In the autumn of 1939, a small group of documentary filmmakers gathered within the orbit of the GPO Film Unit in London to discuss what cinema could do for a country at war. Among them was Humphrey Jennings, a painter and poet who had worked with the GPO Film Unit through the 1930s and who would go on to make some of the most remarkable films of the war — works like Listen to Britain and Fires Were Started that captured the texture of civilian endurance with a lyrical precision that official propaganda had no business being. Their conversation that autumn concerned a question that would preoccupy the British state for the next six years: how do you persuade people of the truth of a cause when the obvious tools of persuasion are so easily recognised as such?

The question was not merely aesthetic. It was strategic. The Ministry of Information, established at the outbreak of war with a brief to manage the news, produce propaganda, and sustain civilian morale, was widely regarded in its early months as a byword for bureaucratic incompetence and heavy-handed censorship. Its first minister, Lord Macmillan, resigned in January 1940 after heavy criticism. A series of disastrously misjudged early campaigns — including a poster, quickly withdrawn, bearing the slogan “Your courage, Your cheerfulness, Your resolution will bring Us Victory,” which managed to imply that courage belonged to the people and victory to the government — demonstrated how difficult it was to translate the rhetoric of national unity into anything that ordinary people would accept.

In Germany, by contrast, the propaganda machinery had been running smoothly since 1933. Joseph Goebbels’s Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was a model of organisational efficiency, seeking to control every dimension of German cultural life — cinema, radio, theatre, the visual arts, music, the press — through the Reich Chamber of Culture, membership of which was compulsory for anyone wishing to work in any creative field. Non-Aryans were excluded. Dissidents were silenced or imprisoned. The result, on the surface, was a formidable apparatus of cultural control. What the comparison with Britain actually reveals, however, is something more surprising: that total cultural control is not the same thing as effective persuasion, and that the British approach — messier, more contested, more honest — ultimately served its purposes better.

Goebbels and the Aestheticisation of Power

Walter Benjamin, writing in exile in 1936, had diagnosed what he called the aestheticisation of politics as the defining cultural gesture of fascism: the transformation of the political into spectacle, the substitution of beauty for argument, the mobilisation of emotional response in the place of rational deliberation. It was a precise description of what Goebbels was doing, and of what Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will — the film of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally — had already achieved with such devastating effect. The columns of torches, the choreography of bodies, the Wagnerian score, the face of the Führer emerging from cloud: these were not merely aesthetic choices. They were a programme.

What Goebbels understood, with the instinct of a skilled demagogue, was that the most effective propaganda does not present itself as propaganda. It presents itself as reality — as the simple, obvious truth of things. His diaries, published posthumously, reveal a man who thought constantly about technique: about the rhythm of news releases, the management of defeats, the cultivation of appropriate emotions. When the Wehrmacht’s advance in the East began to stall in the winter of 1941–42, Goebbels often reframed rather than fully suppressed the news of casualties, especially in the earlier phases of the war: German soldiers were dying heroic deaths in a struggle against Bolshevik barbarism, and their sacrifice demanded the total commitment of the home front. The “Total War” speech he delivered at the Berlin Sportpalast in February 1943 — following the disaster at Stalingrad — was a masterpiece of managed crowd emotion: a theatre of collective will in which the audience’s own responses became the evidence of their belief.

The historian David Welch, in his careful study of Nazi propaganda, has noted that its success was never total and was always contingent. Survey evidence from within Germany, gathered by the Security Service of the SS, showed persistent grumbling, local resistance, and the circulation of defeatist rumours throughout the war. Victor Klemperer’s extraordinary journal, published as The Language of the Third Reich, recorded from the inside the way in which Nazi language penetrated ordinary speech even as the speaker retained private doubts — a linguistic colonisation that worked on people who were not enthusiasts. But the deeper question Klemperer’s diaries raise is not whether Germans believed Nazi propaganda, but what believing or disbelieving it meant in conditions where the costs of public dissent were so high.

The British Experiment: Honest Propaganda

The British approach was shaped by a different set of constraints and, crucially, a different relationship between the state and its citizens. Britain had a free press — constrained by censorship and the D-notice system, but not reduced to a transmission mechanism for official messages. It had the BBC, which retained a reputation for relative independence despite close coordination with government — a reputation built through the 1930s that Reith’s successors would be forced to defend again during the war, against repeated ministerial pressure for more pliant coverage. And it had, in the Mass Observation project founded by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge, and Humphrey Jennings, a surprisingly sophisticated mechanism for understanding what ordinary people actually thought and felt.

Ian McLaine’s detailed study of the Ministry of Information, published in 1979, showed how gradually and painfully the MOI arrived at what became known internally as the “honest propaganda” doctrine: the idea that in a society with free institutions, propaganda that was perceived as propaganda would fail, and that the only effective long-term strategy was to tell the truth — or at least to be seen to tell the truth — even when the truth was bad. The fall of France, the retreat to Dunkirk, the losses in the Western Desert: these could not be concealed from a population that had family members in the services and access to independent sources of information. What could be done was to frame them, to embed them in a larger narrative of resilience and ultimate purpose.

The documentary film tradition proved unexpectedly useful in this regard. Humphrey Jennings’s Listen to Britain (1942) — a film with no commentary, no explanation, no argument, simply sounds and images of British life in wartime, assembled with the precision of a poem — achieved something that no official poster or broadcast address could have managed: it made the experience of endurance feel real, felt, worth having. Jeffrey Richards, in his study of British cinema in this period, has argued that Jennings succeeded precisely because he did not try to persuade anyone of anything in the conventional sense. He trusted his audience’s capacity to make meaning from experience, and that trust was itself a form of argument.

The BBC occupied a similar position. Its overseas broadcasts, broadcasting in multiple languages to occupied Europe, derived their authority from the BBC’s domestic reputation for accuracy. When the BBC reported Allied defeats, as it did, listeners in occupied France or the Netherlands concluded that its reports of Allied victories could also be trusted. Goebbels complained in his diary about the BBC’s “treacherous” policy of accurate news reporting, recognising it for what it was: an asymmetric advantage that German radio, which had been lying since 1933, was structurally incapable of matching.

Women, War, and the Politics of Representation

Both the British and German propaganda apparatuses were deeply invested in the representation of women, and both revealed, through their images and messages, the specific anxieties and ambitions of the regimes producing them. In Germany, the tension was between the Nazi ideological commitment to women as wives and mothers — encapsulated in the slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche — and the growing military-economic need for female labour in factories and the auxiliary services. Goebbels managed this contradiction through what the historian Claudia Koonz identified as a deliberate compartmentalisation: women were addressed as mothers even as they were recruited as workers, the ideology and the reality kept in separate rhetorical spaces.

In Britain, the representation of women in wartime was, in its own way, equally contradictory. The image of the cheerful, capable, self-reliant woman — making do and mending, running the home front, manning the anti-aircraft guns — was a product of genuine necessity combined with calculated propaganda. Some Mass Observation reports suggested that women’s morale was in certain respects more robust than men’s during the Blitz, though evidence was mixed and context-dependent: the domestic role gave structure and purpose that the enforced passivity of waiting did not. But the propaganda that celebrated women’s wartime contributions was also careful to frame these contributions as temporary, exceptional, a service to the national emergency rather than evidence of a permanent change in gender relations.

What neither government fully anticipated was the extent to which wartime experience would reshape the expectations of the women who lived through it — an unintended consequence of mobilisation that would take decades to work through the social fabric. The post-war reconstructionReconstruction Full Description:The period immediately following the Civil War (1865–1877) when the federal government attempted to integrate formerly enslaved people into society. Its premature end and the subsequent rollback of rights necessitated the Civil Rights Movement a century later. Reconstruction saw the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the election of Black politicians across the South. However, it ended with the withdrawal of federal troops and the rise of Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement is often described as the “Second Reconstruction,” an attempt to finish the work that was abandoned in 1877. Critical Perspective:Understanding Reconstruction is essential to understanding the Civil Rights Movement. It provides the historical lesson that legal rights are fragile and temporary without federal enforcement. The “failure” of Reconstruction was not due to Black incapacity, but to a lack of national political will to defend Black rights against white violence—a dynamic that activists in the 1960s were determined not to repeat.
Read more of gender norms in both countries was in part a response to what had happened to women during the war: a reassertion of domestic ideology against a wartime reality that had troubled it.

Soviet Mobilisation and the Limits of Comparison

Any account of wartime culture that restricts itself to Western Europe misses something important. The Soviet cultural mobilisation in response to the German invasion of June 1941 was, in its scale and intensity, unlike anything attempted in Britain or even Germany. The state mobilisation of writers, composers, and artists for what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War drew on the traditions of Socialist Realism — the doctrine, enforced since the 1930s, that art should serve the people by celebrating revolutionary achievement and socialist virtue — but produced, in the conditions of genuine national emergency, works of a different quality.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, composed during the siege of Leningrad and first performed there in August 1942 by a half-starved orchestra while the German guns continued to fire, has provoked fierce arguments about its meaning and intent since its premiere. Whether it is a genuine lament for the victims of fascism, as official Soviet interpretation insisted, or also (as Solomon Volkov’s contested account alleged) a covert dirge for the victims of Stalinism, is still debated. What is beyond doubt is its reception: the broadcast of the Leningrad premiere, over the city’s loudspeakers and by radio throughout the Soviet Union, was an act of cultural resistance with few close parallels in Western Europe — propaganda, certainly, but also something that exceeded the category of propaganda, a genuine artistic response to genuine catastrophe.

The comparison matters because it complicates any simple narrative about the relationship between state power and cultural authenticity. The MOI produced some brilliant work and a great deal of mediocre work. Goebbels’s apparatus produced technically accomplished spectacle that served power efficiently until it didn’t. The Soviet system produced ideological conformity and also Shostakovich, Akhmatova, and Grossman. Culture under pressure does not simply become propaganda, however hard power tries to make it so. Some of what got written and filmed and composed in the worst years of the war escaped the intentions of those who commissioned it, and it is in those escapes that the most lasting work tends to be found.

What the War Did to Culture

The most significant long-term effect of wartime cultural mobilisation was not the specific works it produced but the relationship it established between governments and mass culture. The war demonstrated that culture — film, radio, newspaper, poster, public spectacle — was not an ornamental addition to political life but a central instrument of it. Governments had known this before 1939, but the war made it undeniable. The institutions and habits of mind established between 1939 and 1945 did not dissolve when the war ended.

In Britain, the BBC emerged from the war with its authority and reputation substantially enhanced, its public service model validated by the contrast with state broadcasting systems elsewhere. The documentary film tradition, temporarily disrupted by peacetime commercial pressures, fed into a postwar culture of social realism — in film, television drama, and literary fiction — that shaped British cultural life for a generation. The MOI itself was dissolved, but the techniques and people it had trained found employment in advertising, public relations, and the expanding machinery of political communications.

In Germany, the legacy was more complex. The total collapse of the Nazi state left behind not only physical rubble but a cultural rubble — a generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals who had collaborated, or had been complicit, or had simply survived, and who now had to reckon with what they had made and what it had served. The Trümmerfilme, the rubble films of the immediate postwar years, attempted an honest reckoning with this legacy — but the reckoning was also partial, rushed, and in many cases incomplete.

What both legacies share is the recognition that modern warfare does not simply happen to culture. It reorganises culture, assigns it a function, places it in the service of survival and destruction simultaneously. The films, broadcasts, posters, and performances of 1939–45 were not a cultural parenthesis. They were a formative moment in the history of mass communication — a moment when the question of what culture is for was answered, in blood and burning cities, with unusual clarity.

Listen Further

If you enjoyed this essay, these episodes from the Explaining History archive explore related themes:

• Rosie the Riveter Revisited — on wartime propaganda, women, and the unexpected afterlife of an image
• War Reporting in the USSR: 1941–45 — on Soviet wartime journalism and the management of information during the Great Patriotic War