Soviet and German battlefield is the battlefield with the greatest casualties in WWII . The move against the Soviet Union was long within the plan of the Hitler government. In the eyes of Hitler , a racist and war madman, the Soviet Union was the most ideal colony to Germany, just like India to Britain, and it was the most ideal colony that combines human and material resources. By then, the endless wheat fields in Ukraine will become the food production place that guarantees the lives of the Germans, and the lower-level white people in the East are only suitable as slaves in this production link. However, the Soviet Union's huge reserve of troops and political mobilization capabilities made Hitler fear. Therefore, playing the role of propaganda warfare and dismantling the Soviet army's combat will and the people's spirit of resistance became an important part of Germany's strategic action against the Soviet Union.
Hitler inspected his army
1. Pre-war preparations for the Soviet propaganda war
To fight a propaganda war, the propaganda department must be strong. Before the Soviet-German War , Germany had a total of 11 propaganda departments and more than 200 highly educated talents, and was under the jurisdiction of the Propaganda Department, the Ministry of National Defense and the Eastern Territory Management Zone. Among them, the National Defense Forces Propaganda Department served as the main force in war propaganda. In 1941, the German army specially established a National Defense Forces Propaganda Company, with members directly provided by the army. In just one year, it expanded to 15,000 people, including journalists, newscasters, photographers, etc. They are active in various war zones on the front line, and airlift the edited publicity materials to Berlin , and then they are uniformly made into finished products by the headquarters of the publicity company to put them on the front line.
These promotional products have different types. Considering the practical issues such as the complex ethnic composition of the Soviet region and the large differences in people's education levels, the German army usually adopted a three-pronged propaganda method of leaflets, posters and radio. The image of the German army on the poster
Sulde In the publicity and display, flyers play an important role. A large number of leaflets for persuading surrender were thrown by planes to the frontier positions of the Soviet army. In the first six months after the war began, the Germans produced 15 different types of leaflets and incitemental speeches to attract the Soviet army at a disadvantage.
Compared with flyers, posters have more visual impact. After the German army captured the Soviet city, they would post different posters on the streets. Some are sly-faced Jewish staring at Christian families with malicious intentions, while others are painting Yugoslavs with happiness working on a beautiful farm. These posters not only differentiate the Jewish and non-Jewish groups, but also increasingly divert the hatred of the Soviet people towards Germany.
As Goebbels said, broadcasting will become the eighth largest force, and the value of broadcasting in propaganda war is unquestionable. Every time the German army captured a city, they immediately controlled the local radio station, which was equivalent to stying the mouthpiece here. Then, let professional broadcasters read the pre-formed publicity manuscript step by step, so that their policy coverage can be easily transmitted to listeners of different classes, languages and ethnic groups in the occupied areas. Goebbels in the speech
Hotel in the speech
2. How did Dexuan fool the Soviets?
In order to fool the Soviets, the Germans first constructed a set of "invasion theory". In June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, and flew into the Soviet positions all over the sky, with written on it, "Germany's enemy was not the Soviet people, but the Jews and the Bolshevik government." In this German rhetoric, the war on the Eastern Front was a just war between Europe and the Bolsheviks. It also described the "Soviet-German Treaty of Non-aggression" as Hitler's last effort for peace, and it was the greed of Stalin that ultimately caused the war to break out. Therefore, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union was purely "self-defense".
Soon, the German blitzkrieg achieved great success on the Eastern Front, which was inseparable from Germany's propaganda of Soviet soldiers on the frontline battlefield. A large amount of propaganda to persuade the surrender helped the German army minimize casualties and time loss during the attack. The promotion method of radish and sticks is the most efficient. The German radio in mid-September 1941 claimed that all gangs of gangs who dared to resist were killed immediately after being arrested, and that the relatives and sympathizers of the guerrillas would be liquidated later.On the other hand, the German army also painted big cakes for the Soviets in the German-occupied area. If Germany wins, the Soviet people will get private property. In order to fight against the Soviet political education, he also incited to incite: "Ownership is the foundation of human society. In fact, we also have socialist system , but we have not abolished private ownership . The people want to have their own housing and cars, and farmers want to obtain their own farmland and land. What's wrong with this?" After the Battle of Stalingrad , Germany began to be in a tight position on the Western and Southern fronts. It is crucial to mobilize the Soviet people in the German-occupied area to participate in the war to supplement soldiers and factory labor. With Hitler's approval, on January 13, 1943, Goebbels issued an order to mobilize the people of the German-occupied area to join the team fighting against the Soviet Union. Propaganda for recruiting volunteers is broadcast to various occupied areas. The broadcast emphasized the "new Europe" concept formed by the joint , Western Europe, and Eastern Europe under the leadership of Germany, which was similar to the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Circle where the Japanese deceived the Chinese, and advocated that the Soviets fight for this. In order to recruit people, the German army made certain concessions. Whether it is Ukrainians or Estonians, they can get military uniforms with their own national characteristics. The status of volunteer soldiers is the same as that of other German soldiers, enjoy the same food and treatment, and is also allowed to communicate in the language of their own nation, and even sing and dancing during rest.
Nazi Germany's propaganda poster against the enemy
3. Is the Germans' exhausted propaganda useful?
In the first few weeks of the war, the Nazis' attack on the heart did not work. Red Army Officers and soldiers believed that the temporary failure was related to some wrong government orders, that the Red Army was still strong, and Stalin was always right. In August 1941, the Leningrad war began to get tight, and a large number of casualties occurred in the Soviet Red Army, so a considerable number of soldiers began to be affected by German propaganda leaflets. In the letter they sent to their relatives, they even had the Nazi party emblem (the German plane dropped down along the way). From August 10 to 30, in just 20 days, the relevant departments discovered 18,000 letters with such problems.
On September 19, the "brotherly love" incident broke out. German officers wearing Soviet military uniforms sneaked into the Soviet position to persuade five soldiers to surrender and then returned safely. During this process, the members of the defense line tacitly chose to turn a blind eye.
Soviet prisoners of war
Such a bad incident shocked the top leaders of the Soviet Union. Sherbakov, chairman of the Politburo of the Red Army, issued an order to fully fight against the German propaganda war. At first, the confrontation method was relatively low-level. The German army used speakers to persuade the surrender, and the Soviet army used machine guns and to create noise. The German army airborne and distributed leaflets, and the Red Army political commissared the propaganda pages in the hands of the soldiers one by one. This method is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also treats the symptoms but not the root cause. Therefore, the Soviet army's political organs joined hands with the Soviet Information Bureau to "anti-counterfeiting" the propaganda content of the Germans, and used the tragic situation of the people in the occupied areas to awaken the soldiers' fighting will. This gradually lost the propaganda of the German army's persuasion of surrender in the middle and late period.
The Soviet people in the German-occupied area also quickly discovered that the actual policies were completely different from the original propaganda of the German army. Every time the German army occupied a place, it would massacre local suspects and Red Army sympathizers. After the army evacuated, the Nazi police took over the policing and would carry out another round of cleaning. The "New Land Law" policy promoted by the German army was not implemented at all. On the contrary, farmers were regarded as serfs from the Tsarist Russian era. No matter how many sweet words are used at this time, it is impossible to hide the Nazi sins. The Soviet people in the German-occupied area began to actively fight against the tyranny of the Nazis. A large number of workers were absent from work, which delayed production progress. Soviet farmers burned food to resist the Nazi grain collection team. By the end of 1942, more than 1,000 guerrillas were active in the occupied areas, with a number of up to 1.25 million. The brutal German invaders eventually went towards destruction step by step in the tide of people's war.
Wenshijun said
" Three Kingdoms " says: "The way to use troops is to attack the heart first." It is an important manifestation of the art of war that promotes the enemy in war to achieve strategic goals.Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was not only military, but also used propaganda and public opinion to infiltrate his troops' morale and ideology. The influence of the attack on the heart was no less than that of the war. Therefore, in the early and mid-term of the war, a large number of Soviet soldiers were willing to believe in the Nazis' national socialist theory, took the initiative to put down their weapons, and surrendered to the German army. However, with the changes in the power of Germany and the exposure of various evil deeds committed by the German army in the occupied areas, no matter how scattered Germans say, they could not fool the Soviet people.
References
Liu Qingping: "Film and Political Propaganda in Germany during the Nazi Rule", 2016 Master's Thesis of Hunan Normal University.
Liu Qing: "Research on Wartime Propaganda by Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union (1941-1944)", Hunan Normal University, published a master's thesis in 2018.
(Author: Haoran Literature and History·White Yujing on the Sky)
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