Last time, the US prosecuted Nazi propagandists as war criminals
The Nuremberg precedent
The role of propaganda and propagandists figured prominently at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, convened to render judgment on the Nazi leaders following World War II. The tribunal was an institution organized by the victorious Allied governments, serving in the final analysis the ruling classes of those countries.
Nonetheless, in their arguments US prosecutors set forth a democratic legal principle derived from the international experience of a half-century of carnage: that planning and launching an aggressive war constituted a criminal act and that those who helped prepare such a war through their propaganda efforts were as culpable as those who drew up the battle plans or manufactured the munitions.
The case made against Hans Fritzsche, one of the individuals chiefly responsible for Nazi newspaper and radio propaganda, is particularly significant. Fritzsche, born in Bochum, Westphalia in 1900, served in the German army in World War I and studied liberal arts at university, but left without a degree. He began a career as a journalist working for the Hugenberg Press, a newspaper chain that supported the right-wing “national” parties, including the Nazis.
Fritzsche began commenting on radio in September 1932, discussing political events on his own weekly program, “Hans Fritzsche Speaks.” That same year the regime of Franz von Papen appointed him head of the Wireless [Radio] News Department, a government agency. Fritzsche was generally sympathetic to the Nazi cause, but not a member of the party.
Underlining the importance with which the Hitlerites viewed radio as an instrument of propaganda, on the evening that the Nazis came to power, January 30, 1933, two emissaries of Joseph Goebbels, soon to be minister of propaganda and enlightenment, paid Fritzsche a visit. The latter was allowed to stay on as head of the Wireless Radio Department despite his rejection of certain conditions set by Goebbels, including the immediate firing of all Jews and all those who refused to join the Nazi Party.
The Nuremberg prosecution case against Fritzsche notes: “Fritzsche continued to make radio broadcasts during this period in which he supported the National Socialist [Nazi] coalition government then still existing.”
In April 1933, Goebbels paid Fritzsche a personal visit and informed him of the decision to place the Wireless News Service under the jurisdiction of the newly created Propaganda Ministry as of May 1, 1933. Apparently satisfied with the results of the first meeting, Goebbels arranged a second at which Fritzsche informed the propaganda minister of the steps he had taken to “reorganize and modernize” the agency, including ridding it of Jewish employees.
“Goebbels thereupon informed Fritzsche that he would like to have him reorganize and modernize the entire news services of Germany within the control of the Propaganda Ministry. ... He [Fritzsche] proceeded to conclude the Goebbels-inspired reorganization of the Wireless News Service and, on 1 May 1933, together with the remaining members of his staff, he joined the Propaganda Ministry. On this same day he joined the NSDAP [Nazi Party] and took the customary oath of unconditional loyalty to the Fuehrer.”
After entering the Propaganda Ministry, Fritzsche went to work for its “German Press Division.” From 1933 to 1942 Fritzsche held various positions in that department, heading it for the four years during which the Nazi regime launched its invasions of neighboring countries. The Nuremberg prosecution argued: “By virtue of its functions, the German Press Division became an important and unique instrument of the Nazi conspirators, not only in dominating the minds and psychology of Germans, but also as an instrument of foreign policy and psychological warfare against other nations.”
According to Fritzsche’s own affidavit: “During the whole period from 1933 to 1945 it was the task of the German Press Division to supervise the entire domestic press and to provide it with directives by which this division became an efficient instrument in the hands of the German State leadership. More than 2,300 German daily newspapers were subject to this control. ... The head of the German Press Division held daily press conferences in the Ministry for the representatives of all German newspapers. Hereby all instructions were given to the representatives of the press.”
Propaganda as an instrument of aggression
The prosecution case, argued by Drexel Sprecher, an American, placed considerable stress on the role of media propaganda in enabling the Hitler regime to prepare and carry out aggressive wars. “The use made by the Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. They used the press, after their earlier conquests, as a means for further influencing foreign politics and in maneuvering for the following aggression.”
Fritzsche was named head of the German Press Division in 1938 after the “primitive military-like” methods of his predecessor, Alfred Ingemar Berndt, created “a noticeable crisis in confidence of the German people in the trustworthiness of its press,” in Fritzsche’s words.
The Nuremberg prosecutor detailed the propaganda campaigns taken up by the German media, under Fritzsche’s immediate supervision, in relation to various acts of foreign aggression, including the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia (1939) and the invasions of Poland (1939) and Yugoslavia and the USSR (1941).
The Nazi press propaganda campaign preceding the invasion of Poland involved manufacturing or manipulating complaints of the German minority in that country. Fritzsche explains: “Concerning this the leading German newspapers, upon the basis of directions given out in the so-called ‘daily parole,’ brought out the following publicity with great emphasis: (1) cruelty and terror against Germans and the extermination of Germans in Poland; (2) forced labor of thousands of German men and women in Poland; (3) Poland, land of servitude and disorder; the desertion of Polish soldiers; the increased inflation in Poland; (4) provocation of frontier clashes upon direction of the Polish Government; the Polish lust to conquer; (5) persecution of Czechs and Ukrainians by Poland.”
In regard to the Nazi propaganda surrounding the Yugoslav events, the prosecutor noted the “customary definitions, lies, incitement and threats, and the usual attempt to divide and weaken the victim.”
Fritzsche describes how he received instructions on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941: “[Foreign Minister Joachim von] Ribbentrop informed us that the war against the Soviet Union would start that same day and asked the German press to present the war against the Soviet Union as a preventative war for the defense of the Fatherland, as a war which was forced upon us through the immediate danger of an attack of the Soviet Union against Germany. The claim that this was a preventative war was later repeated by the newspapers which received their instructions from me during the usual daily parole of the Reich Press Chief. I, myself, have also given this presentation of the cause of the war in my regular broadcasts.”
Thus, the presentation of an illegal invasion of a foreign country as a “preventative” or pre-emptive war did not originate with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld.
The prosecution in the Fritzsche case raised an issue that is of the greatest relevance today: the role of Nazi media propaganda in inuring the German population to the sufferings of other peoples and, indeed, urging Germans to commit war crimes. It argued: “Fritzsche incited atrocities and encouraged a ruthless occupation policy. The results of propaganda as a weapon of the Nazi conspirators reaches into every aspect of this conspiracy, including the atrocities and ruthless exploitation in occupied countries. It is likely that many ordinary Germans would never have participated in or tolerated the atrocities committed throughout Europe, had they not been conditioned and goaded by the constant Nazi propaganda. The callousness and zeal of the people who actually committed the atrocities was in large part due to the constant and corrosive propaganda of Fritzsche and his official associates.”
From https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/04/nure-a16.html
