The fate of Mickey Mouse under the Third Reich offers a bizarre insight into the impact of Nazi policies relating to the media and the control of ideas. It is often stated that Hitler hated the most famous mouse in the world and ordered the Disney films featuring him and other cartoon characters to be banned. The Nazis accused Walt Disney himself of having Jewish ancestry and feared that his innocent-seeming cartoons threatened Germans with being ‘infected by undesirable cultural influences’.1 Even more striking is the interpretation that Mickey Mouse, in a number of ways, could be seen as positively symbolizing the Jewish ‘outsider’ overcoming adversity and that, consequently, Hitler loathed the portrayal of the mouse as clean and harmless since his propaganda machine was focused on representing Jews as dirty vermin. As such, this positive image seemed designed to undermine Nazi racial stereotypes that were being employed in Germany to attack Jews. As a consequence: ‘In Hitler’s twisted mind, Disney employed Mickey as a means of countering all the anti-Semitic prejudices he – Hitler – had set out to further entrench.’2 As such, Mickey Mouse, it has been claimed, was declared ‘an enemy of the state’ in 19363 and further, it has been stated, was banned as ‘a decadent rat’.4
When, between 1980 and 1991, Art Spiegelman used the graphic novel form to recount how his own father had survived the Nazi genocide as a Polish Jew, he represented the Jewish victims of Nazism very positively as innocent mice assaulted by Nazis represented as cats. Its title Maus: A Survivor’s Tale encapsulated this image (the German for ‘mouse’ being ‘maus’). In 1992, Maus won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award. Art Spiegelman himself has explained that his depiction of Jews as mice was a deliberate reaction to the Nazi portrayal of them as vermin. It was also influenced by Hitler’s reported hatred of Mickey Mouse as being part of ‘a Jewish art-form’.5
However, as recent study has revealed, Disney characters were actually extremely popular in Nazi Germany, as across the world.6 In 1937 (a year after the alleged banning of Mickey Mouse in Germany), Goebbels gave Hitler a Christmas present of no less than 18 Mickey Mouse films7 and Hitler was reportedly ‘delighted’.8 Despite the disapproval of some Nazis, neither Mickey Mouse nor any other Disney character faced being banned by the censors in Germany in the 1930s. This was because the films were so massively popular. The only exception to this was the banning of the film The Mad Doctor (released in 1933), which featured an attempt to cross the dog Pluto with a chicken and may have been considered a sideswipe at Nazi eugenics. In fact, The Three Little Pigs (not, of course, a Mickey Mouse film) was well received by Nazi censors because they interpreted the wolf – when in the guise of a travelling brush salesman, wearing a false nose – as representing a Jewish character, of the type frequently seen threatening Aryans in German films and picture books. The scene was later removed by Disney.9
The banning of The Mad Doctor, which featured Mickey, may have given rise to the oft-quoted statement that the Nazis banned him. British censors also briefly banned this short film, thinking it would frighten young children. In fact, it was Nazi financial policies applied to the film industry that caused the most problems for Disney. From 1934 onwards, import duties on films were quadrupled and strict controls on exporting currency from Germany made it almost impossible for US companies to make money out of films shown there. As a consequence, Universal and Warner Brothers ended their operations in Germany and, by 1937, the end of Disney’s contract with UFA (the principal German film studio), plus the collapse of one of their German distributors, caused massive problems for the distribution of Disney films. Hitler was one of the few Germans able to enjoy Mickey Mouse that Christmas. By 1939, few Disney cartoons were being shown in the Third Reich.10
The fate of Mickey Mouse raises a number of questions about the Nazi control of ideas. What was an acceptable way to express art in the Third Reich? What would be encouraged, what tolerated and what obliterated? How would a dictatorship strike a balance between its own propaganda aims and the wishes of audiences and readers? What foreign influences would be banned, and which allowed? And what was the best way to manipulate art and culture: direct propaganda, or more subliminal methods?
What is clear is that the Nazi control of ideas was successful in many areas. After all, a monopoly on the transmission of information could not fail to have an impact. A claim by a captured German soldier in Normandy to the American R. R. Hughart (of the 82nd Airborne Division), revealed how a culture of relentless propaganda could have its effect:
‘There isn’t much left of New York any more, is there?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know it’s been bombed by the Luftwaffe.’11
The intention of ‘bringing Germany into line’ and ‘coordinating’ German society so it resembled the Nazi view of life extended into all areas of the arts and the media. All ideas and methods of communication had to be brought into line with Nazi values, or be destroyed. Jewish musical conductors and non-Jewish ones associated with music of which the Nazis disapproved found their concerts disrupted by the SA and pressure brought to bear on their employers to dismiss them. In this way, Bruno Walter, the Jewish conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Hanns Eisler, identified as a left-wing composer, were driven from their jobs. They were only two of hundreds who found that the Nazi accession to power in 1933 meant the end of their careers in Germany.
The ‘coordination’ of the arts and media was overseen by Joseph Goebbels. On 13 March 1933, a special decree set up the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, with Goebbels as its head. He had earlier impressed Hitler with his propaganda work as Gauleiter of Berlin. Goebbels’s new ministry would be responsible for making sure that theatre, film, literature, the arts, the press and broadcasting reflected the Nazi view of the world and Nazi values. It would also influence education, although this was run by a separate ministry with its own agenda for forcing education into the appropriate mould. Goebbels was also responsible for the government’s public relations generally and this included the relationship with the foreign press.12
Goebbels’s ministry was staffed by young, well-educated Nazis who were committed to the transformation of Germany. Together they mounted a ferocious attack on what they called ‘cultural Bolshevism’. This included the removal of Jews from all areas of cultural life and the destruction of modern experimental forms of artistic work such as abstract art and atonal music, which the Nazis regarded as ‘un-German’. In time it extended into all areas of artistic life. Those designated as ‘un-German’ composers, such as Mendelssohn, were banned and attempts were made to ban jazz, which was condemned as ‘nigger music’ by the Nazis. Whilst attempts to outlaw the saxophone (because it was associated with jazz) failed, and attempts to ban jazz itself failed to eliminate it, the Nazi persecution was more successful in many other areas.
It resulted in a situation where there was no longer an independent press and only officially approved German forms of culture were free from brutal attacks. Writers and artists condemned by the Nazis found their plays, pictures and books banned and burnt and, those who could, left Germany. These included such famous names as the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the novelists Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front) and Thomas Mann (a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature) and painters such as Paul Klee. Around 2,000 people working in the arts left the country after 1933, including some of the most internationally famous German artists and writers of the time. The government’s removal of their German citizenship caused them considerable hardship and problems abroad.
Interestingly, Goebbels had rather more open views on art than Hitler and favoured some modern painters, such as the work of Emil Nolde. But it was Hitler’s view on art that prevailed and he ordered Nolde’s paintings to be removed from Goebbels’s new house in the summer of 1933 and Nolde himself was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Art, despite having been a member of the Nazi Party since 1920. All over Germany ‘unacceptable’ curators of art galleries and museums were sacked and others quickly fell into line with expectations. Modernist art pieces were removed from display and some keen Nazi curators set up special exhibits of it under titles such as ‘Degenerate Art’ and ‘Art Horrors’. What was left as German official art-culture can be characterized as rigid, stereotypical images and ideas that repetitively communicated the Nazi obsessions with race, war and control.
Newspapers were banned if they did not follow the Nazi line. The Communist Party and Social Democrat newspapers were shut as soon as their parties were banned. Other newspapers responded to government demands and arrests by ‘voluntarily’ acting to coordinate themselves. In April 1933, the journalists’ union, the Reich Association of the German Press, elected a Nazi as its chairman and promised to ensure that only journalists acceptable to the Nazis would be allowed to join it and so be employed on newspapers. In June 1933, the same policy was adopted by the German Newspaper Publishers’ Association. The press was now firmly muzzled.
Also in June of that first year in power, Goebbels brought all radio broadcasting under his control and rapidly sacked 13 per cent of employees because they were Jewish, or because they held liberal or left-wing views. One month later, Goebbels went further and set up the Reich Film Chamber, which oversaw the whole German film industry and controlled its output. Film makers and actors who were Jewish, or whose views and work the Nazis disapproved of, lost their jobs. Those who remained fell into line with the new expectations; many secured their jobs by joining the Nazi Party.
Victor Klemperer, in his diary entry for September 1934, noted down features of propaganda as outlined by Goebbels at that autumn’s Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg. It should not lie; it should be creative; it must ‘educate’ the people; it must prepare people for unpopular policies; it must listen to the people and speak the language of the people.13 The first characteristic would be strained to breaking point by Goebbels’s understanding of what was ‘true’ but even that revealed a subtlety in his grasp of how the control of ideas should be achieved. It was more effective to manipulate than to simply invent, as this would resonate more with the experiences of the listener and was therefore more likely to be accepted.
The other characteristics, though, were also revealing. They help explain why – for all his fanaticism and moral crudity – Goebbels was a more complex manipulator of messages and their media than many others in the Nazi hierarchy. He had to battle in order that his strategy would prevail over competitors within the party. The methods used in the propaganda would be remarkably modern and would extend well beyond Goebbels’s own area of responsibility. This modern style would be seen in cinema, radio, set-piece dramatic public events and innovative use of print techniques. Paradoxically, these modern methods would be used to convey a message of what has been described as ‘pseudo-archaic certainties’ such as ‘Blood and Soil’, classical and traditional forms of art and music, buildings of classical style but mammoth proportions.14 In this way the Nazi control of ideas appeared, at the same time, both modern and backward looking.
By 1935, Goebbels had succeeded in fighting off the ambitions of others in the Nazi Party who had contested his right to control culture. The most high profile of these rivals was the party’s racial ideology theorist, Alfred Rosenberg. In the film industry, though, Goebbels was allowed a fairly free hand and, from 1935, the two largest film studios – UFA and Tobis – were in effect nationalized. He had the same freedom with regard to radio and literature as well. The one exception was Hitler’s personal intervention, which led to Leni Riefenstahl being commissioned to shoot the film Triumph of the Will in 1934.
The exception of Triumph of the Will is very revealing. It would be the only film made about Hitler in the entire period of the Third Reich. Commissioned to film the Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg, Riefenstahl used innovative techniques (moving cameras, telephoto lenses, aerial photography, dramatic and varied music) to produce a film unlike any earlier documentary. It would influence film making long after its first screening in March 1935. Lasting 114 minutes, it received widespread acclaim. It won the Gold Medal at the Venice Film Festival in 1935, and the Grand Prize at the Paris Film Festival in 1937. Earlier it had won the National Film Prize in Germany and the award was presented by Goebbels himself. This must have been particularly difficult, since he had opposed the concept and methods of this propaganda film from the start. He also clearly resented the fact that the commissioning had been done outside the usual channels of his Propaganda Ministry. But it was more than a matter of personal pride. Goebbels had a different concept of how film should be used. For him the style should avoid parades and spotlights and should, instead, be more subtle, even at times escapist. For this reason – despite its massive success – Triumph of the Will did not set the tone for the film industry of the Third Reich.
The films produced by the UFA (Germany’s principle film studio) were not of the Riefenstahl type. Its stars, such as the Swede Zarah Leander and the immensely popular Hans Albers, appeared in films that offered adventure and escapism. Leander was so popular that she could even survive the antagonism of Goebbels, who clearly resented her distancing herself from the Nazi Party. And Albers could even maintain his massive screen presence while having a Jewish girlfriend – Hansi Burg – although for her own safety she left Germany for Switzerland and then Britain. They were reunited after the war.
By 1938, the categorization of German films might cause some surprise: 10 per cent political, 41 per cent dramas, 49 per cent comedies.15 During the war, Goebbels encouraged escapist films such as the fantasy comedy Münchhausen (1943) and historical dramas – designed to inspire Germans through heroic events from German history – such as thinly veiled ‘parallels’ between Hitler and Frederick the Great in The Great King (1942) and the Napoleonic era film Kolberg (1945). However, it should be remembered that many of the characters in the ‘non-political films’ had to conform to Nazi stereotypes. And so-called historical dramas such as Jew Süss (1940) simply transferred Nazi anti-Semitism into an eighteenth-century setting. The infamous The Eternal Jew (1940)16 – which included scenes filmed in the Lodz ghetto in Poland – was racism of the starkest kind, with its ‘parallels’ drawn between East European Jews and disease-carrying rats.17
With the decline in exports of German films abroad (partly due to the hostility of foreign film distributors towards the repressive policies of the Nazis) and the reduction of foreign imports (due to Nazi tax and currency laws), most Germans by 1939 could only see films produced within Germany. Of these, about 65 per cent were being made by state-financed companies and the remainder were subject to the strict controls of the Propaganda Ministry.
The Nazi control of radio broadcasting was advanced by the rapid expansion of radio ownership in the 1930s. Government subsidies enabled manufacturers to produce cheap ‘People’s Receivers’. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the proportion of German households owning a wireless – about 70 per cent – was one of the highest in the world, comparable with US wireless ownership of 82.8 per cent in 1940.18 These ‘People’s Receivers’ had a limited range, which meant that most Germans using them could not listen to foreign broadcasts. Public loudspeakers allowed for special speeches to be heard in public spaces and those around were to stop and listen. However, by 1939, two thirds of the broadcast material was music and fulfilled Goebbels’s instruction that radio should not be boring. This music was almost entirely popular music, despite Hitler’s passion for Wagner.
During the 1930s, the Nazi control over newspapers meant that, with minor exceptions, only regime-approved news was available. The Nazi Party’s own daily newspaper – the Völkischer Beobachter – became the first German newspaper to sell more than one million copies a day. Mass orders by Nazi organizations boosted the sales of the sensationalist and semi-pornographic Der Stürmer and Der SA Mann (The SA Man) This control of the press did have its downside for the regime, as Gestapo reports indicated popular irritation at the uniformity of press coverage and the way in which news was suppressed even when it was common knowledge. This also led to some seeking information from foreign sources.19
The banning of Jewish writers and others who offended the regime meant that the same uniformity extended to books. Novels about heroic SA men and German peasants became commonplace. The Reich Chamber of Literature ensured that themes fitted the prevailing ideology. Since 1933, the police had been granted the right to seize offending books and, by the end of that year, more than 1,000 titles had been banned. The list of banned titles continued to escalate after this. In May 1933, there had been the infamous book-burning in university towns. It was an action instigated by Nazi students as part of their contribution to ‘coordinating’ Germany.20 Just under a century earlier, in 1821, the German writer Heinrich Heine had commented that: ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.’ His words proved tragically accurate and his own work went into the flames during the Third Reich. In addition to the banning of the works of Jewish and left-wing authors, the Nazi censors also outlawed foreign books that offended them in some way. Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Scott’s Ivanhoe were deemed unacceptable. From 1936, no German could receive a Nobel Prize, after one was awarded to the journalist and essayist Carl von Ossietzky. He himself was banned from accepting the prize and died in 1938 following brutal treatment in concentration camps.
In the field of sculpture the style that had emerged by the mid-1930s was Aryan supermen produced in stone: larger than life, muscular, heroic, aggressive … and lacking in individuality and expression. Alongside these images of the ‘new man’ with his steely masculinity were sculptures ‘celebrating the peasant, the heroic worker and German womanhood – generally in the form of the fertile female’.21 This was the style that was to replace ‘degenerate art’. A sculptor who was admired in this period was Arno Breker, who from 1934 to 1942 was commissioned to sculpt a great many pieces including two pieces to celebrate the Olympics of 1936; in 1937, he was made ‘Official State Sculptor’. Over 90 per cent of his sculptures were destroyed by the Allies at the end of the war, although he himself continued to work in this artistic field until his death in 1991. Like many who gained commissions under the Nazis there was later controversy over his role. Whilst some accused him of working for the Nazis, his supporters argued that he had never supported Nazi ideology but had simply accepted commissions. After the war he produced sculpted portraits for famous figures as varied as Jean Cocteau (1963), the king of Morocco (1970), Salvador Dalí (1975) and Anwar Sadat (1980).22
The same larger-than-life approach dictated new styles of architecture too, which mixed pre-modern effects with modern technologies.23 The huge new airport terminal at Tempelhof was one example. The Reich Chancellery was another. The man commissioned to build the new Reich Chancellery between 1938 and 1939 was Albert Speer, the new Building Inspector for the National Capital. This was only part of a vast building plan, which aimed to see Berlin transformed into the world capital – Germania – by the early 1950s.
The many early attacks on art designated as ‘degenerate’ culminated in the 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich. The pieces were deliberately hung at odd angles and poorly lit in order to make their appearance more jarring and literally out of line with the new German style. This was particularly interesting because Goebbels was secretly sympathetic to aspects of such art; but he mounted the exhibition in a deliberate attempt to gain favour with Hitler, who hated it. The actual selection of the pieces to display was largely left to the President of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, Adolf Ziegler. Ziegler’s anatomically detailed paintings of classical-style nudes had earned him the nick-name ‘Reich Master of Pubic Hair’. Despite the acceptability of his style he fell foul of the regime during the Second World War and spent six weeks in Dachau concentration camp for ‘defeatism’. On release he retired, survived the war, but could not revive his artistic career that had been so closely associated with the Third Reich and he died in 1959. In 1937, though, the exhibition he organized attracted over two million visitors. The art exhibited included work by, among others, Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and Kirchner. Depressed at the rejection of his art, Kirchner committed suicide in 1938. In 1939, the similarly rejected artist Oskar Schlemmer was painting camouflage on military structures because no one would buy his pictures. The Degenerate Art exhibition later went on tour to Berlin, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt.
By 1938, Nazi control of the media was fairly complete. This meant that wherever the public looked – cinema screens, newspapers and magazines, novels, art galleries – the message they received was one of which the Propaganda Ministry approved. This was further refined by the monitoring of public opinion by Block Wardens, Gestapo agents and the SS Security Service (the SD). This assisted the regime in responding to areas of concern and discontent with campaigns designed to reduce tensions in these areas. In many ways the biggest challenge the regime faced was that people tended to be bored by the lack of variety and the constant reiteration of party-approved themes. However, despite this, the relentless Nazification of ideas had its effect. Anti-Semitism clearly increased even if, for most Germans, it was a passive lack of concern for the rapidly reducing rights of others, rather than murderous intent. The inevitability of Nazi rule became accepted, with no likelihood of any alternative form of government. The creation of a sense of unity and purpose helped reduce antagonisms towards the day-to-day failings of the state. And the enforced pageantry might be wooden and knee-jerk as loyal Germans automatically put out flags on the new national holiday to celebrate Hitler’s birthday (April 20th) and gave the Hitler salute, but the effect was to create a greater sense of uniformity. This, for all its artificiality, was boosted by the presentation of the Führer as above all criticism. Posters carefully presented him as a man of destiny raised from the trenches of the First World War, in tune with all levels of society, self-sacrificing, loving animals and children. This propaganda-generated personal popularity was enhanced by the mounting foreign policy successes of the 1930s.
Overall then, the Nazi policy on the control of ideas was a mixture of outright repression and, in certain areas, flexibility. Jewish artists and writers were gone, victims of the ‘Aryan paragraph’ inserted into laws and forced on all organizations. By 1937, modernism in art was suppressed. Hitler’s uncompromising attitude on this had won out over Goebbels’s more relaxed view. But other areas remained intact. Classic German literature and music (so long as it was not written or composed by a Jew) was still enjoyed. And on the fringes of acceptability there still existed clandestine jazz clubs and dance halls where swing music could be enjoyed. The latter were condemned but not hunted down. Goebbels had realized that they did not, in reality, pose any real threat to the state, even if they offended the purists in the party. The Security Service of the SS (the SD) even reported, in 1938, that ‘degenerate art’ was still being viewed in private galleries. For all the strident propaganda of Triumph of the Will and The Eternal Jew, German cinema also included historical dramas with clear Nazi racial messages such as Jew Suss and period pieces such as Kolberg, along with escapist films such as Münchhausen. It was this mixture of crude repression and manipulative creativity that made the propaganda of the Third Reich so distinctive.
1. Weinberg, Gerhard L., Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 65.
2. Brode, Douglas, Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment, University of Texas Press, 2005, pp. 105–6.
3. Parker, P.M. (ed.), Adolf: Webster’s Quotations, Facts and Phrases, ICON Group International, 2008, p. 228, adapted from an article in Wikipedia.
4. Anger, Kenneth, in MacDonald, Scott, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, University of California Press, 2006, p. 51.
5. Witek, Joseph, Art Spiegelman: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi, 2007, p. 91.
6. Laqua, Carten, Mickey Mouse, Hitler, and Nazi Germany: How Disney’s Characters Conquered the Third Reich, Hermes Press, 2009.
7. Welch, David, Hitler: Profile of a Dictator, University College London Press, 1998, p. 6.
8. Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis, Penguin, 2001, p. 33.
9. Evans, Richard, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin Books, 2006, p. 130.
10. Ibid., pp. 130–1.
11. Beevor, Anthony, D-Day, Viking, 2009, p. 122. Using material from the National World War II Museum, Eisenhower Center archive, New Orleans, USA.
12. Welch, David, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, Routledge, 1993, provides a detailed examination of Nazi use of propaganda throughout the period of the Third Reich.
13. Klemperer, Victor, The Klemperer Diaries, 1933–1945, Phoenix Press, 2000, p. 82.
14. Evans, Richard, op. cit., p. 212.
15. Ibid., p. 132.
16. Friedländer, Saul, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, Phoenix, 2008, examines the origins of the latter two films, pp. 19–22.
17. For an overview of Goebbels’s impact on film, see Moeller, Felix, The Film Minister: Goebbels and the Cinema in the Third Reich, Axel Menges, 2001, and Welch, David, Propaganda and the German cinema, 1933–1945, I.B. Tauris, 2001.
18. Craig, Steve, ‘How America adopted radio: Demographic differences in set ownership reported in the 1930–1950 U.S. censuses’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, June 2004, p. 15, www.allbusiness.com/information/internet-publishing-broadcasting/172664–1.html
19. Huener, Jonathan, Nicosia, Francis R., The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change, Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 95, remind us that during the war even the ban on jazz was reversed in order to stop Germans tuning into foreign radio stations.
20. Vondung, Klaus and Ricks, Stephen D. (trans.), The Apocalypse in Germany, University of Missouri Press, 2000, p. 172.
21. McElligott, Anthony and Kirk, Tim (eds), Working towards the Führer: Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw, Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 100.
22. Wistrich, Robert S., Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge, 2nd edn, 1995, pp. 24–5, provides an overview of Breker’s career.
23. Koepnick, Lutz Peter, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, University of Nebraska Press, 2nd revised edn, 1999, p. 99.