The German Anti-War Movement, 1943
A measure of the effectiveness of U.S. propaganda during the World Wars is the enduring popular view that the German people are by nature submissive to authority, or worse, bent on aggression. At the lowest level, the disinformation campaign deployed the Argumentum ad Odium in widely distributed posters featuring Teutonic brutes red in tooth and claw. Only slightly more sophisticated were literary caricatures such as this one by best-selling author William Shirer in his Berlin Diary:
It must also be noted down that Hitler’s frenzy for bloody conquest is by no means exclusive to him in Germany. The urge to expansion, the hunger for land and space, for what Germans call Lebensraum, has lain long in the soul of the people.
This program of demonization pushed any inconvenient facts from the popular consciousness (and, of course, made the fire-bombing of German cities a bit more palatable). Thus today few Americans know of the nearly successful July 20 Plot of 1944 by Colonel Stauffenberg and other German officers to assassinate Hitler. Still fewer know of German student and youth opposition to the war and the Nazi regime.
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