Why the Hate Germany Campaign

Kremlinologists ought to go to the movies once in a while. To understand Moscow’s prime propaganda target of the year, they only have to visit the latest picture presented by Stanley Kramer, Hollywood’s world-famous producer of message movies. One of his first great successes was Death of a Salesman, which debunked America’s social order; at the time this film was presented, Moscow was depicting America as a country in which the Common Man struggled against Wall Street and the Pentagon. Even more of a worldwide success was Mr. Kramer’s next movie, On the Beach, a powerful appeal to atom bomb anxieties. It happened to be shown while Khrushchev was doing his best to scare this country out of its wits, to denounce it abroad, and to paralyze its defense effort by stopping our nuclear armaments. In this country and abroad, Mr. Kramer’s fantasy of fear helped to achieve this goal. When the Soviets exploded their own new superbombs, and fallout became a friendly achievement of Socialist progress, the Kremlin had to find a new and world-wide scarecrow. The Germans were chosen as successors to The Bomb, and once again strangely coinciding with the Kremlin’s new propaganda line, Mr. Kramer (may we call him a lifelong strange coin-cider without hurting his feelings?), presented Judgment at Nuremberg, a picture in which the Germans were revealed to be just as deadly as— only yesterday—The Bomb.

If Mr. Kramer brilliantly proved in his historical horror picture that the Germans—their masks of gemütlich beer guzzlers or of cosmopolitan gentlefolk to the contrary notwithstanding—are Nazis, it also revealed why Americans have been led to go soft on the Nazis and appease Germany. The reason, of course, is that the wire-pullers behind the scenes want to fight Russia. In fact, the hero of the picture is a wise and wonderful American judge who slowly learns the true, beast-like nature of the Germans, and, presiding over an Allied War Crime Trial, bravely resists pressure to acquit Hitler’s murderers in order to form with them a common front in the Berlin blockade—a moral hero in the best American tradition. (At the beginning of the Berlin blockade, the Allied war crime trials, in which Soviet war — and peace — criminals were judges rather than defendants, had already terminated. But to make a message “hit hard,” as brainwashers put it, history must be rewritten.) “It is unreasonable to suppose that the United States is in danger from Russia or Communism . . . but the nomination of Germany as the watchdog to guard us against peril attains fantastic heights of madness,” Henry Morgenthau Jr. stated in 1945; and Mr. Kramer still seems to believe in 1962.

NM

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Norbert Muhlen

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Kremlinologists ought to go to the movies once in a while. To understand Moscow’s prime propaganda target of the year, they only have to visit the latest picture presented by Stanley Kramer, Hollywood’s world-famous producer of message movies. One of his first great successes was Death of a Salesman, which debunked America’s social order; at the time this film was presented, Moscow was depicting America as a country in which the Common Man struggled against Wall Street and the Pentagon. Even more of a worldwide success was Mr. Kramer’s next movie, On the Beach, a powerful appeal to atom bomb anxieties. It happened to be shown while Khrushchev was doing his best to scare this country out of its wits, to denounce it abroad, and to paralyze its defense effort by stopping our nuclear armaments. In this country and abroad, Mr. Kramer’s fantasy of fear helped to achieve this goal. When the Soviets exploded their own new superbombs, and fallout became a friendly achievement of Socialist progress, the Kremlin had to find a new and world-wide scarecrow. The Germans were chosen as successors to The Bomb, and once again strangely coinciding with the Kremlin’s new propaganda line, Mr. Kramer (may we call him a lifelong strange coin-cider without hurting his feelings?), presented Judgment at Nuremberg, a picture in which the Germans were revealed to be just as deadly as— only yesterday—The Bomb.

If Mr. Kramer brilliantly proved in his historical horror picture that the Germans—their masks of gemütlich beer guzzlers or of cosmopolitan gentlefolk to the contrary notwithstanding—are Nazis, it also revealed why Americans have been led to go soft on the Nazis and appease Germany. The reason, of course, is that the wire-pullers behind the scenes want to fight Russia. In fact, the hero of the picture is a wise and wonderful American judge who slowly learns the true, beast-like nature of the Germans, and, presiding over an Allied War Crime Trial, bravely resists pressure to acquit Hitler’s murderers in order to form with them a common front in the Berlin blockade—a moral hero in the best American tradition. (At the beginning of the Berlin blockade, the Allied war crime trials, in which Soviet war — and peace — criminals were judges rather than defendants, had already terminated. But to make a message “hit hard,” as brainwashers put it, history must be rewritten.) “It is unreasonable to suppose that the United States is in danger from Russia or Communism . . . but the nomination of Germany as the watchdog to guard us against peril attains fantastic heights of madness,” Henry Morgenthau Jr. stated in 1945; and Mr. Kramer still seems to believe in 1962.