They denounced enemy bribing cases to the local police and had editors and enemy agents arrested. Sometimes Germans and French would try to bribe the same journalist, and this man would simply tailor his articles in favour of the highest bidder.
In Germany, private editors supplied subscriptions of special war brochures to the population with most of them being cancelled as early as In some countries locals were hired as propagandists, often expatriates who in some cases founded propaganda organisations themselves. Propaganda abroad was especially difficult for the Germans, because at the outset of the war the British cut the undersea telegraph cables.
At first it was possible to transmit the material via neutral countries such as Sweden , Switzerland and Italy, but soon the Germans faced major problems when the sea blockade was tightened and even neutral ships were searched. Now British postal censors opened all letters and parcels between neutral countries and could therefore closely survey all correspondence of German propaganda agents and even replace German propaganda with their own.
The Overseas Transocean Company took care of this. In order to pass propaganda to enemy countries even more sophisticated methods were necessary. Switzerland was the European centre of spies and propaganda agents. The French smuggled propaganda to Germany and the Germans sent some propaganda to France from Switzerland and Spain, [] but usually considered France as immune to propaganda and concentrated their efforts on Italy. Books and brochures were sent with camouflage covers; leaflets were put in leather sacks or bottles and floated down the Rhine, or across the Lake Constance or Lake Lugano, tied underneath boats; hidden in chests with a double floor; in books carried by school children; thrown over a frontier fence, or sent by post with fake wrappers or jackets from falsified official addresses.
Sometimes espionage accompanied propaganda. The American Secret Service tapped the telephone wires of the German and Austrian embassies in Washington, and Czech undercover agents infiltrated them and stole compromising photos and sabotage plans, which were then widely publicized in American newspapers.
All armies also employed army chaplains for the same purpose, but in different numbers: from two chaplains per division in Prussia to 2, plus 24, other clerics in the Italian army. In order to give propaganda a better chance the armies tried to mix it with entertainment.
They organized theatre and film performances, songs and musical sketches, free beer, dances, acrobatic shows, and collective singing. The first to step up propaganda for the armed forces was Erich Ludendorff with his Patriotic Instruction of July Special directors of propaganda organized compulsory lectures for the soldiers, and university professors gave lectures to officers. In the Austrian army in March an Enemy Propaganda Defence Agency was created with the task of training propaganda officers.
In France, propaganda was considerably strengthened by a famous war novel, Le Feu , published in by Henri Barbusse , which was for a long time misunderstood as a pacifist work. Welcomed and encouraged by French propaganda authorities the author continued to spread his arguments in articles and brochures with phrases such as this:.
In spring the Central Powers started directing propaganda at the Italian and Russian fronts, and somewhat later also against the Romanians and the Serbs in Saloniki. In winter it was the turn of the Italians and the British at the Piave front to make propaganda, and from Autumn British and French leaflets flooded the German Western Front. The Germans did not retaliate there because they considered their enemies too nationalistic and propaganda resistant and even refused the proposition of French socialist prisoners to write propaganda texts.
Propaganda was transmitted with information boards, megaphones, gramophone recordings, and in appropriate cases even with bottles and buoys via waterways. A much better transmittance possibility was by planes or balloons.
The Germans dropped the Gazette des Ardennes over the French front and the occupied areas and the French Service of Air Propaganda, founded in August , dropped La voix du pays over the latter as well. Because of legal protests by the Russian and German High Commands followed by the court-martialling of captured aviators, [] the British for a while switched to another technique: dropping leaflets from balloons.
When the balloon was released, the tinder was lit and after forty minutes the balloon was driven by the western winds between twenty and kilometers, sometimes more, into the German lines where the tinder burned out and the leaflets fell to the ground.
Each balloon could transport two kilos of paper. Until November , 30, balloons dropped 60, tons of paper, that is, 60 million leaflets and 10 million newspapers in several languages. Accordingly, it tried to destroy their conviction that the war was defensive and that they would certainly win. Helena to the French victims of British bombs in the occupied areas.
The reward factor also played an important role. Numerous Allied leaflets, most of them with facsimile letters from prisoners and impressive photos promised a wonderful life in the prisoner-of-war camps: prisoners of war POWs were wined and dined in elegant halls and enjoyed beautiful gardens, football fields and swimming pools. Uninspiring photos of German prisoner-of-war camps matched the misery of Russian POWs many of whom were starving. One of the most important propaganda slogans of the war was the right of self-determination for all nationalities.
Germany promised to liberate the alien peoples of Tsarist Russia — Poles, Ukrainians and Balts — and offered them freedom and political influence as autonomous, but dependent satellite states bound to Germany in military, political and economic matters. This organisation sent a dramatic appeal to President Wilson, instigated brochures such as Do you know Russia? At this congress, more than delegates denounced British colonial rule and Russian oppression of national minorities and completely discredited the Allied assumption of fighting for the freedom of the small peoples — one of the greatest triumphs of German propaganda during the war.
The Russians promised to liberate all Slavic peoples of Austria-Hungary and to unify Poland as an autonomous state within the Tsarist Empire. A great advantage for German propaganda was the publication of the secret treaties between Tsarist Russia and the Western Allies by the Bolsheviks, which blatantly violated the right of self-determination. Italy would annex German and Slavic territories in Austria, and Britain and France would divide up among themselves the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire.
Besides the propaganda for the Slavic and Arabic peoples other targets played only a minor role. I would like to evaluate the influence of propaganda by looking at the special situation in Great Britain. Of 5 million men fit for military service approximately 2. When the volunteers were confronted with the reality of the front, they were deeply shocked. Once arrived in a hospital in such a state they might sob and beg adamant doctors not to be sent back to the front.
However, as only However, even then men could appeal for exemption to tribunals, which practically everybody did. The total number of exemptions finally amounted to 2,, men, with the number of conscripts slightly higher 2,, Only atrocity propaganda succeeded — temporarily — and nearly half of the men were not only unimpressed by propaganda but even successfully thwarted the military service act.
One can assume that in the other countries the situation would have been the same. One reservation must be made. In all armies there were soldiers who enjoyed the war and identified with propaganda because it reinforced their personal convictions. Acceptance of patriotic propaganda also depended on class.
The elites, the intellectuals and the middle classes were more receptive to it than workers and peasants. In Britain 40 percent of the professional and commercial classes enlisted, against 27 percent of the industrial workers and 22 percent of the rural population. The home front presented a similar image. People from bourgeois and petty bourgeois families readily accepted the patriotic arguments of war propaganda whereas the workers who distrusted official information, considered newspaper articles as lies and front reports as laughable.
Nevertheless, in all countries a counter movement among the public arose with dangerous rumours, gossip and criticism. For instance, a wholesale clothier and his employees at Tours were happy to see the war going on, owing to the high profit and the good wages they were receiving. For those who refused the war and its propaganda messages the authorities in all countries applied disciplinary measures as harsh as those at the front. Demonstrations and protests against the war were crushed by the intervention of police forces or troops.
Strikers, rioters, and pacifists were either shot, jailed, in some cases put in mental hospitals, moved to forced labour in the colonies or sent to the front and placed as cannon fodder in the most exposed trenches. In Italy, the authorities were especially distrustful because only a minority of warmongers backed the war and the majority of the people hated it and called it the war of the signori.
Examples included the socialist deputies Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Dittmann in Germany, the former Minister of Finance Joseph Caillaux in France, the philosopher Bertrand Russell in Britain, the socialist leader Costantino Lazzari in Italy and the socialist politician Eugene V.
Debs in the United States, the latter one week after the armistice. When on 10 August a message of the Kaiser was read at school, she regretted that as a girl she could not enlist as a volunteer. We were children, students, and all of them in the school, with the director and the teachers in the forefront, had cried: Hurrah.
It is often selective with the facts or truths it presents, and will often appeal to fears or concerns of the group it is targeting. However, during both World Wars I and II, propaganda posters caught the eye and influenced the populace, with their striking artistic style still rippling through art to this day. We have taken a look at some prominent and interesting examples from both sides.
James Montgomery Flagg, a prominent U. Versions of the poster were then used again for World War II. By James Montgomery Flagg. During both World Wars, posters were meant to instill people with a positive and patriotic outlook on the conflict. Posters were encouraging not just men to join the army, but every citizen of the United States to contribute to the war effort and do their part, whether at home or abroad.
As we can see in the above example, red, white and blue are the colors which dominate the poster. A contrast from the usual stark colors that are in a number of propaganda posters, the artist, Egon Tschirch, worked as a freelance painter in Rostock. Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist , Collection of Mary Ellen Meehan.
During wartime, large-format, full-color posters plastered walls from city streets to classrooms. They mobilized support for the war effort, summoned donations to charities, encouraged participation in war bonds, and publicized victories in notable battles to a broad public. Illustrators of varying renown were called on to produce forceful images whose meaning could be quickly and easily grasped by a diverse audience.
The "mad brute" wears a spiked helmet emblazoned with the word "militarism" and dons a mustache suggestive of Kaiser Wilhelm II's whiskers. He has abducted an allegorical figure of Lady Liberty and clenches the bloodied club of German Kultur culture.
The motif of the barbarous enemy abounds in propaganda issued by the Allied forces, and the ape-like figure in particular—a precursor to the title character in the film King Kong —spoke to an audience familiar with Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Right: Fritz Erler German, — Help Us Win! Buy War Bonds Helft uns siegen! Zeichnet die Kriegsanleihe , Buy War Bonds after making studies of soldiers at the front.
The man depicted in his poster wears a type of steel helmet introduced by the German army in The gas mask on his chest, the two "potato-masher" grenades in a pouch dangling from his left shoulder, and the barbed wire that surrounds him are all visual hallmarks of World War I. The artist formed the soldier's pupils into small crosses, harnessing Christian symbolism to cast him as a noble and timeless figure. Contact us Send us your feedback.
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Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. Subject and research guides. Search this Guide Search. Subjects: History - British. Placefinder Propaganda. Newspaper responses to WWI The public demand for news of the war was reflected in the increased sales of newspapers, which played an important role in disseminating information which bolstered the British war effort. Cymru , war loans During WWI civilians were strongly encouraged to invest in war loans.
Cymru British Library, the Bryce Report Those interested in the official manifestations of propaganda may wish to consult the 'Report of the Committee on alleged German Outrages' , commonly known as the Bryce Report. Imperial War Museum.
IWM, propaganda films At the outbreak of war, Britain had no official propaganda agency, but an organisation was soon established at Wellington House under Charles Masterman. Report a problem.
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