Archive/File: imt/nca/nca-02/nca-02-16-responsibility-21-05
Last-Modified: 1997/06/19

   Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume Two, Chapter XIV

D. CONCLUSION.

Fritzsche was not the type of conspirator who signed
decrees, or who sat in the inner councils planning the
overall grand strategy. The function of propaganda is, for
the most part, apart from the field of such planning. The
function of a propaganda agency is somewhat more analogous
to an advertising agency or public relations department, the
job of which is to sell the product and to win the market
for the enterprise in question. Here the enterprise was the
Nazi conspiracy. In a conspiracy which depends upon fraud as
a means, the salesmen of the conspiratorial group are quite
as essential and culpable as the master planners, even
though he may not have contributed substantially to the
formulation of all the basic strategy, but rather
concentrated on making the execution of this strategy
possible. In this case, propaganda was a weapon of
tremendous importance to this conspiracy. Furthermore, the
leading propagandists were major accomplices in this
conspiracy, and Fritzsche was one of them.

When Fritzsche entered the Propaganda Ministry, which has
been called the most fabulous "lie factory" of all time, and
thus attached himself to the conspiracy, he did so with more
of an open mind than most of the conspirators who had
committed themselves at an earlier date, before the seizure
of power. He was in a particularly strategic position to
observe the frauds committed upon the German people and the
world by the conspirators.

In 1933, before Fritzsche took his Party oath of
unconditional obedience and subservience to the Fuehrer, he
had observed at first hand the operations of the storm
troopers and the execution of Nazi race actions. When,
notwithstanding, Fritzsche undertook to bring all German
news agencies within Nazi control, he learned from the
inside, indeed from Goebbels himself, the intrigue and lies
against opposition groups within and without Germany.

                                                [Page  1052]
                                                            
He observed, for example, how opposition journalists, a
profession to which he had previously belonged, were either
absorbed or eliminated. He continued to support the
conspiracy. He learned from day to day the art of intrigue
and quackery in the process of perverting the German nation,
and he grew in prestige and influence as he practiced this

Fritzsche learned a lesson from his predecessor, Berndt, who
fell from the leadership of the German Press Division partly
because he over-played his hand by blunt and excessive
manipulation of the Sudetenland propaganda. Fritzsche
stepped into the gap caused by the loss of confidence of
both the editors and the German people, and did his job with
more skill and subtlety. His shrewdness and ability to be
more assuring and "to find," as Goebbels said, "willing ears
of the whole nation," -- these things made him the more
useful accomplice of the conspirators.

Nazi Germany and its press went into war with Fritzsche in
control of all German news, whether by press or radio.: In
1942, when Fritzsche transferred from the field of the press
to radio, he was not removed for bungling, but because
Goebbels then needed his talents most in the field of radio.
Fritzsche is not in the dock as a free journalist but as a
propagandist who helped substantially to tighten the Nazi
stranglehold over the German people, who made the excesses
of the conspirators palatable to the German people, who
goaded the German nation to fury and crime against people
they were told by him were subhuman.

Without the propaganda apparatus of the Nazi State, the
world would not have suffered the catastrophe of these
years, and it is because of Fritzsche's role in behalf of
the Nazi conspirators, and their deceitful and barbarous
practices, that he is called to account before the
International Military Tribunal.

(See also Section 9 of Chapter VII on Propaganda,
Censorship, and Supervision of Cultural Activities.)

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