Censorship in Nazi Germany

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 both the silencing of dissenting voices and the propaganda weaponization by the State of all forms of mass communication, including newspaper, music, literature, radio, and film.^[1] The Ministry of Propaganda also produced and disseminated their own literature over the mass media which was solely devoted to furthering Nazi ideology and the Hitler Myth.

With disturbingly close similarities to Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union, crude caricatures were used to dehumanize and inflame hatred towards 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.

Similarly to the Soviet film industry under Stalinism, the Ministry also promoted a secular messianic cult of personality surrounding Adolf Hitler through films such as Triumph of the Will of the 1934 rally. In an ironic parallel to the cases exposed in the volume The Commissar Vanishes, the Nazi propaganda film The Victory of Faith was made in 1933 and then banned by the Ministry owing to the prominent role played by Ernst Roehm, who was shot without trial during the 1934 political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.

The ministry also tightly controlled news media and whatever information was made available to their citizens. As many other Orwellian governments have done, the Nazis set out to rewrite German history to conform to Nazi ideology and condemned everything that contradicted their 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.

Even though the German people are traditionally stereotyped as blindly obedient to authority, this caused a typical backlash commonly seen in other countries. Nazi censorship laws created a demand and thriving black market for banned literature, which continued to be published throughout the 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.

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 led to widespread Anti-German sentiment calls by influential figures like Ilya Ehrenberg, Edvard Beneš, Theodore N. Kaufman, and Abba Kovner, for total war tactics and even for ethnic cleansing of the German people following the end of the war, the latter of which was 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.

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.

[1] "Control and opposition in Nazi Germany". BBC Bitesize.

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