Psychological WarfareLinebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
History
Psychological Warfare
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
Psychological warfare
[Illustration: _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.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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