Censorship in Nazi Germany
What is worse, a highly ironic parallel to the many cases of Stalinist damnatio memoriae and censoring of photographs exposed in David King's The Commissar Vanishes, may be seen in the events surrounding Leni Riefenstahl's 1933 Nazi propaganda film The Victory of Faith.
It was almost immediately banned, however, after high level Nazi Party member Ernst Röhm, whose close friendship with Hitler is very visible and prominently emphasized in the film, was shot without trial in the 1934 political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.
Despite the extremely high risks involved, public demand created a black market for banned literature, which continued to be published throughout the global German diaspora by Exilliteratur firms, and especially for allegedly "degenerate" American Jazz and Swing Music, which were acquired anyway and devoured in secret by the early beginnings of an anti-Nazi youth dissident movement.
Moreover, Nazi ideological censorship triggered a brain drain that proved devastating to Germany and Austria's once dynamic literary, artistic, and cultural life and to the once radically innovative and pioneering German film industry.
Many of Germany and Austria's best actors, directors, and film technicians, including Fritz Lang, Max Reinhardt, William Dieterle, Fred Zinnemann, Conrad Veidt, Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamar, Peter Lorre, and many others like them often emigrated for very similar reasons and continued their careers by aiding the Allied war effort as anti-Nazi filmmakers in Hollywood.
In actual practice, giving German POWs easy access to banned art, music, motion pictures, and literary works was found in the United States to be a very effective tool of deprogramming them from Nazi ideology.
[5] Ever since it opened in 1980, the Memorial to the German Resistance in Berlin has included exhibits about Nazi propaganda, censorship, and those, like The White Rose student movement, who defied them at extremely high risk and often with terrible costs.
[6] In a particularly egregious example, the Ministry banned and blacklisted legendary avante garde stage director Max Reinhardt, whom Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy have dubbed "one of the most picturesque actor-directors of modern times".
Vita Nova also commissioned and published translations into the German language of Christian literature by writers from multiple denominations, but all of whom had been banned by Goebbels' Ministry, such as Nikolai Berdyaev, William Ralph Inge, Emanuel Rádl, Emmanuel Mounier, and Sigrid Undset.
[17] Furthermore, before he was sent back to the Wehrmacht in disgrace,[18] conscripted Catholic seminarian Gereon Goldmann used his Waffen-SS uniform as a cover for both black marketeering and the deliberate subversion of Nazi anti-Catholicism and ideological censorship.
[19] Goldmann later wrote, "The drivers knew their contents and consented, for money, to watch over them and deliver them to our Monastery in Gorheim-Sigmaringen, to Dr. Heinrich Hofler, the leader of the German Catholic group who ministered to the spiritual needs of the army.
"[21] The written anti-Nazi sermons of Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen and the Papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge were secretly copied and distributed in Nazi Germany at equally serious risk and ultimately inspired The White Rose student dissident movement to act similarly.
[22] To evade being correctly identified during Gestapo raids, Exilliteratur and underground media sources often produced black market editions of banned books which were bound within innocent-looking covers with deliberately misleading titles.
I find it insane to sacrifice to that honor their culture, their past, and their honesty, and to perfect the criminal arts of barbarians.As a philologist which a specialty in Germanic languages, their mythology, and early Christian literature, such as the Heliand and The Dream of the Rood, J.R.R.
Anyway, I have in this war a burning, private grudge... against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler [for] ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
"[25] For this reason, Tolkien reacted with anger to Allied politicians and propagandists during World War II, whom he felt foolishly accepted Nazi claims about German history and culture at face value.
In a 1944 letter to his son Christopher, he wrote:[26] ...it is distressing to see the [British] press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic.
There was a solemn article in the local [Oxford] paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil!
Particularly in demand among POWs were works of Exilliteratur and other books by writers subjected to historical negationism such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Thomas Mann's Zauberberg, and Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette.
[28] Furthermore, ever since its opening in 1980, the Memorial to the German Resistance in Berlin has included museum exhibits showing illegal Tarnschriften and anti-Nazi Samizdat literature, which were written and distributed by groups like the White Rose student movement in high risk defiance of Nazi censorship laws.
