World War II Propaganda Battle


This documentary analyzes how propaganda was used in National Socialist Germany and in the United States to motivate their peoples during World War II.

The outbreak of World War II saw two motion picture experts from Germany and the United States battle each other with as much ferocity as any army or navy. Their respective missions: to ignite a public desire to wage and win a global conflict. This program contains interviews with Fritz Hippler, chief filmmaker for the Nazi Party, and Frank Capra, renowned filmmaker who worked for the Allied cause, noted for his gentle, humane films about ordinary folk standing up to oppression.

In that powerful interview Hippler revealed the secrets of modern political propaganda:

FRITZ HIPPLER: I think the main thing of propaganda is what Goebbels repeated at all times. “The secret of propaganda is to simplify complex or complicated things, to make them as simple as possible. As simple that even the less ingenious men can understand what I mean. Simplify.” And then, if you had found the form which tells a complicated thing in the simplest way, when you have found this form, then, secondly, repeat it! Repeat it every day. Simplify and repetition. That’s the secret of modern propaganda.”

America’s political duopoly are also Hippler’s children as revealed above in this compilation from the 2004 GOP presidential convention during the height of the unconstitutional, illegal preemptive war of aggression in Iraq. Hippler was responsible for the insidious Nazi propaganda film, Campaign in Poland, attempting to justify that earlier war of aggression.

But it wasn’t only the governments of Germany and the United States that engaged in propaganda. Hollywood made numerous movies in this regard, which were anti-German, anti-Japanese and pro-Soviet.

In the later category there were several notable films. Hollywood during the War had a sizable and powerful contingent of Communists and Fellow Travelers who were prominent directors, producers, screen writers, and actors and actresses.  Some of the most notable and memorable movies of this period were made by these persons (many of whom were later blacklisted in the post-War aftermath during the early years of the Cold War).

Here are the three most notorious:

Mission to Moscow is a 1943 film directed by Michael Curtiz, based on the 1941 book by the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies.

The movie chronicles the experiences of the second American ambassador to the Soviet Union and was made in response to a request by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was made during World War II, when the Americans and Soviets were allies, and takes an extremely solicitous view of not only the USSR in general but of Stalinism and Stalinist repressions in particular. For that reason, it was later scrutinized by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

The film, made during World War II, shows the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in a positive light. Completed in late April 1943, the film is, in the words of Robert Buckner, the film’s producer, “an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation”.

The movie gives a one-sided view of the Moscow trials, rationalizes Moscow’s participation in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland, and portrays the Soviet Union as a state that was moving towards a democratic model, a Soviet Union committed to internationalism. The book was vague on the guilt or innocence of defendants in the Moscow trials, but the film portrays the defendants in the Moscow trials as guilty in Davies’ view. It also showed some of the purges as an attempt by Stalin to rid his country of pro-German fifth columnists. Some fifth columnists are described in the film as acting on behalf of Germany and Japan. The film “defends the purges, complete with a quarter-hour dedicated to arguing that Leon Trotsky was a Nazi agent”. In the film, Davies proclaims at the end of the trial scene: “Based on twenty years’ trial practice, I’d be inclined to believe these confessions.”

There are anachronisms in the film—for example, the trials of Mikhail Tukhachevsky (June 1937) and Nikolai Bukharin (March 1938) are depicted as occurring at the same time. Tukhachevsky and Timoshenko are shown as marshals of the Soviet Union at the same time, but Tukhachevsky was executed in June 1937 and Timoshenko was not made marshal until 1940.

According to film historian Robert Osborne, “At the time this movie was made it had one of the largest casts ever assembled … was very successful … When it was shown in Moscow, despite all the good will, people who saw it considered it a comedy—its portrayal of average, everyday life in the Soviet Union apparently way off the mark for 1943”. “When the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich saw it, he observed that no Soviet propaganda agency would dare to present such outrageous lies.”

 

The North Star was a lavishly produced Hollywood wartime propaganda epic with an all-star cast. Like the films “Mission to Moscow” and “Song of Russia” its purpose was to boost support for our Soviet ally. It opens as a lighthearted semi-musical, but then abruptly erupts in violence and stark tragedy as the Nazis attack and occupy a peaceful Ukrainian village. Corny at times, over the top at times, yet there is no denying this film’s power. Of course there is no reference to the genocide of over seven million Ukrainians deliberately and systematically starved to death by Josef Stalin and the Soviets in the Winter of 1933-34.

The notorious unrepentant Communist apologist Lillian Hellman was the screenwriter.

Actor Walter Brennan later became a staunch anti-Communist ultra-conservative, prominent member of the John Birch Society, and dedicated supporter of 1964 GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as a result of his experience of appearing in this film.

 

Song of Russia demonstrates a positive portrayal of the Soviet Union in the film, clearly linked to the wartime alliance of the Soviet Union and the U.S. After the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of the Cold War, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) cited Song of Russia as one of the three noted examples of “pro-Soviet propaganda films” made by Hollywood, the others being Warner Brothers’ Mission to Moscow and RKO’s The North Star. This assertion was supported by the Russian-born pro-capitalist and anti-Communist writer Ayn Rand, who was specifically asked by a HCUA investigator to see the film and provide an expert opinion on it.  Ayn Rand, in her 1947 testimony before the HUAC, cited Song of Russia as an example of Communist propaganda in the Hollywood motion picture-industry, depicting an idealized Soviet Union with freedom and comfort that, in her opinion, never existed in the real Soviet Union.

Robert Taylor himself protested, after the fact, that he had had to make the film under duress, as he was under contract to MGM. This is the rationale he used to explain why he was a friendly witness during the HCUA hearings in the 1950s. Russian-born director Gregory Ratoff testified that Taylor was telling the truth and that Taylor had explicitly protested about the aforementioned aspect of the film but had been told by MGM to “just do the picture” or else he would liable for breach of contract.

Share

2:11 am on July 31, 2020