Goebbels Worries about Germans Who Don’t Want to Fight to the End

Today I add the penultimate of Joseph Goebbels’s weekly articles for Das Reich.  It was mid-April, and despite constant calls to fight to the end, Germans in the West were all too eager to surrender to the advancing British and American forces.  The worst came on 1 March 1945, when the citizens of Goebbels’s hometown of Rheydt easily accepted American troops.  This article is titled “Risking One’s Own Life.” Goebbels argues that only a few spineless Germans accept enemy occupation, while the good ones fight to the end.

Neues Deutschland after the Wende

Just after the fall of East Germany I wrote a paper about Neues Deutschland’s transition from the subservient organ of the East German state to a newspaper that was a trying to adjust to dramatically new conditions.  It was one of the few things I’ve written that I could not find a home for and it has been sitting in my files for twenty years.  It is by now decidedly dated, but for those interested in the period it may have some interest.

The essay is titled “Neues Deutschland after the Wende.”

Remarks by Gauleiter Eigruber in August 1943

I’ve got a slowly developing page of speeches and essays by the various Nazi Gauleiter.  Today I’m adding some 1943 remarks to local group leaders by August Eigruber, Gauleiter of Oberdonau.

This is based on a newspaper article that reports some of his remarks, where were intended to encourage local group leaders to further efforts.

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Nazi Posters from Early 1941

While looking through early 1941 issues of Unser Wille und Weg (the Nazi monthly for propagandists) for another reason I came across black and white photographs of three posters that I've added to the poster section of the GPA.

This could be used by local party groups to advertise political meetings.

This also served the same purpose.  It was part of a campaign that had soldiers on leave speak to audiences about their experiences at the front.

This was a nationally-distributed poster promoting unity between the front and the homeland.

All three posters were probably in color (and the bottom one certainly was). 

Despite the strains of the war effort, which had led many formerly engaged in making propaganda to join the military, propaganda activity remained intense.

Wochenspruch der NSDAP

I have hundreds of examples of the Wochenspruch der NSDAP on the site.  This was a weekly poster with inspiring quotations issued between 1937 and 1944.  Before 1940, many were issued by the Gauleitungen, afterwards (mostly) by the Reichspropagandaleitung.  My page is the most complete collection available, but it is not complete.   New ones surface every now and then.

Just yesterday I found confirmation that the final issue (which I have not seen) was #15/1944.  The image is courtesy of MAR Historical.

I, and others, are attempting to find as many of these as we can.  Should you have ones not on my site, I’d appreciate hearing about them.

An Anti-Semitic Poster from 1932

A friend of the site provides me with this interesting image that I have added to the poster page:

Death to Marxism

Join Us!

It probably was issued for one of Reichstag elections of 1932, since the snake has the three-arrow symbol of the “Iron Front,” an anti-Nazi coalition established in December.  It could also be from the Prussian elections that year.  It looks to be something produced by a regional party organization, since posters produced by the Reichspropagandaleitung were generally more polished.

Letters to Adolf Hitler

A variety of German archival material ended up in Russia after World War II. Henrik Eberle’s Letters to Hitler (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), based primarily on material in the Moscow archive, is an example.  It is an edited and condensed version of a book originally published in Germany in 2007.  The book includes a wide range of letters to Hitler.

The book also recommends the German Propaganda Archive (p. 202) as a good site for those wanting further information.