The Anti-Komintern and Nazi Anti-Bolshevik Propaganda in the 1930s

Abstract

Of all the lessons that Adolf Hitler claimed to have drawn from his experiences in the Great War, none would prove to be more significant in its consequences than his discovery of the power of propaganda. Applauding the British wartime propagandists, in particular, for the purposefulness, indeed brilliance, of their efforts to undermine the German war effort, the future chancellor famously wrote in Mein Kampf that effective propaganda must 'confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over'.1 Throughout the era of the Third Reich Hitler, his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the army of German propagandists active in the press, radio and other media essentially kept faith with this maxim, carrying out a series of sustained campaigns to promote essential tenets of nazi ideology in both the domestic and the international arenas. In the latter context the most prominent of these campaigns was that directed against the Soviet Union, home of 'Jewish Bolshevism' and the primary object of Hitler's imperialist designs in Europe. Indeed, apart from the interlude occasioned by the tactical shift in German policy towards the USSR between 1939 and 1941, the propaganda onslaught against Bolshevism ranks as perhaps the most consistent strain of nazi pre-war propaganda to be designed with both a German and a foreign audience in mind. Given the pivotal role in Hitler's Weltanschauung of those interlinked racial-political and territorial issues namely the determination to extirpate 'Jewish Bolshevism' and the requirement for additional Lebensraum that lay at the core of his plans for the eradication of the USSR, it seems surprising that relatively little has been published about the German propaganda campaign against Bolshevism and the Soviet Union before 1939, although this is due in part to serious problems with the available sources. By drawing on new material, particularly from the surviving files of the Anti-Komintern, an agency established by Goebbels in 1933 with the specific aim of conducting anti-Bolshevik propaganda, this essay seeks to shed some light on this important issue and also to offer insights into the nature of nazi external propaganda conducted at a level several times removed from the extravagances of the Nuremberg rallies and other public manifestations of the regime's opposition to the 'red peril'. The activities of the Anti-Komintern have received scant attention in the literature on German propaganda during the 1930s. Apart from a rather dismissive analysis by Walter Laqueur, which seeks to downplay if not ridicule its