Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts by Daniel Siemens

Author:Daniel Siemens [Siemens, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780300196818
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

Communist Propaganda

In an immediate reaction to the German attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the propagandists of the Communist International in Moscow decided to launch additional German-language radio programmes to reach out to particular audiences. The programme Sturmadler, literally ‘Storm Eagle’, was meant to appeal to German youth, while SA-Mann Hans Weber was designed to influence the rank-and-file National Socialist. In 1942 both programmes became part of the Deutscher Volkssender, the umbrella radio station in the Soviet Union that served as the unofficial voice of the German Communist Party in exile.90 The journalist Fritz Erpenbeck, who later in the war became the deputy director of the radio programme Freies Deutschland, took the role of renegade stormtrooper Hans Weber. It is impossible to assess the impact of these twenty-minute-long daily broadcasts, which could be heard in many parts of the Reich. The creators of the programme nonetheless believed in its efficacy, as they quickly added a companion for Weber, a fellow SA man called Max Schröder, voiced by the journalist Max Keilson. This anti-Nazi comedy show built on the German Communist tactic of the 1930s of infiltrating the SA through Zersetzungsschriften, subversive ‘SA journals’. Written in simple popular language, at times in the form of fictitious dialogues, these works had attempted to draw dissatisfied ‘Old Fighters’ over to the other side by emphasizing the mismatch between the SA’s rhetoric of social revolution and the ‘selling out’ of the party establishment.91 The new radio programme was also influenced by the clandestine British radio station Gustav Siegfried Eins, or GS1, which had started up some months earlier, in May 1941. On this station an anonymous ‘boss’ uttered verbal slanders against both Nazis and Communists. In contrast to the British broadcast, the German Communist programme was intended to be ‘less vulgar and obscene’, Erpenbeck remembered after the war, not least because of initial Soviet censorship.92 In light of what we know about Nazi humour today, this was a wise decision, as the Germans at the time preferred rather innocent and tame jokes to outright, aggressive abuse that directly pointed the finger at what was perceived as ridiculous or scandalous.93

The key mission of SA-Mann Hans Weber was to reach out to the everyday Nazi using the colloquial language of the heavily industrialized and densely populated Ruhr, a dialect complemented later by the popular Berlin idiom. Both SA characters, modelled after the familiar type of the committed but limited Nazi, demonstrated the imperfections of the Third Reich by commenting on the affairs and endemic corruption of Nazi functionaries. Again and again they emphasized the discrepancies between the party propaganda and the social realities in Germany.94 Particularly memorable episodes that were allegedly based on accounts from intercepted German letters included a ‘thick description’ of party officials from a Westphalian town who had taken part in sexual saturnalia with a teenage girl, and a request from a German mother to her husband in the Waffen-SS to ‘send children’s clothing’ with the addendum, ‘I don’t mind if it is bloody, I’ll wash it out.

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