Propaganda

  • On the 23rd of June , 1944,two delegates from the International Red Cross and one from the Danish Red Cross visited Theresienstadt  accompanied by the commandant SS First Lieutenant Karl Rahm and one of his deputies. During the visit the delegations were treated to an Opera by the Jewish composer Hans Krása. The children’s opera Brundibár was

    Read more →

  • Teaching hate

    I was going to put a lot of pictures in this blog, but then when I looked at this picture I thought that it would be enough. A class, class mates and a teacher, like any other class in any other school. Except it isn’t. Here the children are taught to hate. The kids standing

    Read more →

  • Der Stürmer is probably the most vile newspaper ever published. It was nothing more then Julius Streicher’s Anti-Semitic propaganda tabloid. It was however popular and made Streicher a wealthy man. It wasn’t the official Nazi newspaper, in fact some leading Nazis did not like it at all. Joseph Goebbels tried to ban the newspaper in

    Read more →

  • The Nazi had a well oiled propaganda machine which was very effective,not only to sell their warped ideology but also when it came to recruiting for the SS and other branches of the army. They also had a very effective propaganda program outside Germany. The picture above is a Dutch SS recruit poster saying “For

    Read more →

  • Law Abiding Citizens

    It is not always a good thing to be a law-abiding citizen. Don’t worry; I am not encouraging anarchy, but it is a fact that many things that we now know were evil and vile were once laws. Like slavery once was legal and written into law. Combine that with a nation whose culture it

    Read more →

  • Cat in the hat;How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and It’s a Wonderful Life are not stories you would associate with WWII or propaganda, and yet they have a distinct ,albeit indirect link to WWII propaganda movies. The name Theodor Seuss Geisel will mean little to many people,although there is a hint in his name which gives

    Read more →

  • Despite all the horrors of World War II—there was still room for humour, satire, and a healthy dose of sarcasm. Although, sometimes the price to pay for a joke could be extremely high. In this blog, these are just a few examples of some WWII jokes, the consequences for some of them, and the way

    Read more →

  • Nazis and Cinema

    Ever since its inception , the media of  film has been a perfect tool to inform the masses be it in an entertaining way or in a more sinister manner. It was and still is the perfect way to distribute propaganda material en mass, although in more recent  years social media has taken over that

    Read more →

  • Theresienstadt was a 1944 Nazi propaganda film depicting  Theresienstadt concentration camp as a sort of idyllic rest stop, in an attempt to convince world opinion that there was no such thing as Nazi death camps.  The film intended to be viewed in “neutral” nations  showing how “humane” conditions were at Theresienstadt. Nor only was it enough

    Read more →

  • At the moment there is a lot of talk how social media is used to distribute propaganda, but the widespread of propaganda is nothing new. The ‘social media’  during WWII was the radio. About 18 months after the Germans invaded the Netherlands they started broadcasting German language course programs. During World War II radio listening

    Read more →