Figure 1.--The fall of France not only brought on the Battle of Britain and eventually the Blitz, but fear of a NAZI invasion (June 1940). As a result, the British not only evacuated the children to the country side again. Many both in Britain and America, however, believed that the Germans were posed to invade Britain and the country would fall to the NAZIs as well. Ambassador Kennedy told President Roosevlt it was only a matter of weeks. Thus an overseas evacuation program was developed with most of the children going to neutral America. Here is photograph of parents registering for overseas evacuation which was used in Goebbels' NAZI controlled media. Notice that the NAZI caption could just as well been written in Moscow by Communist propgandists. The photograph was probanly taken in July 1940, but appeared in German newspapers (August 10, 1940) at the height of the Battle of Britain. The German caption read, "Nur für Kinder der britishchen Plutokraten ist Schifsraum zur Verfügung. Ein Spezialbüro für Kinderverschickung sitzt in einem Londoner Hotel." This means, "Only for the children of the British Plutocrats is the space available. A special office for children's being evacuated abroad sits in a London hotel." The Propaganda Ministry also provided a French versionfor use in NAZI-occupied France. "Il n'y a de la place à bord des bateaux que pour les enfants des plutocrates britanniques." France was also affect by Socist thought and had an important Communist movement.

Modern political discourse tends to differentate betweem Communism and Fascism as polar opposites. And the 'Socialist' and 'Worker's' in the National Socialist German Worker's Party was simply window dressing. In fact The NAZIs and Communists despite apocolyptic, life and death struggle on the Eastern Front that dominated World War II, the two totalitarian dictatorships were virtual twins. Both were ruthless dictatorships who trampeled on indivual human rights, seized absolute control of the media, and created what are today as the iconic police states of all time--although the modrn Socialist dominated mrdia and academia almost always refer to the NAZIs and and not the Communists. The NAZIS and Soviets established the same institutions and pursued the same methods like unrestrained secret police, perversion of the justice system, end of the rule of law, brutality, torture, murder, perversion of the arts, atheism, massive militaries, slave labor, concentration camps, mandatory state youth system, and supression of neighboring countries and national groups with etnic cleanding a mass deportations. The Soviets pursued Russian imperialism, the NAZIs Grman imperialism. And the results were the same -- state murder on an unbeleveable scale. There were some differences, but both were forms of totalarianism which were much more alike than different. Both were fundamental diversions from the arc of Western Civilizationn toward individual freedom. This was the fundamental, destinctive characteristic of Western Civilization since the Greeks invented freedom at Thermopylae. And both Communists and Fascists adopted Socialist economic systems. The Communists seized private property. The Fascists allowed private ownership, but took effective control of industry. Mussolini in Italy alled it the Corporate State. Hitler called it National Socialism. The NAZI Government did seize important elements of the economy. This was done by Himmler's SS or Göring's giant conglomerate, the Reichswerke. But for the most part the NAZIs let industry remain in private hands while controling corporate activity. The mechanism for control was Göring Four Year Plan, compaable to Stalin's Five Year Plan. Hitler and the NAZIs are often portrayed as virulent anti-Communists. They were certainly anti-Soviet. Notice that NAZI propganda commonlu used 'Bolshevik' rather than 'Communist'. NAZI propaganda emphasized its Socialist foundation and devition to the working man. DAF Leader Ley would claim that Germany was the first country in Europe to overcome the class struggle. [Ley, 1933.] NAZI propaganda propegated by Goebbels Propaganda Ministry sounded very similar to Soviet propaganda. One historian writes, "All the propagandists in the Third Reich from Hitler on down were accustomed to rant in their public speeches against the bourgeois and the capitalist and proclaim their solidarity with the worker. But... the official statistics ... revealed that the much maligned capitalists, not the workers, benefited most from Nazi policies." [Shirer, p. 329.] Notably both the Soviets and the NAZIs abolished free trade unions, created Governnment-controlled unions, and imposed low salaries on workers. Once Hiter and Stalin launched the War, both NAZI and Soviet propaganda focused only 'capitalist plutocrats', with Chamberlain, Churchill, and Roosevelt dressed like Monopoly figures being common targets. NAZI and Soviet propaganda became virtually indestinguishable (figure 1). The only real difference was the racism woven into NAZI propaganda. After launching the Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union, the targets incrasingly became Stalin and the Bolsheviks with images of hodes of murderous Asiatic sub-humans. At the end of the War, however, after Germans began surrendeing en masse to the Western Allies, Goebbels began having second thoughts about his propaganda campaign which he blamed on others. He writes in his diary, "I shall very quickly purge the press section of refractory and defeatist elements and can now carry on propaganda against the West which will be in no way inferior to that against the East. Anti-Anglo-Ameican propaganda is now the order of the day. Only if we demonstrate to our people that Anglo-American intentions towards them are no different from those of the Bolshevists will they adopt a different attitude toward our eneny in the West." [Goebbels, March 30, 1945, p. 343.]

Sources

Goebbels, Josef. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed and intro. Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels (Avon: New York, 1978), 453p.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959).

Created: 4:48 AM 3/20/2017
Last updated: 4:48 AM 3/20/2017