obviously stereotyped roles. The teaching profession was also carefully organised, the Nazi Teachers' League
(NSLB) accounting for 97 per cent of the total teaching force by 1937.
And yet the process was in many ways badly flawed. Education experienced the sort of overlapping between
administrative and party organs. For example, the Ministry of Education continued to use the guidelines of the
Weimar Republic largely because it argued interminably with the Party headquarters about the shape to be taken
by their replacement. The conflict between Ley and Rust on the one hand and Bormann and Hess on the other
meant that the new regulations for elementary education were delayed until 1939, while secondary schools were
served little better. This had two unfortunate side-effects. One was that the content of the curriculum was diluted
by more traditional influences than was originally intended. The other was the persistence of confusion within the
schools themselves as to the precise means of delivering the curriculum. Gestapo reports contained numerous
examples of unsatisfactory teachers, many of whom were quite probably confused rather than deliberately
uncooperative.
Indoctrination through a revised curriculum was complemented and reinforced by mobilisation through the youth
movements. At least, this was the theory behind the specialised activities provided, according to age and gender,
through the German Young People (DJ), Hitler Youth (HJ), Young Maidens JM) and League of German Maidens
(BDM). In some respects these carried widespread appeal, initially appearing as a challenge to more conservative
forms of authority and giving youth a sense of collective power. But again the process suffered through
administrative imbalance. This time there were arguments between the Ministry of Education and the Reich
Youth Leadership as to underlying objectives and overriding priorities. Consequently the Hitler Youth and the
educational system often diverged. The whole system also began to lose the edge of its initial appeal as it was
seen to be enforcing the ideas of the new establishment. This trend was accelerated as the Hitle r Youth became
merely a nursery for military mobilisation. As the best of the youth leaders moved into the army, the official
youth programme became more routine and less imaginative.
In general, education and the youth movement both lacked a completely clear exposition of ideology which, as in
other spheres, remained eclectic. As Peukert maintains: 'the ideological content of National Socialism remained
too vague to function as a self-sufficient educational objective. In practice young people selected from competing
information-sources and values which were on offer. As it turned out, the impact of war meant that the more
positive elements of the Hitler Youth disappeared altogether, while youth movements became increasingly
influential. In this respect Nazi Germany - albeit unintentionally - gave birth to modern youth culture not as an
integral part of conformity but as an autonomous and sometimes hostile response to it. Nothing could have been
further from the intention of the Nazi leadership.
If indoctrination had a significant but limited impact on youth, could the same be said about the effect of
propaganda on the rest of the population? A further distinction needs to be made at this point between the
development of propaganda channels, such as radio, cinema and press, and the attempts to influence cultural
output in literature, art and music.
The Nazis gave priority to the radio since this increased the impression of personal contact between the people
and their leader, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of the Fuhrer cult. Increased access to radio sets was, of
course, an essential prerequisite for the success of this approach. This was achieved, with ownership of sets
increasing from 25 per cent of households in 1932 to 70 per cent by 1939, the largest proportion anywhere in the
world. For the vast majority of the population the radio provided the most abiding impression of the Fuhrer that
they were ever likely to have. As such this component of propaganda must go down as a considerable success.
Film proved a more difficult medium, and the regime used it less effectively than they did the radio. The most
accomplished film was not necessarily the most influential. Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will was commissioned
by Hitler himself as a record of the Nuremberg rallies of 1934. Technically a brilliant achievement, it created a
multi-layered image of Nazism which brought in all elements of society and directly fostered the Fuhrer cult. On
the other hand, it was too long for most audiences, who sometimes reacted negatively to the repetition of the same
types of scene. During the war, film-based propaganda was radicalised and the anti-semitic component became
more extreme. But it soon became apparent that Hitter's vision -of what was likely to engage the public was less
effective than Goebbels's. The Eternal Jew, commissioned by Hitler and directed by Hippler, was so crude that
audiences were repelled by the images created. The anti-semitic message was conveyed more effectively through
a feature film, Jew Suss (Jud Suss). By this stage, Goebbels had learned how to introduce propaganda as a
subliminal message within the context of a story with which the viewers could identify. This applied also to his
attempts to engender a spirit of resistance to the Allies with his film on Frederick the Great. But such
developments came too late for anything but a peripheral effect on the morale of a population facing imminent
defeat.
Channelling the press for propaganda was also problematic. Because it was based on a more traditional
technology, it had had longer than the radio to develop within the structure of private ownership; radio, by
contrast, could be taken over relatively easily by the State. The proliferation of newspapers during the liberal era
of the Weimar Republic accentuated the difficulty: by 1933 there were about 4,700 daily newspapers in
Germany, representing a wide variety of political and regional views and loyalties. To an extent, the regime
achieved effective administrative control. Between 1933 and 1945, for example, the number of State-owned
newspapers increased from 2.5 per cent of the total to 82 per cent. The German News Agency (DNB) provided an
effective control over the means whereby news was to be presented; news agencies were amalgamated to ensure a
single source of information; and journalists were made responsible to the State rather than to their editors. But
the result was a bland form of journalism which produced a decline in public interest. Throughout the period, the
regime was never able to use the press to generate support. The emphasis of its censorship was therefore
preventive rather than creative.
The Nazi relationship with culture was ambivalent. On the one hand, it distrusted some of the traditional content
while, on the other, never quite succeeding in providing an alternative. In the three major cases of literature, art
and music, censorship created a contemporary vacuum which a new and distinctive Nazi culture was intended to
fill. The results differed in intensity. Literature produced a complete void; music was less affected; and the
vacuum of art was most filled - but with work of distressingly low quality.
The focus on literature was preventive censorship. This meant the massive book-burning sessions in which the SA
took part, and the removal of over 2,500 German authors from the approved lists. To some extent destruction was
cathartic. It could never seriously have been the preliminary to an alternative Nazi literature since Nazism itself
was anti-intellectual. It discouraged any diversity of viewpoints and individual experience, seeking instead to
stereotype collectivism. Within this atmosphere any chance of creating an 'official' literature disappeared - even
supposing that the population would have been allowed any time to read it.
If the Nazis gave up on literature as a form of propaganda, they made a deliberate effort to use the visual arts to
put across basic blood and soil values. Painters like Kampf and Ziegler were able to provide pictorial stereotypes
of physical appearance, of women as mothers and home-minders, and of men in a variety of martial roles. Such
images reinforced the roles inculcated through the institutions of youth indoctrination, such as the BDM and the
H.J. On the other hand, the result was a form of art which was bland and lacking in any obvious talent. The
vacuum produced by preventive censorship was filled with mediocrity. Much of the 'Nazi' art was derivative and
eclectic: for example, Kamp's study of Venus and Adonis was a thinly disguised copy of earlier masters such as
Rubens and David. The effect of such plagiarism on the public cannot have been anything more than peripheral,
especially since there was always more interest in exhibitions of non-Nazi art which were officially classed as
'degenerate'.
The Nazi regime ended the period of musical experimentation which had been a major cultural feature of the
Weimar Republic. The works of Schoenberg and Berg were considered un-German, while those of Mendeissohn
were banned as 'Jewish'. Yet the majority of German or Austrian composers were unaffected and retained their
place as part of Germany's cultural heritage. The Nazis did, however, use certain composers as the spearhead of
their cultural penetration: foremost among these was Wagner, whose Ring cycle was seen by Hitler as the musical
embodiment of volkisch values. Contemporary composers like Richard Strauss and Carl Orff had ambivalent
attitudes. They managed to coexist with the regime and produce work which outlived the Reich. In this sense the
quality of the Reich's musical output was superior to the work of painters like Kampf and Ziegler, but the result
was less distinctively Nazi. Overall, Nazi culture was ephemeral and, unlike Socialist Realism in Russia, had no
lasting impact on culture.
The ultimate test of the success of Nazi propaganda must be the degree to which the people of Germany could be
brought to accept the experience of war. Throughout the Nazi era there were really two levels of propaganda. One
level put across Hitler's basic ideology, the other made pragmatic adjustments to fit the needs of the moment.
During the period 1933-9, pragmatism frequently diluted ideology, giving rise to considerable theoretical
inconsistency in Hitter's ideas. During this period Hitler was presented as a man of peace and yet all the processes
of indoctrination and propaganda emphasised struggle and its martial refinement. The period 1939-45 tended to
bring together more completely the man and his ideas. This occurred in two stages. The first was the
acclimatisation of the people to the idea of war, achieved through the emphasis on Blitzkrieg, or 'lightning' war.
Logically this fitted in with the notion of easy conquest achieved by the 'master race', and while it lasted it was a
considerable success: Hitler probably reached the peak of his popularity in 1940, at the time of the fall of France.
During the second stage, however, propaganda had to acclimatise the people to the experience of war. At first
Goebbels scored a propaganda success in his 'total war' speech in 1941 but, in the longer term there was a clear
decline in popular enthusiasm. From 1943 the main characteristic shown by German civilians was fortitude in the
face of adversity and destruction, not a fanatical desire to achieve a world vision. By this stage, Nazi propaganda
and indoctrination had not so much failed. They had become irrelevant.