By Lyubov Tsarevskaya
The war waged by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union was also a war of
ideologies. Both in the Soviet Union and in Germany people learned about
what was happening at the fronts through periodicals, radio and news reels.
Much importance was attached not only to the facts as such, but also to
their interpretation. Witness how German propagandists covered the Battle
of Stalingrad.
On the evening of November 28th, 1942 all German radio stations broadcast
the speech Hitler delivered in Munich. He declared that the German troops
had actually taken Stalingrad with the exception of a small apartment house.
Major Helmut Weltz, the commander of a field engineers’ battalion, was
listening to a wireless in the cold trenches outside Stalingrad. One can
only guess what he felt listening to the speech of his leader who was announcing
an impending victory while the encircled German army was literally perishing
of cold, hunger and diseases at Stalingrad.
“We could not take off our uniforms for weeks,” Major Helmut Weltz wrote
in his memoirs many years later. “We were plagued by lice. Some suffered
from typhus. We were incessantly hungry. A piece of bread and hot water
twice a day was the only food we would live on for a long time. Any organism
would protest against this. Horse meat was treasured.”
Listening to the broadcasts from Berlin Major Weltz could know by his own
experience that Goebbels’ propagandists were lying. But Major Weltz could
also hear another voice through his wireless – the voice of Radio Moscow…
At that time Radio Moscow did not have enough experience in its broadcasting
for the enemy soldiers, but the radio station’s reaction to the change
in the mood of the first German prisoners of war was swift. Radio Moscow
learned from them what in its broadcasts attracted the Germans surrounded
outside Stalingrad and what evoked their distrust and even rejection.
Radio Moscow journalists took all this into account and altered their broadcasting
accordingly. And their efforts to demoralize the enemy troops yielded results.
This was reflected in the memoirs of Major Helmut Weltz.
“Beginning with Christmas something new began to sound in Radio Moscow
broadcasts – the voices of Germans who addressed us from behind the frontline,
the voices of officers believed to be missing for months, the voices of
German novelists and even the voice of a parliament member. His name was
Ulbricht, his surname was unknown to me. And how could I possibly know
his name? I had always taken pride in being beyond politics. However, what
he told us was repeated night after night, and found its audience. In many
a case we listened to what he said with more interest than to what was
said in the recordings the Russians had been broadcasting for us in the
past few weeks. His was a German voice, the real German language, not translation
from Russian that we rejected as enemy propaganda.”
“That German was listened to with interest,” Helmut Weltz wrote in his
memoirs. “He presented convincing arguments when he spoke about how hopeless
our situation was, when he said that there would be a need for each of
us after the war. What he told us about the military monopolists who were
making millions on the war was absolutely new to us. But what had the greatest
effect was his statement that the Russians hated only the Hitlerite state
and its rulers, not the people of Germany. It seemed that it was really
so, otherwise the German officers who spoke after that would not have confirmed
it. Our invisible interlocutor did not need to use many words to describe
the misfortunes each of us faced, to show them as a sequence of events
and to confront the soldiers with the need to make the following decision:
either to continue their pointless resistance or surrender at one’s own
risk. “Your destiny is in your own hands!” Radio Moscow said so with conviction
in its address to the German troops.”
Some time has passed before Helmut Weltz took a hard, but the only possible
decision – to surrender to the Soviet troops. His memoirs, published later,
confirm that during the Battle of Stalingrad the voice of Radio Moscow
persuaded many Germans, including those at the front, to develop a new
attitude to the war unleashed by Hitler, and to their own unseemly role
in it. But the German press, Radio Berlin and Goebbels’ propagandists did
all they could to maintain the declining morale of the German troops. As
for Radio Moscow, it worked to lower their morale. As it transpired later,
when the huge Nazi army group massed outside Stalingrad surrenders, Radio
Moscow acted quite effectively, making its own contribution to the defeat
of the enemy.
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