Nazi Press Directives on the Invasion of the Soviet Union

For another purpose I’ve been looking through the Zeitschriften-Dienst again.  It was a weekly newsletter for magazine editors with instructions on how to cover the news.  I thought it would be interesting to trace instructions on the Soviet Union, beginning at the high point of Nazi optimism, October 1941, and ending in mid-January 1942.  It's interesting to see how the system responded when victory did not occur as rapidly as expected.

Two Nazi Anti-Semitic Posters from the East

A visitor to the site provided me with two vivid Nazi anti-Semitic posters I’d not seen before.  The first is, I think, in Ukrainian:

Google’s translation site suggests a meaning of “Satan has taken off his mask.”

The second I find particularly interesting:

I think it is in Ukrainian, which Google translates as “He poisons our lives.”  I had not realized that there was a Ukrainian translation of the book.

Kristallnacht Poster (1938)

A friend of the site provided me with this remarkable poster:

It announces a rash of meetings throughout Munich on 10 November 1938 to bring out the public to protest “World Jewry,” which is made to blame for the anti-Semitic violence throughout Germany the previous night.  As best I can tell, Gauleiter Adolf Wagner (head of the party in Munich) addressed the biggest rally, with 20 party orators speaking at meetings in other parts of the city.  The text is translated on the poster page.

Superman and the Nazis

I get requests from authors who want to use material from the GPA, often for interesting and surprising projects.  A recent one came from Larry Tye, whose new book Superman: The High-Fying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero cites an article in the SS’s weekly paper Das Schwarze Korps that complained about a 1940 comic strip in Look magazine that had Superman hauling Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations.

Tye’s book reviews the history of Superman, beginning with two Jewish kids from Cleveland and moving to radio, cartoons, television shows, and films.  It’s a good read. If you have any interest at all in Superman, this well-researched book will tell you things you did not know.

Violence in Nazi Anti-Semitic Propaganda

Two months back I gave a paper at Texas A & M University’s conference on symbolic violence.  The paper ended up having so many images that I can’t think of a good place to publish it, so for the time being I am making it available here.

It looks at the range of Nazi anti-Semitism, examining how Nazi violence against Jews was presented as justified self-defense, whereas alleged Jewish violence against Germany was portrayed as part of the Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world.

New “Wochenspruch der NSDAP” Quotation Posters

I have added several dozen new translations to the Wochenspruch der NSDAP page.  These were weekly posters with inspiring quotations.  Most are from Gau Westfalen-Süd, but from a few other areas as well.

Several particularly surprise me.  I had thought that the individual Gaue ceased issuing them after mid-1940. Nearly all did. However, Gau Sachsen continued to issue its own into 1941.  Should anyone know more about this, please let me know.

Nazi Speaker Directive on Italy (1943)

One more Nazi speaker directive — this one telling speakers how what to say about Italy’s “treasonous” act of deposing Mussolini.  The basic argument is that Italians thought they could get out of the war by surrendering, but the material says neither the Allies nor the Germans will let them.  The evidence was a variety of citations from the Allied press along with some from Nazi-occupied Europe.

The same argument was used for the remainder of the war: the Allies will make wonderful promises before they take over, but forget them afterwards.  They were using similar arguments in the spring of 1945.