"Is any particular explanation or justification needed to make it clear that I gladly accepted the funds which the Russian comrades sent me by the hand of Comrade Joffe for the purposes of the German revolution? Comrade Joffe gave me the money in the night of November 5th. This had nothing to do with the money which he had previously given me for the purchase of weapons. I used the money for the purpose intended, namely, the spreading of the revolutionary idea, and regret only that circumstances made it impossible for me to use all of it in this manner."
Bolshevik centers had been organized all over Germany when the revolution came. On the same day Joffe was expelled, the police in Düsseldorf closed a Bolshevik nest which was ostensibly conducted as a news agency. It was but one of scores of similar centers of revolution.
The revolutionary propaganda being carried on inside the empire was powerfully aided and supplemented by the activities of Germany's enemies along the same lines. No detailed report of the extent of this branch of warfare is yet available, but it was, in the words of one of Germany's leading generals in a talk with the writer, "devilishly clever and effective." From the air, through secret channels, through traitors at home, the German soldier or sailor was worked upon. He was told truths about the forces against him that had been suppressed by the German censors. The folly of longer trying to oppose the whole world was pointed out, and every possible weakness in the German character was cunningly exploited. The good effect of this propaganda cannot be doubted.
Testimony regarding the part played by enemy propaganda in bringing about the final collapse of Germany has been given by one of the men best qualified to know the facts. In an article in Everybody's Magazine for February, 1919, George Creel, chairman of the American Committee on Public Information, gives full credit to the work of the American soldiers, but declares that, in the last analysis, Germany was defeated by publicity. The military collapse of Germany was due to "a disintegration of morale both on the firing line and among the civilian population." It was the telling of the truth to the Germans by their enemies that finally caused the débâcle at a time when the German Army "was well equipped with supplies and ammunitions, and behind it still stretched line after line almost impregnable by reason of natural strength and military science." [17]
[ [17] German assertions that their armies were never defeated in a military sense regularly arouse and will long continue to arouse anger and scornful indignation among their enemies, yet here we have official testimony to support their contentions. It is no detraction from the valor and military successes of the Allies to assert again that if the German troops had not been weakened physically by starvation and morally by enemy propaganda, they could have carried on the war for many months more.
The propaganda literature was prepared by historians, journalists and advertising specialists, and even some psychologists were enlisted to help in its writing. Germany's borders, however, were so carefully guarded that it was difficult to get the matter into the country. Mr. Creel relates interestingly how this was done. Aëroplanes were employed to some extent, but these were so badly needed for fighting purposes that not enough could be obtained for distribution of propaganda literature.
"The French introduced a rifle-grenade that carried pamphlets about six hundred feet in a favoring wind, and a seventy-five millimeter shell that carried four or five miles. The British developed a six-inch gun that carried ten or twelve miles and scattered several thousand leaflets from each shell. The Italians used rockets for close work on the front, each rocket carrying forty or fifty leaflets. The obvious smash at German morale was through America's aim and swift war-progress, and for this reason the Allies used the President's speeches and our military facts freely and sometimes exclusively.
"To reach further behind the lines, all fronts used paper balloons filled with coal-gas. They would remain in the air a minimum of twenty hours, so as to make a trip of six hundred miles in a thirty-mile wind. On a Belgian fête-day such balloons carried four hundred thousand greetings into Belgium, and some flew clear across Belgium. Fabric balloons, carrying seventeen or eighteen pounds of leaflets, were also employed, but with all the balloons the uncertainty of the wind made the work haphazard.
"The attempt was made to fly kites over the trenches and drop leaflets from traveling containers that were run up the kite-wire, but this method could be used only on fronts where aëroplanes were not active, because the wires were a menace to the planes. The paper used in the leaflets was chemically treated so that they would not spoil if they lay out in the rain.
"An American invention that gave promise of supplanting all others was a balloon that carried a tin container holding about ten thousand pamphlets. A clock attachment governed the climb of the balloon, it had a sailing range of from six to eight hundred miles, and the mechanism could be set in such a manner as to have the pamphlets dropped in a bunch or one at a time at regular intervals, the whole business blowing up conclusively with the descent of the last printed 'bullet'."