After the end of World War II Germany was separated into nation-states. Each nation-state was governed by a different country because officials could not agree on peace terms. The Soviet Union had claimed the eastern portion of the country. In 1947, the "German People's Congress for Unity and Just Peace" met in Berlin. The Congress was to take the demands of all the occupied zones, and create a peace treaty which would enact a centralized German government. In order to have their nation-state properly represented, the Soviets created the German Democratic Republic in 1949 when they officially approved their constitution in May.
The purpose of propaganda in the German Democratic Republic was to maintain the Soviet ideology of socialism. Through various forms of propaganda, such as posters, pamphlets and speeches, the Soviet Union censored the ideas of the allied forces and the outside world from the citizens of Eastern Germany. [1] News published in the GDR was intended to inform the East German public of how current events fitted into "the overall pattern of historical necessity", with news editors specifically instructed by the government to extract "from every item of news its possible relevance to the global struggle between capitalism and communism". [2]
The GDR's propaganda also sought to portray the United States of America and other countries of the West, and especially its neighbour and main rival West Germany, in a negative light. For example, in 1950, the GDR published claims that the United States was sabotaging potato crops in East Germany by airdropping Colorado potato beetles onto crops. [3] However, it has been claimed that the GDR's state newspaper, Neues Deutschland , failed to reach much of the East German population. [4]
Media for East German propaganda during the Cold War played a very significant role in the persuasion and ideologies of the East German people at this time. The types of media that were most prevalent in their propaganda efforts were posters, pamphlets, tabloids, and speeches.
Posters during the Cold War focused primarily on depictions of Stalin and his positive effects on East Germany. The information on the posters was used to convince the German people that the institutions of the Soviet Union would perpetuate a peaceful socialist society. Many other posters were used to depict the allied forces in a negative light, this form of propaganda was generated to make the Germans dislike the ally outsiders.
The German Democratic Republic created pamphlets to promote a socialist and peaceful way of life to those living in Eastern Germany. These pamphlets were dropped in the Federal Territory of East German zones in large "propaganda rockets" and small "metal coconuts", along with "occurrence reports" that documents the times they were sent and 'outside occurrences' to spread their news in an innovative, creative and far reaching way. The "propaganda rockets" allowed for more people to be exposed the information over a large geographic scale. [ citation needed ]
The German tabloids during the cold war were used as media source to entertain and inform the working class with pictures, articles and news that highlighted the successes of the East German society.[ citation needed ]
There were many influential leaders and intellectuals during the Cold War in East Germany. Speeches were made in order to persuade the people to fall in line with the socialist movement and the leaders of the Soviet Union. These speeches, along with the propaganda aforementioned helped to convince the German people that socialism and the German Democratic Republic would remain intact.
Of central importance in the context of East German propaganda were the speeches given at the national memorial sites (Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätten) Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen on the occasion of the major anniversaries of the liberation of the concentration camps. According to historian Anne-Kathleen Tillack-Graf, the speeches were more about the current issues of the GDR concerning the political and economic situation, and only to a lesser extent about the lives and commemoration of the victims of the concentration camps and the historical events. Accordingly, the main topics of the speakers concerned Cold War issues such as peaceful coexistence, the arms race between the Soviet Union and the USA or Ronald Reagan's Star Wars. In addition, there was a somewhat distorted portrayal of historical events in favour of a positive presentation of socialism. [5]
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic, was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the country was a part of the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. Commonly described as a communist state, it described itself as a socialist "workers' and peasants' state". Its territory was administered and occupied by Soviet forces following the end of World War II—the Soviet occupation zone of the Potsdam Agreement, bounded on the east by the Oder–Neisse line. The Soviet zone surrounded West Berlin but did not include it and West Berlin remained outside the jurisdiction of the GDR. Most scholars and academics describe the GDR as a totalitarian dictatorship.
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Trygve Martin Bratteli (help·info) was a Norwegian newspaper editor and politician with the Norwegian Labour Party. He served as the 26th prime minister of Norway from 1971 to 1972 and again from 1973 to 1976. He was president of the Nordic Council in 1978.
Horst Sindermann was a Communist German politician and one of the leaders of East Germany. He became Chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1973, but in 1976 he became President of the Volkskammer, the only member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany to hold the post.
Mittelbau-Dora was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany, for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners.
Antonín Zápotocký was a Czech communist politician and statesman who served as the prime minister of Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1953 and the president of Czechoslovakia from 1953 to 1957.
The Soviet Occupation Zone was an area of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union as a communist area, established as a result of the Potsdam Agreement on 1 August 1945. On 7 October 1949 the German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly referred to in English as East Germany, was established in the Soviet Occupation Zone.
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners throughout World War II. Prominent prisoners included Joseph Stalin's oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; assassin Herschel Grynszpan; Paul Reynaud, the penultimate Prime Minister of France; Francisco Largo Caballero, Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War; the wife and children of the Crown Prince of Bavaria; Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera; and several enemy soldiers and political dissidents.
Olga Benário Prestes was a German-Brazilian communist militant executed by Nazi Germany.
Marcel Paul was a French trade unionist and communist politician. He was also a Nazi concentration camp survivor and later served as a member of the French parliament.
As with many Soviet-allied countries prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the government of the former German Democratic Republic applied censorship during its existence from 1949 to 1990. The censorship was practised through a hierarchical but unofficial censorship apparatus, ultimately controlled by the ruling party (SED). Through censorship, the socialist point of view on society was ensured in all forms of literature, arts, culture and public communication. Due to the lack of an official censorship apparatus, censorship was applied locally in a highly structured and institutionalized manner under the control of the SED.
Neues Deutschland is a left-wing German daily newspaper, headquartered in Berlin.
Martha Desrumaux was a militant communist and a member of the French Resistance.
Erich Mückenberger was a German socialist politician. He began his political career in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) when the East German branches of SPD and the Communist Party of Germany merged after the Second World War. Mückenberger was one of the most high-ranking former Social Democrats in the German Democratic Republic and held several positions in the SED.
Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish, approximately 15%. 85% were from other races and cultures. More than 80% were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave labor by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
Christian Mahler (1905-1966) was a Communist Party activist who resisted Naziism and spent most of the Hitler period in forced custody. After 1945 he became a party functionary in the German Democratic Republic and then an increasingly senior Police officer. He concluded his career as the first director of the Sachsenhausen National Memorial.
Pyotr Andreievitch Abrasimov was a Soviet war hero and politician who became a career diplomat. He served his country as ambassador successively in China, France, Poland and East Germany.
Olga Körner was a German political activist and a co-founder of the proletarian women's movement in Dresden. Between 1930 and 1933 she sat as a member of the national parliament ("Reichstag").
Käthe Niederkirchner was a German Communist resistance activist whose life ended, after she was shot by Nazi paramilitaries, on the night of 27/28 September 1944 at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Karl Hermann Dietrich Lothar Erdmann was a German journalist. During the Weimar Republic he was the editor of the trade union theory organ Die Arbeit. He was a main supporter of the turning away of trade unions from social democracy at the end of the Republic. Despite his rapprochement with National Socialism, he died after maltreatment in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.