Goebbels Works Harder

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23445, 27 September 1941, Page 8

Goebbels Works Harder

The British Air Ministry issued this week an interesting and highly significant analysis of German air communiques since the transfer of the greater part of the Luftwaffe from west to east. German air communiques have never been very accurate, particularly in their figures of losses. Analysts of German propaganda have noted that, when air battles are going against Germany, it is normal practice for the compilers of the German communiques to reverse the figures given in the British communiques. The explanation of this apparently crude trick seems to be the assumption (which may be well enough founded) that most listeners are careless and that as long as the actual figures are the same in both communiques, the discrepancy tends to pass unobserved. Until the beginning of the war with Russia, however, German official accounts of the nature and extent of air operations were reasonably accurate. It has now been revealed that, of the communiques issued since that time, more than half describe raids on Britain which did not take place. There could be no more encouraging tribute than this to the effect of the lucent, British air offensive on German morale, for it amounts to an admission that German civilians need to be sustained by the belief that British civilians are suffering as they are suffering. The decline in the accuracy of German air communiques is, moreover, paralleled by a similar decline in the accuracy of other communiques. During the campaigns in Poland, Norway, theLLorw r Countries. and France, German army communiques were severely factual and even estimates of casualties were later shown to be fairly close to the truth. But the German High Command’s accounts of the fighting on the eastern front •were fantastic from the first. Though in the early stages the high command’s confident prophecies of huge and decisive victories may have been based' on an underestimate of Russian morale and resources, later exaggerations can have no such explanation. It seems clear that army communiques are now subject to deliberate propaganda editing, designed to keep up the expectations of great victories and to conceal losses. The refusal of the German Government to allow newspapers to publish casualty lists is a confession of anxiety over the effects on public morale of losses in the east, Which (according to Mr Churchill) are already greater, after four months of fighting, than losses in any single year of the last war. German shipping communiques are difficult to check in detail because British figures of shipping losses are not now issued at regular intervals, but it is sufficient to note that the recent turn in Britain’s favour of the Battle of the Atlantic is being concealed from the German people, as also is the mounting total of Axis shipping losses. The truth seems to be that German propaganda, which invariably concentrates o,n the immediate situation and trusts to the public’s notoriously short memory to nullify inconsistencies, has begun to grow less and less effective inside Germany. The efficacy of the clever psychological tricks which are the stock-in-trade of Dr. Goebbels and his assistants has begun to dec’ine, just as the efficacy

of any other'sort of stimulant begins to decline after repeated doses. Dr. Goebbels cannot arrest the operation of this law of diminishing returns; he can only go on increasing the size of the doses. It is, however, necessary to guard against basing unduly optimistic conclusions on the facts of the German propaganda situation. If the testimony of acute and disinterested observers like Joseph Harsch and Otto Tolischus can be accepted, the great majority of the' German people reached saturation point for Nazi propaganda early in the war. They carry on doggedly, not because* they are buoyed up by propaganda illusions, but because they have ceased to believe very strongly in anything. Their courage is the courage of despair; and they give their allegiance to National Socialism not because they like its doctrines but because it offers stability of a sort in a crumbling world.