaganda with a superficial anti-German tone. Others took a strong Communist line and sought to build up opposition to the British government within England.)
- (8) Falsified quotations on the official German radio. (Sometimes it was easier to make up an imaginary foreign source, ostensibly quoted in the German program, rather than to set up a special fake program for the purpose.)
- (9) "Planted" news sources quoted on the German radio. (A great deal of the German news was culled out of Swedish, Spanish and other papers which were either secretly German-controlled or which—as in the case of the United States papers involved—were so sympathetic to Germany that they voluntarily printed German-inspired news which the Nazis could then quote from a "neutral" or "enemy" source.)
- (10) Open falsification of BBC (British Broadcasting Company, the official British agency) materials—at which the Germans were not necessarily caught by their ordinary listeners, but at which BBC caught them.
- (11) Ghost voices and ghost programs, transmitted on legitimate Allied wave lengths when the Allied transmitters went off the air, or else interrupting the Allied broadcasts by transmitting simultaneously.
