Introduction
During World War II, the Western Allies conducted intense research on morale and attitudes among Germans. This included surveys and interrogations of the captured Nazi elite and rank and file soldiers, and extended to clandestine recordings of conversations among German prisoners of war (POWs) in American and British captivity. The protocols and reports resulting from POW interrogations, surveys, and wiretapping informed and were part of Allied propaganda and psychological warfare. Allied interrogations involved not only German POWs, but also civilians, after the troops advanced through France and Belgium into Germany in the autumn of 1944. Intelligence officers sought to establish—along with any information that could provide tactical advantage—to what extent Germans were likely to offer resistance, who could be trusted, and, in order to expedite surrender or defeat, weaken morale and lower opposition through leaflet campaigns, broadcasts, and other psychological warfare operations. To this end, American and British intelligence officers interrogated German civilians whom they encountered along the way in the newly occupied towns and cities, often in evacuation and internment camps. Officers served in the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force's (SHAEF) Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), whereas others worked for military intelligence (G-2) or in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). The resulting reports and profiles, which were often rich in detail and shared and circulated, fed into psychological warfare “output” and helped inform the wider outlook on Germans and Germany among the Allies. Yet in the research on Nazi violence and its aftermath, wartime interrogations of civilians, in particular, and Allied psychological warfare operations in general, rarely feature.
To a degree, this may have to do with the nature of the sources. None of the interrogations appear to have been recorded on tape. What remains are the reports compiled by intelligence officers, usually soon after interrogation, internal correspondence, personal papers, and postwar accounts, which include books and scholarly articles assessing and analyzing wartime psychological warfare work undertaken previously. Owing to the particularities of the Allied advance through Germany, there is a distinct bias toward interrogations in western Germany, particularly the Rhineland, parts of what is now Baden-Württemberg and, to a lesser degree, Bavaria. But these places were not necessarily only populated by local residents, but also evacuees and refugees from other parts of Germany. Leading Nazis had mostly fled elsewhere ahead of the arrival of the Allied troops. More importantly still, the reports are not verbatim transcripts but summaries, reflecting the interest and particular analytical and ideological lens of the interrogator and author or editor of a given report. Arguably, all of these sources tell us at least as much about the Western Allies in this particular period as they do about the Germans the intelligence officers encountered.
In existing scholarship, material relating to psychological warfare is primarily used in studies of psychological warfare per se, which tend to focus on organizational structures and policies; Allied propaganda; and on interrogations with POWs as part of the research on “mentalities” and the Volksgemeinschaft. Here, the overrepresentation of male members of the Wehrmacht—both officers and rank and file soldiers—has left those outside the military and women, in particular, underexamined.Footnote 1 Recent studies based on a separate and distinct corpus, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, whose Morale Division sought to establish the efficacy of Allied area bombing of industrial towns and cities for undermining civilian morale, have begun to buck this trend.Footnote 2 In works on postwar information control and denazification, psychological warfare and other intelligence gathering feature only marginally, despite frequent continuities in personnel, who moved on to other, often successor, agencies and organizations (e.g., OMGUS, CIA), and thus continuities in technique, knowledge, and understandings.Footnote 3
This article is based on the reports, profiles, and internal correspondence resulting from interrogations of German civilians in the final months of the war, private letters, and published postwar accounts (books and journal articles) by former intelligence officers about their experiences and work in this period. These are valuable sources for historical research into German responses to Nazism and the Allied occupation in this period and its aftermath, allowing us to examine the evolution of attitudes toward the Germans, the conclusions officers drew from their encounters, and some of the long-term ramifications of psychological warfare operations. Applying Sara Ahmed's conception of the “encounter,” which usefully “suggests a meeting, but a meeting which involves surprise and conflict,”Footnote 4 helps alert us toward the tensions involved in the interactions between intelligence officers and German civilians, and the limits of what can be known.Footnote 5 As we shall see in this particular context, it also points us to the tension between intelligence officers’ analyses and the ways in which they were put to use.
Due to the limited scope of the article, the focus will primarily be on US intelligence officers, particularly but not exclusively those serving with PWD. I will address how they experienced their early encounters with German civilians, the ways in which the latter presented themselves, how the intelligence was used, and the ramifications of psychological warfare intelligence gathering and techniques. This article aims to reposition debates surrounding Allied notions of culpability, the extent of ordinary Germans’ knowledge of atrocities, and degree of denial by bringing the early occupation period from autumn 1944 onward into view. I will show that intelligence officers’ stance toward German civilians was fluid and at times ambiguous, with the encounter causing considerable distress to some of them. Their reports and correspondence further suggest that in this period, Germans readily professed to knowledge of atrocities. But contrary to intelligence officers’ expectations, they failed to accept any guilt or responsibility, personal or collective. Finally, I will argue that the very foundations and techniques of Western Allied psychological warfare may have—inadvertently—reinforced and legitimized justification strategies that separated between “real” Nazis and everyone else. This was at odds with one of the central aims of military government, that is, to inculcate a sense of culpability in Germans, and may have indeed undermined such efforts.
This article expands the focus beyond Wehrmacht soldiers and POWs, and intervenes into the ongoing debate about “what Germans knew” and their degree of involvement in the Third Reich. Prior to Germany's surrender and the full disclosure of National Socialist violence unleashed across Europe, the by now ubiquitous widespread denial of knowledge of atrocities by Germans had not yet formed in this period.Footnote 6 The article further adds to scholarship concerned with the impact of Allied measures during the occupation on the ways in which Germans confronted the Nazi past after 1945, or failed to do so. Even before reeducation, denazification, and legal prosecutions—whose origins and planning began long before the war ended—Allied psychological warfare operations may have had ramifications for the extent to which Germans were prepared to address guilt and responsibility. Specifically, we find a link between interrogations of both German POWs and civilians, psychological warfare leaflets and radio broadcasts, and their reception.
Encountering German Civilians: Allied Intelligence Officers in Germany, 1944–1945
The Western Allies’ military intelligence gathering and psychological warfare operations during World War II were neither unified nor coordinated. The United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Office for War Information (OWI), the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and Ministry of Information (MOI), all ran their own psychological warfare operations, as did the military at different levels.Footnote 7 Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower established the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB) in October 1942 to coordinate US and British propaganda in the Mediterranean theater of war. For propaganda in the European theater of war following the Normandy landing, Brigadier General Robert McClure was put in charge of the newly created PWD, whose four key sections were Plans and Directives, Intelligence, Liaison, and Operations. The Intelligence Section was constituted of field interrogators, an office in Paris (PWD-Forward) gathering the field interrogators’ work and with responsibility for message production, and a Research and Analysis Branch in London (PWD-Rear). The Weekly Intelligence Summary was based on field interrogation reports, their analysis by PWD in London and Paris, and monthly POW surveys. The Intelligence Section of PWD collected psychological warfare intelligence and reported on the attitudes of German soldiers, and later of German civilians, and the effectiveness of its propaganda. Their methods were quantitative surveys, qualitative (prolonged) interrogations, and document analysis.Footnote 8 The overall goal of psychological warfare was to “erode the enemy's morale and will to resist.”Footnote 9
Among the intelligence officers were many civilians, particularly in PWD, including academics, authors, or journalists, often with decidedly left-wing political leanings. Some were émigrés from Germany and Austria, many of them Jewish.Footnote 10 Their perception of German civilians and POWs was influenced by different sources, including military handbooks, personal experiences and political outlooks, professional backgrounds (academic, military, media, and literature), the reports and summaries they received on a regular basis, their training, peers, milieus, and experiences in the field.
From October 1944 to May 1945, PWD's field intelligence officers interrogated hundreds of German civilians whom they came upon in evacuation and internment camps, and in the newly occupied towns and cities. Their mission was to “conduct surveys of public opinion and morale and to report on the relations of people” with military government (MG).Footnote 11 Most prominently, Saul Padover and his colleagues Lewis F. Gittler and Paul Sweet, attached to 12th Army Group, and later Ninth Army, created more than thirty special reports and more than eighty profiles of individuals.Footnote 12 Beginning in the towns and cities of the Rhineland, they interrogated a wide variety of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and occupations and diverse views toward Nazism. Although none of them appeared to have been formally trained in interrogation and interview techniques, by the time Padover, Sweet, and Gittler arrived in Germany in the autumn of 1944, they had already gained considerable experience and knowledge they then applied in the field.
All three had a connection to Germany, either professionally or personally, or indeed both. Padover and Sweet, who were friends, were both historians of Germany, with both also serving at OSS Research and Analysis Branch in London prior to their PWD assignment. Both had studied at the University of Chicago. There, Padover was taught by Harold Lasswell, an influential figure in psychological warfare since the publication of Propaganda Technique in the World War in 1927 and Psychopathology and Politics in 1930, and who had taught several other OSS intelligence officers.Footnote 13 Padover was born in 1905 in Vienna to Jewish parents, and the family emigrated to the United States in 1920. Sweet, who was born in 1907 in Pennsylvania, studied a semester each in Göttingen and Munich in 1929 and 1930, respectively, conducted research in Vienna in 1933–1934, and visited archives in Berlin in 1937. Padover continued his academic career after the war, and Sweet became a Foreign Service officer. Both received a Bronze Star for their wartime service. Gittler, born in Chicago in 1914 into a family of orthodox rabbis and Silesian entrepreneurs, lived in Berlin for several years in the 1930s, together with his sister helping Jewish families smuggle out valuables and money, and seeking immigration visas for them. He returned to the United States in 1937, and was eventually recruited by the OWI, working in Washington, DC, Britain, and ultimately for PWD. He was a writer, who had published on Germany, including a book coauthored with Ladislas Farago, on German psychological warfare in 1941. After the war, he wrote the script for a film on the Jewish plight in Europe, Il Grido della Terra (The Earth Cries Out), directed by Duilio Coletti in 1949. He continued to write about Germany, including for Life magazine.Footnote 14
In the same period, counter-intelligence officers began to screen the civilian population for Nazi Party membership and war criminals, while military intelligence sought out information of tactical use for the military. These were not entirely isolated operations. For instance, PWD's intelligence officers would refer civilians they interrogated to CIC if they suspected them of war crimes or if they fell into the automatic arrest categories. PWD field interrogators operated relatively independently according to Sweet, which manifested in their many suggestively named reports and profiles.Footnote 15 These included titles such as “Edelweiss Pirates: German Youth in Revolt?” “A Socialist Who Did Nazi Occupation Work in Russia,” “A Nazi Real Estate Broker,” “A Middle-Aged Social Democrat, A Little Man Who Never Compromised,” “‘Unpolitical’ German Girl,” “Father and Wife of an SS-Man,” “Anti-Nazi Daughter of a Nazi,” and “A Race-Conscious and Nazified Girl.”Footnote 16
Interrogation reports varied in contents, length, and tone. The profiles and reports compiled by Padover and Gittler, for example, focused either on one person, giving ample information about their backgrounds, views, and behaviors during interrogation, or on a group of people, but usually linking the reports to a more general analysis about, for example, German youth, communists, or the political situation in a particular town. Subject of the profiles and reports were often very “ordinary” German civilians, whom Padover and his colleagues frequently questioned about their knowledge of atrocities, particularly against Jews and Soviet POWs.Footnote 17
Intelligence officers’ encounters with an amorphous group of German civilians raised difficult questions. What to make of (let alone do with) the largest group of Germans, that is, those who were neither victims of Nazi persecution nor “Nazis in the accepted sense of the word,” as Daniel Lerner, Chief Editor of PWD and its Weekly Intelligence Summary, put it, yet who were nonetheless implicated in the Nazi state, was an important question for the Western Allies. Through interrogations, they sought to find out how the Germans “tick,” the extent to which resistance and guerrilla warfare was to be expected, and whom they could trust during the occupation and after the end of hostilities. Their research, digested in the form of reports, further informed psychological warfare operations, such as leaflet and broadcast campaigns.Footnote 18
In the Allied use of the term, the very category of “civilian” was highly fluid and wide-ranging. It encompassed essentially anyone who was not presently serving in the military. On the German side, warfare in the East had severely and dangerously blurred the lines between civilian and combatant, not least in the violent pursuit of partisans, real or imagined, reprisals, and the killing of Jewish civilians under the guise of anti-guerrilla warfare.Footnote 19 Spilling over into the Reich at the end of the war to the German home front, “total war”—fighting to the last at all costs, including the mobilization of children and elderly people—further put into question the extent to which anyone in Germany, who was not persecuted by the Nazis, could actually be a “civilian.” Meanwhile, the British and Americans used strategic bombing to demoralize civilians and they accepted the loss of civilian lives, who were increasingly seen as combatants.Footnote 20 As the fighting continued and the Allies advanced through Germany, civilians warranted special consideration. How they were perceived by the Allies shifted; the category of “civilians” was neither fixed nor a homogenous community of experience, neither at the time nor in later representations.
Jewish intelligence officer Morris B. Parloff, a psychology graduate who had trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, landed in France in August 1944. As part of military intelligence, T-Force, 12th Army Group, he screened German civilians for membership in National Socialist organizations and war crimes.Footnote 21 In a letter to his wife, he wrote about his encounters with civilians in Aachen: “I have spoken to PW's [sic; prisoners of war] for a long time both in England and in France … But I had never seen the cold, blank stares of hatred that I have seen in the eyes of some civilians in Germany.”Footnote 22 Several months later, he told his wife about his own resentment toward the Germans: by April 1945, he confessed to having had enough of speaking to German civilians, and of his own reactions of hatred and disgust. Although criticizing aspects of Allied occupation policy shortly after the end of the war, Parloff nonetheless agreed that “We are not fighting an army alone. We are fighting a nation at war.”Footnote 23 In this context, intelligence reports warned not to trust civilians because some Nazis would disguise themselves as civilians, Red Cross, or foreign workers.Footnote 24 Another report warned of “A Knife in Our Back” as German civilians had passed information about Allied movements and locations on to the German forces and spread alarm as Allied troops advanced. The report further notes:
The civs [civilians] we are now encountering are as much a part of GERMANYFootnote 25 as the enemy troops we engage in battle. Realizing that they have no love for those ideals which we cherish, we may well expect to be treated scornfully whenever they may be in a position to choose their own line of action. When death and destruction became evident, German civs rapidly display their white flags of meekness. Remember that these flags are serving as a means of sparing German lives and property. It is true that they are lessening the cost of victory—they are also allowing German individuals who have no understanding of humane treatment to carry out activities which are nothing less than despicable collaboration.
All of these indications prove that any outward sign of friendliness by civilians toward our soldiers had no foundation in sincerity, but must have an ulterior motive. These people hate us—they are our enemies. We cannot afford to trust them in any way. We must deal with them firmly, justly, and only when necessary for furtherance of military objectives.
If we are cautious, the knife cleverly held in civ hands, and maliciously planned to be brutally thrust into our back may well turn into a lesson that the “Master Race” will never forget. GERMANY is conquered, and those who resort to force in an attempt to disprove this fact must be rendered ineffective.Footnote 26
If the German leadership feared defeatism among the population and what it saw as a repetition of 1918, the Allies, too, feared to be “stabbed in the back.” Faced with the specter of Nazi guerrilla Werewolves Footnote 27 and a Nazi last stand in the Alps, the so-called national redoubt, the Allies feared “civilians” much more than they did regular soldiers. Such warnings against trusting German civilians also served as reminders to uphold the Allied policy of nonfraternization. Ninth US Army provided a more sober analysis of the situation based on the interrogation of civilians. It reported in late April 1945 that the “bulk of the German people are ‘War weary’; sickened by the damage to their homeland their attitudes range from a ‘I'm glad it's all over,’ to a truculent admission of defeat and a stoic resolve to gird the loins and make the best of the situation.”Footnote 28 There thus existed considerable differences in assessment of civilian responses, fluctuating over time, and depending on the reporting officers.
Besides capturing and reporting on the general mood and morale, part of intelligence research was also to differentiate among this very broad category of German civilians. Based on both quantitative surveys and reports resulting from qualitative interrogations from the field, Harry V. Dicks, psychiatrist with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Edward A. Shils, a sociologist with the OSS and another disciple of Harold Lasswell's, established a typology. It separated between fanatical hard-core Nazis (idealistic zealots; party toughs; concealed fanatics); modified Nazis “with reservations” (pseudo-doubters; idealists; cynics); “unpolitical” Germans (rural population; village artisans; minor officials; professional soldiers); passive anti-Nazis (the middle-aged; the very young; the opportunists); and active anti-Nazis (political anti-Nazis: nationalist conservatives, centrists, democrats; religious anti-Nazis: Roman Catholics, evangelicals; individualists). The typology, which reveals an acute awareness of the many layers of involvement in the Third Reich among German “civilians,” was created so that PWD could identify the target audience that they regarded as most susceptible to psychological warfare output.Footnote 29
Dicks was a World War I veteran, having served in military intelligence for the British Expeditionary Force in Russia. He was fluent in both Russian and German. As a qualified physician, he specialized in psychiatry and published a monograph on psychopathology in 1939. He was adviser on German morale for military intelligence from 1942 to 1944 and from 1944 to 1945 with PWD, before being assigned to the Intelligence Branch, Control Commission for Germany as adviser on German personnel and denazification in 1945–1946. Although it thus stands to reason that the typology created by Dicks and Shils would have had an impact on denazification, this ought to be explored in further studies. Dicks later published on authoritarian psychology and collective psychopathology, including a book on Licensed Mass Murder: A Sociopyschological Study of Some SS Killers (New York: Basic Books, 1973), based on interrogations. Dicks seems to have been unaware of the Frankfurt School's prewar and wartime studies of authoritarianism. The aforementioned typology was created for this specific context based on interrogations and other intelligence, influenced by Dicks and Shils's previous work, though we find echoes of Lasswell's scholarship. Shils became assistant secretary of the US Secretary of State, and in 1943 joined PWD in London, before being assigned to 12th Army Group following the Normandy landing. He continued his academic career after the war at the University of Chicago, becoming an influential sociologist studying the role of intellectuals in society. Although initially in favor of studies on the authoritarian personality, Shils later published a critique of the Frankfurt School's seminal work, arguing for what he saw as inherent similarities between left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism.Footnote 30
The influence of this typology certainly continued shortly after VE Day, when guidance was issued by PWD for information control during the occupation, including on how to distinguish “Nazis” from “Germans,” seen as important for the challenging tasks of eradicating National Socialism and reconstruction.Footnote 31 It was more nuanced than the three lists—black, gray, white—for Nazis, followers, and anti-Nazis created during the war and used by CIC,Footnote 32 or the five denazification categories established later in the US zone of occupation in 1946.Footnote 33 In the new guidance, “Nazis” were distinguished into “three general types: the fanatic, the undercover man, the gangster.” To identify them (and others), a catalogue of questions was designed to help personnel with the assignment of “how to recognize a Nazi.” The questions were predominantly concerned with attitudes and opinions, for example, regarding the “Jewish question,” Nazi ideology, war criminals, resistance against the Germans, the causes of the war, and the Nazis’ rise to power. A handful of questions concerned behaviors, primarily oppositional activities. But the guidance also points to “other types,” which are divided into three groups. These “other types” are likely derived from Dicks and Shils's earlier typology, previously described.
As in the earlier work, we find a mix of demographic and socioeconomic markers, attitudes, and behaviors: “suspects, or ‘bad bets,’” “nonpoliticals” or “dark horses,” and finally “useful contacts and potential appointees, who may be described as ‘good bets.’” The bad bets included opportunists and cynics, and reactionary anti-Nazis; the good bets included political anti-Nazis; religious anti-Nazis; cultural anti-Nazis; and anti-Nazis on personal grounds. Notably, the dark horses group contained eight types of people the Allies could not quite make sense of and regarded as potentially susceptible to psychological warfare: country people; minor officials; certain “specialists” and other professionals; small town artisans and craftsmen; professional soldiers; Nazis by force of circumstance; the very young; and disillusioned idealists.Footnote 34
As indicated previously, these different “types” were based to a degree on intelligence work undertaken in Germany from autumn 1944 onward. A discussion of the extent to which intelligence officers were aware of such typologies and other analyses and applied them in their field interrogations is beyond the scope of this article. Their reports and correspondence certainly point us to underlying notions of authoritarianism and obedience, and of a particular German national character. We also see the extent of suspicion with which intelligence officers viewed particular groups of German civilians.
Although attitudes toward Germans fluctuated among intelligence staff, they appeared to harden in early 1945 as the Allied troops advanced farther into Germany and came upon the former concentration camps. The same has been said for US public opinion in this period, with an increasing number of respondents convinced of Germany's aggressive nature as details of atrocities and war crimes were made more and more public.Footnote 35 In this context, the experiences of intelligence officers in their encounters with German civilians resulted in deep suspicion toward and in many cases blanket resentment of German civilians.
Padover, one of PWD's most influential intelligence officers, grew increasingly exasperated after months of interrogating ordinary Germans; this got much worse after he visited the liberated camp of Buchenwald.Footnote 36 In an internal report written around Christmas 1944, he had still condemned Allied “hard policy” against all Germans and argued that not all Germans were Nazis, even calling on the Allies to make use of “experts” who joined the party only out of careerism but not conviction.Footnote 37 But several months later, after VE Day, he wrote to his wife that the Germans, having killed, enslaved, and massacred millions of people, were no longer part of the family of nations and constituted a cursed and much-loathed people, and only the next generation would be able to make a new beginning.Footnote 38 The book about his eight months of interrogating Germans, which he published as early as 1946, was written through this particular lens, seen through the later experiences and encounters, with the report from Christmas 1944 feeling strangely disjointed among the account's overall tone. Somewhat surprisingly, apart from withholding a handful of names of US Army and intelligence officers, Padover's book, although published quite soon after the war, is remarkably frank and appears to have evaded any government controls, censorship, and classification despite being seemingly largely based on the reports and profiles he created in his capacity as a PWD intelligence officer.Footnote 39
Like many of his contemporaries, Padover believed in the notion of German collective guilt—not only for having allowed the Nazis to rise to power but also for not rising up against them—and saw it rooted in a particular national character that was prone to authoritarianism, obedience, and a lack of compassion, even toward their own compatriots. In his view, the bulk of Germans was to be held responsible. Seemingly fed up with Germans putting all the blame on Hitler, Padover wrote in his notebook in May or June 1945, “IT'S NOT JUST HITLER.”Footnote 40 Even though he emigrated long before the Nazis rose to power, he must have been all too aware during his service in Germany that he, too, and his parents could have fallen victim to Nazi violence had they not left Austria—although this was not a topic he ever broached in his reports nor in his postwar account. Padover's left-leaning politics informed his attitudes toward his German interlocutors. He was most frustrated by social democrats and communists, and by what he regarded as their failures and compromises, while reserving some of his praise for those whom he felt had remained steadfast.Footnote 41 In his postwar account, he often highlighted atrocities against both Soviet POWs and Jews, just as he had done in his PWD reports.
The (ongoing) effort to differentiate between different types of involvement in Nazism, of positioning within the Nazi state, and of wider complicity did not happen in isolation. Intelligence officers brought with them prior conceptions shaped by official doctrine, their own experiences, and political leanings. But the impressions of the devastation caused by Nazi Germany's war, encounters with German civilians, former forced laborers and concentration camp inmates, and the harrowing images from the liberated camps also helped both forge and reinforce a certain notion of guilt and responsibility, and of German reactions.
“That all Germans … Must Bear the Mark of Shame Has Simply Not Occurred to These People”: Collective Guilt Doctrine between Expectations and Reality
Intelligence officers had ingested, to varying degrees, the “doctrine of collective guilt.”Footnote 42 Upon landing in Europe, they encountered extensive war damage, victims of Nazi violence, and hatred of the Germans, and they very much expected their interlocutors to accept personal or collective guilt and responsibility. A key component and aim of Allied military government policy was that Germans should understand and acknowledge their responsibility for National Socialism and its downfall.Footnote 43 Notably, the terms guilt and responsibility were not defined or distinguished, and often used seemingly interchangeably. The charge of “collective guilt” was never fully translated into policy, especially after the end of the war, and there had been differing strands of thinking throughout. Subsequently, Germans used the collective guilt charge to their advantage to reject outright any kind of responsibility and to claim unfair treatment.Footnote 44
Observations regarding the lack of a sense of guilt among German civilians are commonplace in the reports and profiles submitted by intelligence officers. Among them was US Marine Corps Reserve Captain John P. Dickson, who, based on his interrogations of civilians during a trip to the western Rhineland area from March 21 to 28, 1945, reported for PWD:
None of the civilians interrogated, from the janitor's wife to the university professor, gave evidence of sensing personal guilt in the slightest degree. That all Germans, regardless of individual political leanings, must bear the mark of shame has simply not occurred to these people. Affirmations of hatred of their “Nazi” masters, expressions of relief at the arrival of the Allies—especially of the Americans—are too frequent and commonplace to merit attention. Some referred to their “government” as “criminals,” but others, like the janitor's wife, obstinately declined to employ any term stronger than “those idiots” … who are insisting … upon the senseless destruction of the “Fatherland.”
… No admission was made to a member of the occupying forces that it was a regime composed of anything worse than mentally unbalanced individuals. Again, a complete lack of a sense of guilt. … If, as of course often occurs, Hitler, and now more often Himmler, is named as the chief criminal, the interrogator is left to feel that his subject is in no way related to these men or to their colleagues, that there is no inner connection, no link between the rulers and the ruled. …
If care is not taken, these people may succeed in convincing some of us that in the final analysis, they, as Rhinelanders and Catholics, are nothing more than innocent bystanders at the scene of the crime. …
The long-term problem, the eradication of the Nazi spirit and of German militarism, is closely associated with one of the major difficulties concerning our M.G. [military government] men—how to identify a “genuine” Nazi. Screening can accomplish a great deal … But in the natural desire to eliminate all suspected Nazi sympathisers, ownership of the Party button is being overestimated as a final criterion. On the other hand, little attention is paid to the degree of support an individual lent to the Party.Footnote 45
The “degree of support” was to become an important aspect of denazification proceedings, and its measurement was built into the development of the denazification questionnaire, or Fragebogen.Footnote 46 Yet there were disagreements among the Allies as to the extent to which only leading Nazis or other, more lowly but committed figures should be included in the program, or what constituted merely “nominal” or “active” Nazi Party membership.Footnote 47
Of particular note is the use of the term bystander, the earliest thus far identified in this context. The term became highly influential, if contested, through Raul Hilberg's 1992 book, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. Dickson warns of Germans pulling wool over Allied eyes, of pretending to have been “innocent bystanders,” thus evading reeducation and facing their own personal or collective responsibility. From the outset, then, the term bystander was introduced and used, somewhat polemically, to describe and problematize not so much behaviors but self-representations and to point toward the challenges facing reeducation and occupation. Indeed, the use of the term implies its very opposite, that there can in fact be no innocent bystanders. Dickson's warning echoes into the present and testifies to a crucial period, in which a particular set of German responses to Nazism began to emerge and solidify. The fact that guilt and responsibility were ill defined, not only in Dickson's writing, could suggest that the terms denote a particular, perhaps specifically American, shared notion of what one might call “civic” guilt or responsibility. Protestations of innocence through impotence simply failed to register with intelligence officers, who were not only outraged at the atrocities and destruction wrought by Germans but held different notions of civic duty, agency, and an individual's role and position vis-à-vis the state, as seen in Dickson's nod to the link between the “ruler and the ruled.” It was thus also an encounter of one set of values with another, which materialized in the frequent expressions of indignation, incomprehension, and exasperation.
Dickson was not alone in noting a lack of a sense of guilt among Germans. In the second half of March 1945, Padover and Gittler composed one of their many “profiles” of Germans they encountered, entitled “an ex-SS man.” The five-page report, longer than the average one to three pages that they usually submitted, also gives a clue as to the way in which they conducted their interrogations.
Padover and Gittler described how they had come across a twenty-one-year-old man from Krefeld. Due to lung problems resulting from his third combat wound, H. K. had been released from the Waffen-SS in December 1944. Having spent much time in hospital in the summer of 1944, he began to fear death and to distance himself from Nazism. Padover and Gittler, however, found that his thinking was profusely saturated with Nazi ideology no matter how hard he tried to conceal it. At the time of his release from the Waffen-SS, H. K. was SS-Standarten-Oberjunker in the 600th Paratrooper Battalion, which had fought partisans in Yugoslavia from late 1943. Prior to this, H. K. had served as a signaler in Russia and Ukraine in 1941 and 1942. Before joining the Waffen-SS sometime around spring 1941, he had been in the Hitler Youth in a branch engaged in police and patrol duties, and in this capacity was present at, perhaps involved in, and still openly celebrated the destruction of the Krefeld synagogue in November 1938. His father worked as a chemist for IG Farben. Both left the Catholic Church in 1935. Later in this conversation, H. K. admitted that in all of 1941, they took no prisoners, instead shooting them in the back of the neck after interrogation, adding that “terrorists and bandits” were dealt with in much the same way.
Would he shoot anyone on a direct order? He hesitated an instant, and then hunched his shoulders. “If it is an order, one must do it. Most of those we are ordered to shoot are criminals anyways. Otherwise, we would not have received an order to shoot them.
We asked if he had heard of Maidanek [sic] in Lublin. He said yes, he had been in Lublin in 1943, recovering from his second wound. Had he heard of the 850,000 gassed and cremated there. He corrected us quickly. … “That is an exaggeration. I only knew of 16,000 and they were all shot in the back of the neck. The SS TOTENKOPF unit did most of the work there. They had to do it on order. Yes, it was repulsive … but it had to be done. … It is true that we cremated the bodies … We didn't want another Katyn, you know,” he said with a clever smile. He described Katyn as a massacre of Polish officers by Russians. “We did not make their mistake of burying the dead. We cremated them.”
Asked how this affected him from the humanistic point of view, he said: We never thought much about it. Most of them were Jews or were in a concentration camp. Everyone in such a camp is probably a criminal. Otherwise, how would he have got into the camp in the first place? You must understand that it is not a personal thing. The man who receives an order to shoot a civilian cannot take time out to find out who is and who is not a criminal. We leave that to the higher authorities.”
… During this admission of shooting civilians and prisoners in Poland, Russia and Yugoslavia, we (Lieutenant Peter Hart was present) showed no sharp reaction, and [H. K.] himself demonstrated no uneasiness about his own participation in the shootings. His attitude was that it was all in the past, that he had merely obeyed “orders,” and that the victims were “criminals” and thus deserved execution. His standpoint was that he is now a civilian and wanted to study in peace and his military past was honourable and forgotten. …
PS: CIC is holding [H. K.], but they believe they may have to release him for lack of a definitive charge.Footnote 48
The former Waffen-SS member's whereabouts and fate after this encounter are uncertain.Footnote 49 The fact that CIC may have released him “for lack of a definitive charge” alerts us to some of the problems concerning Allied notions of judicial culpability and the relative dearth of knowledge they possessed at this stage. The 16,000 dead in Majdanek he talks about most likely relate to the massacre of 18,000 Jews on November 3, 1943, as part of Operation Harvest Festival, when the surviving Jews in the Lublin district were murdered, and which was carried out by SS forces brought in from outside the camp. Majdanek had been the first major camp liberated by the Red Army in July 1944. Reports regarding the number of deaths at Majdanek have varied and have long been overestimated. Tomasz Kranz has calculated the figure to be 78,000 of which 59,000 were Jews.Footnote 50 Padover and his team had considerable leeway in the way in which they conducted interrogations, which did not have to follow any particular protocol, barring that of nonfraternization. H. K.'s profile sees Padover and Gittler explaining how they would show no reaction, perhaps so he would continue talking. The fact that they felt the need to spell this out also points us toward the enormity of what they encountered in this particular interrogation, which stood out as their only direct contact with a self-professed mass murderer.
Later PWD reports from June 1945 also complained about the “lack of any sense of war guilt among the ordinary German P/W [prisoner of war] and his false expectations of conditions under American occupation,” the problem thus not being limited to civilians alone.Footnote 51 Young people, too, as shown in letters written shortly after the end of the war, “follow the example of their elders in declining to accept the doctrine of collective German responsibility for Nazism and the war.” Some even tried “to turn the ‘guilt’ argument back against the western powers, condemning Allied governments for not having done more to resist Hitler before 1939.”Footnote 52 Countering such refusal to accept guilt and responsibility was part of the Allied reeducation strategy. Captain Donald McGranahan, who belonged to the Intelligence Section, where he organized and controlled the “flow and use” of different types of intelligence,Footnote 53 had visited the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp on April 19–20, 1945, where he encountered child survivors. In his report to the chief of PWD's Intelligence Section, he explained that he had “promised to speak to the children over Radio Luxembourg,” which was under SHAEF control from September 1944 until November 1945, and “to speak about them for the benefit of a wider audience. The children were quite eager to tell what they had gone through. A copy of the talk, which is appended, includes most of the points that were brought out. Several of the more gruesome details were omitted, such as the story of one child who saw his elders biting each others [sic] throat in starvation and madness.” He further reported that the Polish-Jewish children wanted to go the United States rather than return to Poland and that they harbored “intense feelings of revenge against the Germans.”Footnote 54 The radio broadcast (whether or not it was actually broadcast could not yet be established), entitled “A Talk to the Children of Buchenwald,” though addressing the children, was ultimately aimed at a wider German audience for the purpose of reeducation:
I am sorry that it is not possible for every German to go and talk with you boys of Buchenwald, as I did. You may recall that we did bring one German woman there to see you. Before she went to Buchenwald with us, she did not appear to feel any particular guilt or shame about what had taken place there. We took her before a group of you and asked the first boy where his mother was. “Gassed,” was the answer. We asked the next boy where his father was. “Shot, kaput [sic],” was the answer. We asked how many of the boys in this group had lost their parents. Every one raised his hand. This German woman also heard several of you tell your personal histories. When she went away from Buchenwald she was unable to speak. When we finally left her, she told us she would devote the rest of her life trying to make up for the crimes done to you and other children like you.
I do not know whether this woman was sincere or not, and as you will probably say, her good intentions are a little late. But I can tell you that you do not need to worry about your future.—If there is anything that the Allied armies are fighting for, it is this: that the injustices and crimes and cruelties committed against children like you will be amended.Footnote 55
McGranahan's radio address, and the correspondence with PWD's Intelligence Section, are remarkable for a number of reasons. The encounter had certainly left a considerable impression on him. Yet the proposed broadcast apparently omitted not only the most horrific details related to him but also the Jewishness of some of the children he had talked to. It further claimed that the Allies had been fighting to end injustices against children all along, thus accommodating a particular narrative of “why we fight” whose hold continues into the present and which distorts the more complex development of the Western Allies’ engagement in the war. McGranahan's pedagogic example of the German woman who was shown the liberated camp bought into and validated, perhaps inadvertently, German claims of ignorance about camp conditions, while also overestimating or misjudging the educational impact such direct confrontation would have on German civilians. The broadcast reads as offering a pathway to Germans that would allow them to acknowledge the crimes that had been committed in the camps while insisting on their own prior ignorance and innocence.
If Germans were mostly perceived to deny guilt and responsibility, some reports insisted that they in fact did feel some subconscious sense of guilt or at least displayed signs of a bad conscience. Notably, such claims were made where reports addressed atrocities. Having traveled through occupied Germany in the first two weeks of April 1945, Lerner contended: “All this elaborate structure of psychological evasion is built upon a deep sense of guilt. Nearly every German has some knowledge of the atrocities committed within Germany and in foreign lands. A surprisingly large number admit to knowledge of the ‘Gaswagen’ and how it was used—although the name LUBLIN does not always strike a spark.”Footnote 56
Echoing Lerner's assertions was intelligence officer Morris Janowitz, who concluded from a survey of German civilians shortly after Germany's surrender that “The only gap in the protective wall which Germans have erected to keep out all feelings of guilt about atrocities seems to be in connection with the mistreatment of German Jews. Here was a fact that even the most simple-minded German could not hide from his own consciousness. The Germans remembered the destruction of Jewish shops and synagogues, the systematic discrimination and final rounding-up and deportation of the Jews from their own community. … Some go so far as to lay the blame for the present difficulties of Germany on the mistreatment of the Jews.” The defeat at Stalingrad was especially assigned to Nazi policy toward the Jews; yet there was still no “realization of the need for developing individual responsibility in order to prevent the recurrence of the same misdeeds; it is more a wish or hope for absolution. Probing and discussion never produced any feelings of guilt. When a sense of shame was noted, it was a purely personal reaction without any feelings of coresponsibility.”Footnote 57
German postwar strategies of self-exculpation were built on two pillars: claims of a lack of knowledge of Nazi policy of mass murder and extermination, and a lack of influence on any such policy.Footnote 58 These claims still resonate into the present. But as PWD reports indicate, this was not so in the final months of the war in intelligence officers’ encounters with Germans, in which the latter spoke relatively freely about atrocities, though without always possessing the full details. But already at the time, most Germans recognized no link between their own actions and attitudes and the violence they recounted. Shortly after the war, PWD collated a report regarding the “German civilian mentality: reaction to atrocities,” that is, reactions to a concentration camp brochure the Allies had produced, observing:
Almost without exception, responsibility for misdeeds placed exclusively on Party or SS. German people “helpless & cannot be taken to task.”
… Nazis, near-Nazis, nationalists look on such atrocities as inevitable consequences of war & hatreds it stirs up. Acts were connected with wellbeing of Reich & people as whole. People who refuse to pass any moral judgment on the war. DENIAL OF ANY GUILT IS OFTEN ATTEMPT TO DENY ONE'S OWN SHARE IN A GENERAL GUILT. Yet widespread bad conscience about systematic atrocities toward Jews. This probably because of conviction that world Jewry is in fact the very great power which Goebbels had said it was, & is now wreaking retribution. Apologies for past actions toward Jews are method for winning absolution.”Footnote 59
The report further highlighted “Resistance” to their attempts to “inculcate some sense of collective responsibility” and reasoned that this may be due to a “CONFLICT BETWEEN the COLLECTIVE-RESPONSIBILITY DOCTRINE AND ACTUAL MG [military government] POLICY,”Footnote 60 alluding to the fact that many former Nazis were employed in city administrations. Such a case had been exposed by Padover, Gittler, and Sweet in a damning report on Aachen (February 1945) they sent to OSS rather than going through the proper channels and which Padover is said to have leaked to the press.Footnote 61
Apart from the discrepancy between Allied policy and military government in practice, there was another conflict that got in the way of “inculcating a sense of responsibility,” which had to do with the very nature and practice of Allied psychological warfare, specifically, its foundations in advertising principles and the “wedge-driving” technique.
Germans vs. Nazis: Origins and Impact of Psychological Warfare Operations in Germany
In 1950, as the Korean War unfolded, William Harlan Hale, a former intelligence officer, first in New York and London, later as chief of Radio Luxembourg, was tasked with collecting evaluations and suggestions for improvements from fellow former intelligence staff. He summarized the reflections of Wallace Carroll, OWI, who had been in charge of European psychological warfare policies at the time, as follows:
In World War II, the “unconditional surrender” formula made it difficult for P. W. [psychological warfare] to win over enemy individuals until their situation became desperate; still, ways were found even within that formula to disarm the psychological resistance of many an individual before his state was desperate. This, Carroll recalls, involved selecting our main propaganda targets in such a way as to avoid giving the individual enemy listener the impression of blanket hostility on our part to everything in his world. The “real enemy,” in other words, had to be carefully defined and highlighted in our P. W. output in such a way that the individual enemy listener—especially down in the rank & file—saw in it the image of someone other than himself. All P. W. “wedge-driving” depends on the application of this technique. In waging P. W. war on German armed forces, much of the attack concentrated on their most vulnerable point—the relationship between Army and Party.Footnote 62
Carroll's evaluation is striking. Within the narrow constraints of the unconditional surrender formula, the exploitation of existing grievances, weaknesses, and strained relations was undoubtedly effective. Yet the technique had uncertain implications for the period of occupation, specifically, for Allied reeducation efforts.
Recent scholarship has explored the impact of Allied occupation policies and practices in the postwar period. As Donald Bloxham demonstrates, “Allied ‘reeducation’ policies, by some of its techniques and messages, contributed to its own failure to inculcate a German ‘memory’ and sense of responsibility for the crimes of Nazism.”Footnote 63 He cites a lack of clarity on the question of guilt and the fact that reeducation policy enabled representations of the past in which “ordinary” Germans were absolved of guilt and responsibility or appeared as victims, accommodating and fortifying Germany's particular strategy of “mastering the past.”Footnote 64 Similarly, William Mikkel Dack argues that the shared experience of completing a denazification questionnaire, of which approximately 20 million were distributed in the four occupation zones (primarily in the US zone), that is, reaching about a third of the German population, had a significant, perhaps lasting effect on Germans and their “construction of early postwar personal narratives.”Footnote 65
As a corrective to the focus on the immediate postwar period, I argue that the lasting effect of Allied policies so convincingly demonstrated by Bloxham and Dack also applies in the case of psychological warfare outputs prior to the end of the war in Europe. Dack claims that the impact of the questionnaire may be bigger than that of “denazification radio broadcasts, mandatory film screenings, or a tour of a concentration camp.”Footnote 66 Left to be explored is the interplay between denazification self-evaluations and the Nuremberg Trial, press coverage, other denazification measures, and so on, which can be presumed to have affected the direction, tone, even vocabulary of supporting information supplied by Germans seeking to be permitted to continue their current employment or take up a new position. The assertion that “The Fragebogen acted as a blank canvas upon which Germans documented their personal history of living under the Third Reich and constructed narratives about their relationship with the Nazi regime, narratives often clothed in strong emotions” can thus be qualified and the Fragebogen be embedded in the wider, complex context of the early postwar years, and indeed the final months of the war, which were, as we have seen, all but a clean slate.Footnote 67
As troops which were supported by CIC officers entered newly conquered towns and cities, black lists and automatic arrest category instructions enabled them to remove people from office and intern and arrest them. Dack notes how the arrests were a cause of anxiety among the local populations who were not privy to the criteria leading to internment.Footnote 68 So even before the specifics of denazification were known, already from autumn 1944 onward, Germans had to consider the extent of their own involvement, how it would affect them, and how they would represent it to the occupying forces.Footnote 69
As mentioned previously, PWD's field interrogations and other forms of intelligence gathering informed the production of leaflets and radio broadcasts. In the following, I will draw attention to what may be wider ramifications of psychological warfare operations for later German self-representations. Specifically, the way in which Germans on any part of a spectrum of complicity tended to separate themselves from “real Nazis” in many contemporary sources and postwar accounts was possibly reinforced and lent legitimacy by psychological warfare propaganda—before the end of hostilities.
To a degree, psychological warfare output ran counter to psychological warfare's own standing directive, namely, that “The use of Psychological Warfare in military operations must however be strictly subordinated to the long-term policy of our Governments. In the sense that nothing must be done to undermine fighting morale during operations which would prejudice Government policy to Germany after the war.”Footnote 70 One of the psychological warfare leaflets, for instance, purports to answer questions posed by German soldiers captured in Italy, including the following:
“Will we be held responsible for the acts of our Nazi leaders and of the Waffen-SS?”
Their officers had told them that, if they were captured, the Americans and English would mistreat them. They feared a mass vengeance for the deeds committed in Germany's name in occupied Europe.
They should have known that the Anglo-Saxons always treat their prisoners “fair”—with chivalry and decency. No German soldier is ever held responsible for the deeds of his leaders. German prisoners of war get the same food and care as English and American soldiers. And after the war they will be able to return home to their families and help to build up a new and better Germany.Footnote 71
The “wedge-driving technique” was arguably ill suited for holding to account, postconflict, a society complicit to different degrees in systematic exclusion, expropriation, expulsion, and extermination. In the aforementioned example, it helped reinforce notions of an unpolitical Wehrmacht and foster a sense of impunity. Intelligence officers’ frequently voiced expectations of admissions of guilt and responsibility from Germans are thus at odds with the most fundamental psychological warfare techniques they employed and supported. The extent to which these techniques had an impact on Germans and the outcome of the war is difficult to establish. But there can be no doubt that the radio programs and leaflet campaigns reached a significant number of German civilians and soldiers.Footnote 72
A representative questionnaire study administered in June 1945 among 666 adults aged 18 to 55 in Marburg, Hersfeld, and Eschwege sought to “obtain a quantitative measure of the extent to which Allied radio programmes were listened to, of German attitudes toward them and of the effect which they produced.”Footnote 73 According to the survey results, 51 percent of the population had listened to Allied radio broadcasts, though listening numbers varied according to gender, occupation, and political outlook. Radio Luxembourg was the “most popular of Allied stations,” followed by the BBC.Footnote 74 Just under half of those who professed to listening to Allied radio broadcasts had listened to the supreme commander's proclamations, with many passing on the information to others.Footnote 75
The survey also evaluated civilians’ exposure to leaflets during the war, of which billions were dropped.Footnote 76 An average of 30 percent professed to having seen leaflets, with men, Catholics, and the more highly educated significantly more likely to have been exposed to them. Similar to radio listeners, just under half passed the leaflets on to others. Radio broadcasts were considered more accurate than leaflets. The more memorable leaflet contents included statements alluding to the consequences of the “wedge-driving” technique: survey respondents cited leaflets that highlighted “The poor leadership of the German Government”; “Details about the useless efforts and waste of men's lives by the leading Generals of the Wehrmacht”; or “That the Allies intend to abolish only the Nazi regime and appeal to the German people for support.”Footnote 77 A survey by Major Martin F. Herz, who was chief leaflet writer for PWD, after having been in charge of leaflet writing and POW interrogation for the combat propaganda team of the Fifth Army in Italy, reported that two leaflets, in particular, proved highly successful: SHAEF's Safe-Conduct letter and One minute which may save your life, the latter of which “salved the feelings of the enemy by crediting him, by implication, with great soldierly virtue; it accommodated his alibi of material inferiority; it described him in soldierly (nonpolitical) terms, avoiding any political arguments; it did not overly praise captivity; and it ‘left the decision to the reader,’ seemingly not urging him to desert.”Footnote 78
Crucially, such leaflets did not originate in a vacuum, but were carefully crafted and primed, and, in part, based on and tested in interrogations, which allowed confirming their effectiveness and further refinement. The degree of effectiveness was further probed by the number of leaflets that were found on captured German soldiers; recollections of leaflets among POWs and their discussion; description of their surrender; German counter-propaganda reacting to Allied leaflets; and comments by the Wehrmacht command, which they gleaned from captured documents. A few years after the war, Herz countered the perception and charge of the failures of wartime propaganda on the grounds that “Re-education is not a task of psychological warfare, but of postwar reconstruction”Footnote 79 and defended the psychological warfare techniques of “wedge-driving” and finding “common ground.”Footnote 80 With regard to civilians, Herz elaborated his conviction that “most propaganda directed to enemy civilians will have little concrete effect on the course of a war. In fact … little can be gained from propaganda directed toward enemy civilians in wartime, except by way of building up credibility. Thus our enormous leaflet output which was dropped on Germany during the war … can really be judged only in terms of whether it built up belief in our essential honesty.”Footnote 81
The potential impact of psychological warfare techniques on civilians, and of seeking to build up “credibility” in this particular way, is indicated in the interrogation of seventy German civilians, a cross-section of the population in the western zones (Cologne, Kassel, Erfurt, Koblenz, Kaiserslautern, Marburg, Heidelberg, and a number of villages), in early June 1945 about their reactions to atrocities. In this evaluation, Janowitz, who was then serving as an intelligence officer and analyst for PWB, established that Germans would either claim ignorance of the conditions inside the camps or the impossibility of agency under Nazism. Such claims were found among “All types of personalities and social classes … In order to buttress their argument, a few sophisticated civilians pointed to the past programs of BBC and Radio Luxembourg, which had attacked the Nazi leaders as the ‘real war criminals.’”Footnote 82 Anti-Nazis would criticize them for separating between party and nonparty members as “running counter to attempts to develop a sense of collective responsibility among the German people. Military government policy was leading many Germans who had traveled complacently on the Nazi bandwagon to consider that they would not have to bear any responsibility, since only Nazi party members were being punished.”Footnote 83 This alerts us to the fact that Allied attitudes, policies, and practices were rather confused in this period, including on the British side, as recent scholarship on the PWE and strategic bombing has demonstrated. The question of whether to target all Germans or only “Nazis”—however defined—proved to be a contentious issue.Footnote 84
Janowitz was not alone in recording such sentiments. Parloff, too, commented on this issue. Reflecting on the conduct of the occupying troops and “the policy of ‘We Come as Conquerors, not Liberators, ” he wrote to his wife in January 1945: “The Germans here had gained the erroneous impression that the Americans were coming to liberate Germany from the Nazi Yoke. They claim our radio propaganda told them so. I don't know if that's true or not.”Footnote 85 Especially “anti-Nazis” would challenge the Allied occupation forces after the end of the war, as noted in an intelligence report from July 1945, according to which they would complain that “We (anti-Nazis) and you (Americans) used to maintain that this war was waged against Nazism and not against the German people.”Footnote 86 Contrary to Herz's assertions, the credibility built during the war through propaganda was thus seemingly undermined in some quarters in the immediate postwar period.
Given what may be modest gains of psychological warfare among the civilian population during wartime, with its aims focussed on achieving long-term postwar goals, this strategy may have obstructed reeducation aims. They largely fed Germans what they wanted to hear to build up credibility, only to then contradict their previous messaging as soon as the war was over. Indeed, McGranahan, perhaps still unsettled by his encounter with the child survivors of Buchenwald, appeared to have felt uneasy about the strategy, musing not long after the war:
We did, of course, attempt in some degree to destroy the central core of German loyalty, but we could have attempted much more. We could have told the Germans quite honestly what we thought about Hitler; we could have given the same attention before the collapse as we did afterward to the aggression, sadism, and brutality of the Nazi regime, its loathsomeness to the civilized world, and the role of the German people in tolerating it; we could have concentrated much more than we did on encouraging and organizing the anti-Nazis, remembering that if 60 percent professed loyalty to Hitler, 40 percent did not. There is no way of knowing today what the consequences would have been if we had followed such a policy. It is difficult enough to evaluate the effects of propaganda we did employ, let alone policies we never put into operation.Footnote 87
For McGranahan, the problem lay in the fact that in the United States, propaganda was based on advertising and public relations principles, in which it was paramount not to offend but to find a common denominator. In a psychological warfare context, “established values and symbols” were not attacked. Instead, the focus was on less ideological issues.Footnote 88 He voiced his “personal opinion that our policy was wrong in shrinking from ideological attack and modelling itself on advertising methods. … With the occupation, we radically changed from the advertising to the evangelical type of propaganda. Now we are full of moral indignation, we sternly condemn the common man in Germany for sinfully participating in the Nazi cause, and we openly avow our purpose of converting the Germans to democracy. The Germans, of course, are quite surprised at this change. Bolder ones among them complain that if we thought it was futile to try to encourage them to turn against the Nazi leadership during the war, we are being somewhat inconsistent now in blaming them for having failed to do so.”Footnote 89
Richard Crossman, former head of PWE's German Section and later assistant chief of PWD, and a Labour MP from 1945, admitted in an address to the Royal United Services Institution in 1953 that Parliament, had it been able to openly discuss the propaganda directed at Germans, “would have complained that the propaganda organization was ‘appeasing’ the Germans. But it was essential to make leaflets objective and credible to a German—not to the House of Commons!”Footnote 90 Similar to Herz, Crossman continued to defend the strategy by maintaining that “it is not only necessary to say the truth; it must be the credible truth. You have to eliminate a great many things which are true if the enemy will not believe them to be true.”Footnote 91 In other words, to build and maintain Allied credibility with Germans, less “credible”—or less palatable—elements of the truth were omitted, with unknown but potentially far-reaching consequences.
Conclusion
The final seven months of the war prove significant for our understanding of evolving Allied attitudes toward Germans and German responses toward the occupation forces and their own involvement in the Third Reich. Intelligence officers were among the first of the Allies to interact with German civilians and to question them about their attitudes and behaviors. Among the Allies, there was considerable uncertainty and ambiguity regarding what to expect when entering Germany. The intelligence officers’ approaches to psychological profiling, professional and personal backgrounds, along with ideas about national character and collective guilt, shaped their encounters and German civilians’ responses.
The analysis of intelligence officers’ interrogations and reports adds to the discourse surrounding Allied notions of complicity, guilt, and responsibility in the latter months of the war. In the long history of seeking to separate between “active” and “nominal” Nazis, “Nazis” and “anti-Nazis,” “good bets” and “bad bets,” “Germans” and “Nazis,” or, more recently, “perpetrators” and “bystanders,” the Western Allies’ definition of guilt and responsibility was initially very wide, if ill defined. It increasingly narrowed after war's end in the context of Cold War practicalities, denazification, and war crimes trials, but has more recently expanded again to include forms of everyday complicity. Psychological warfare research and operations have received scant attention in this development. But as this article has demonstrated, the reports and profiles offer an intimate view of early encounters between Allies and German civilians, and their disparate notions of culpability. The interrogations of civilians, and intelligence officers’ often astute, if at times polemical, analyses, which, together with POW interrogations and observations, informed the more widely researched radio broadcasts and leaflet campaigns, thus deserve a closer look than previously afforded.
Psychological warfare operations directed at civilians were intended to build up credibility for the period of occupation after the hostilities had ended. It was assumed in intelligence circles that Germans would accept only certain aspects of the truth. Any contentious issues were therefore omitted, a psychological warfare practice, which has its roots in the application of advertising and marketing principles. It is closely connected to another key technique, the exploitation of existing grievances and weaknesses, for example, between soldiers and army leadership, or between the people and government. In this manner, a firm line was drawn between Germans and Nazis. Psychological warfare operations did not develop in a vacuum. Leaflets and radio broadcasts were developed through POW interrogations, clandestine recordings, and surveys, along with civilian interrogations; and in turn, the effectiveness of said output was tested on these groups.
Taking place before any details of postwar denazification and criminal prosecutions were known, before exculpation and defense strategies were publicized and hardened, the PWD reports and profiles attest to civilians who until April/May 1945 readily admitted to having known about atrocities, yet who already distanced themselves from any role in the process, and indeed from “the Nazis.” Psychological warfare operations are not responsible for these claims, yet may well have played a part in reinforcing them, not least as strategies or performances toward the intelligence officers. Germans used tropes and slogans which they knew originated or would resonate with the Allies, who, in turn, had concluded from their POW surveys and interrogations that this was going to be the most successful psychological warfare strategy. It ran counter to many intelligence officers’ own observations, attitudes, and analyses, as expressed in reports and correspondence both at the time and after the war. It further undermined the objective of instilling a sense of guilt or responsibility in Germans, whether personal or collective, and may have ultimately weakened Allied credibility.
