Propaganda in WW1 and WW2

An astounding estimate of ninety million Americans went to the movies every week during World War II and over one thousand war films were released in the period. Among them, many were directed by star directors and also starred many of the most famous actors and actresses of the time. For instance, Academy Award winning director Frank Capra produced a series of seven propaganda films Why We Fight throughout the course of the war.  Famed actress Katharine Hepburn narrated Women in Defense (1941), which was scripted by then First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Women in Defense is a short propaganda film which informed women of the many ways they could help out in the war. Other famous films include Michael Curtiz’s classic Casablanca (1942), which starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Tay Garnett’s Bataan (1943) and Clark Gable’s hit combat movie Combat America (1943), which was especially distinctive as Gable himself also contributed to the war effort through his participation in the United States army as a major.

From 1942 to 1945, much of what Hollywood produced was aimed at portraying the various aspects of America’s involvement in World War II. The major concern of Hollywood’s combat film in the era of the Second World War was to rationalize America’s sudden participation in the war and also served to validate the purpose of the war. Hollywood, under careful guidelines proposed by the Office of War Information, produced propaganda films aimed to educate citizens of their duties in the war and to encourage patriotic behavior in order to strengthen the nation’s unity in fighting back against the enemies. Hollywood also attempted to rationalize American involvement in the war as righteous and necessary by incorporating American family and patriotic values such as honor and duty in the films. Generally, the illusions created in the films were that Americans were portrayed as civilized by his “reasoned control: moderate behavior, trust, peacefulness and sentiment”, while the enemy was defined by his “lack of control: excess, treachery, disorder and passion”.  The contrast in the portrayal of the hero verses the enemy ultimately led to the conclusion that America is fighting the war because it is obliged to the preserve the much-treasured American ideologies of peace and liberty on the home front.

Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer and the United States Office of War Information collaborated with director Tay Garnett in his 1943 war film Bataan.  Bataan was considered a landmark film because it was the first film to set exclusively on the battlefields. It was produced with the aim to increase public understanding of World War II (even if it includes the awful truth of death in combat).  The film featured no scenes of the “soldiers on leave, depictions of the home front, or flashbacks to pre-war civilian life”— it was made to prepare its wartime audience for American casualties.  The setting of Bataan is at the defense of the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II and featured the day-to-day routine of a platoon of United States soldiers. To maintain the spirit of encouragement on the home front and in attempt to justify casualties in combat, Bataan emphasized the values of sacrifice, peace and honor to portray enlistment and warfare as the “duty of all men”.  The enemy, the Japanese, was portrayed as scheming and dishonest cheaters who “feign death and then attack unwary American”.  In contrast, Bataan portrayed the Americans as honorable men who respected the rules of conduct based in morality. In midst of danger, Lieutenant Madden said, “This is a dirty war and we’ve got to fight it the right way”.  The depiction of honor, altruism and national unity in Bataan further inspired public support of the War because the illusion portrayed in the film represented values that the general public firmly believed, were worth fighting for.

During the era of World War II, no studio devoted more of its time and resources to wartime activities than Walt Disney’s.  The military virtually took over the Disney studio in Burbank at the time. John Hench, Disney’s oldest employee, remembers, “They came the next day [after Pearl Harbor]…literally”.  Walt Disney studios largely produced propaganda and entertainment shorts, educational shorts and training films for the military in effort to persuade the public to support the war and troops overseas. In the production of propaganda cartoons, the military corrected and approved each and every short while Walt Disney himself added elements of “theatrical influences” to improve the entertainment quality of the films. Like many Hollywood feature films of the period, Disney’s cartoons presented the enemy as brute animals that lacked the ability to reason and thus behaved in the irrational and demented way that they did. Animation allowed Disney to incorporate elements of humor and the cartoons ridiculed the Germans and the Japanese as they were presented through caricature. Walt Disney’s wartime cartoons were successful because the illusions created relieved the tensions of war through comedy while still sending a strong message to the audience.

 1943 Academy Awards nominated animation short, Emotion and Reason illustrated Hitler as a monster who used methods of psychology and brainwashed German citizens until they were left with no ability to reason, and thus blindly followed his fanatical philosophy of racial supremacy. In Emotion and Reason, Hitler was described as a “Master rabble-rouser” who destroyed “Reason by preying upon the weakness of Emotion with fear, sympathy, pride and hate, just as he did in the minds of the German people”.  The end of the animation short featured the American Air Force heroically going off to war with the animated character Reason, firmly in the pilot’s seat while another character Emotion, was buckled in the backseat. Emotion and Reason is another propaganda film that sold the Second World War to the general public by playing on the moral reasoning of the American citizens. It showcased the illusion that unlike the devious enemy, the United States military was “doing the right thing to win the war” and thus need total support from the home front in order to protect such respectable ethics.

Being aware of the significant power of film, Adolf Hitler declared the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda responsible “for all tasks related to the spiritual guidance of the nation, to the promotion of the state, culture, and the economy, to the promulgation of information to domestic and foreign sources about the nation…” early on in 1933.  As Hitler’s right-hand man and the Minster of Propaganda and Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels endeavored the hefty task of remaking German culture and belief by means of turning film into a machine of mass deception. Goebbels spoke in a mass conference of Germany’s film employees, “It is not true that broadcasting can exist as a separate entity, outside the age that it portrays. More than any other form of public life, it has the duty to reflect, and to give expression to, our time, and the demand and needs of our time”.  Following his firm belief in the power of film and media, an astonishing total of 1,094 films were released through the Third Reich Cinema throughout the Second World War in Germany.  The films released ranged from educational and informative shorts, feature films, documentaries to elaborate musicals. The films, being issued by the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, all heavily endorsed Adolf Hitler’s philosophies for a new Germany.

In an interview regarding Nazi propaganda films, contemporary German film director Wim Wenders observed, "Never before and in no other country have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here, never before and nowhere else have they been debased so deeply as vehicles to transmit lies." Nazi propaganda films created illusions that served to glorify the Nazi party and its ideologies no matter how false they may be. The films fall mainly into two categories: morale building and party propaganda. While morale-building films were produced to cement the authority of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s leadership in Germany, the latter was aimed to psychologically persuade and prepare the German nation the dreadful events that will unfold along with the rise of Adolf Hitler and his party. Nazi government issued propaganda films were so influential that incident as extreme as racial cleansing has occurred because of the compelling illusions created in the films. For example The Baptism of Fire (1940) was released in anticipation of the Nazi’s taking of Poland the following year. Another more notable example, is the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film The Eternal Jew (1940), which brainwashed the nation of Germany into supporting the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish race in Germany and other German states in World War II.

At the beginning of the Nazi campaign in 1933, propaganda films were made with the official aim to promote the party. An example of such films is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1933). Riefenstahl, as the most prolific Nazi film director, made Triumph of the Will to celebrate the Nazi Party and der fuehrer Hitler’s greatness as the leader of Germany. Often in Riefenstahl’s film, she would film Hitler from the ground. This cinematographic technique was commonly used to make Hitler appear more powerful and superior, so the German citizens would put their faith into der fuehrer to lead the nation. Another notable Riefenstahl propaganda production is Day of the Freedom— Our Armed Forces (1935). It is the third documentary Riefenstahl directed for the Nazi party. Day of the Freedom celebrates the “reinstitution of compulsory military services and freedom from the slave treaty of Versailles”.  The film celebrated military and encouraged men and women to join the effort of fighting in the war. The film portrays the life of soldiers on the front line. Riefenstahl romanticized military life in Day of our Freedom by creating an illusion of heroism and also at times, leisure in warfare. In the film, soldiers were seen grooming, going about their daily duties such as cleaning, eating and smoking cigarettes, and were also seen in combat, heroically running out to the battlefields. The emphasis on the beauty and gallantry in combat, was an illusion created to mask the terrible truth of fatalities in war.

Victims of the Past is a Nazi propaganda film released in 1937, in accordance with Hitler’s philosophy in the creation of “the new man so that [the German race] will not succumb to the phenomenon of degeneration so typical of modern times”.  The film showed horrific images of lunatics and mentally disabled people. It created a terrible illusion and made the audience believe that one in four people will become a “degenerate” in fifty years if one does not support euthanasia and efforts to preserve Germany as a superior country with a superior race. Victims of the Past was a play on the psyche of German citizens and promoted Hitler’s social Darwinist pursues through the creation of an illusion of fear in the film.

In his diary, Joseph Goebbels famously wrote, “What would have become of this movement without propaganda? And where would our country be heading if truly creative propaganda did not provide its spiritual identity today!”  The influence of propaganda cannot be undermined— some even believe that World War II was made because of propaganda and most significantly, propaganda films.  While Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party attempted to convince Germany to realize the dream of a more perfect and pure nation through sacrifice, the Americans were in battle against the dilemma of going into war to take revenge on the Empire of Japan or to keep peace. In conclusion, while the general public was perplexed by the complexities of the war, the American and German government respectively, successfully persuaded their citizens from being skeptical of war to supporting the efforts of total war through the creation of illusions.  The illusion of horror and fear such as The Eternal Jew on the German front, and the illusion of righteousness and honor as seen in Bataan on the American front.

 

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