Censorship in Nazi Germany was extreme and strictly enforced by the governing Nazi Party, but specifically by Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Similarly to many other police states both before and since, censorship within Nazi Germany included both domination and propaganda weaponization by the State of all forms of mass communication, including newspaper, music, literature, radio, and film.[1] The Ministry of Propaganda also produced and disseminated their own literature over the mass media which was solely devoted to furthering Nazi ideology and the Hitler Myth. Crudely drawn caricatures intended to dehumanize the Party's political opponents and to inflame Antisemitism lay at the core of the Ministry's propaganda, especially in 1940 films such as Jud Süß and The Eternal Jew. The Ministry also promoted a secular messianic cult of personality surrounding Adolf Hitler with early films such as Triumph of the Will of the 1934 rally and The Victory of Faith made in 1933, and which survives now after a single copy recently discovered in the UK. It was later banned by the Ministry owing to the prominent role in the film of Ernst Roehm, who was later murdered in the political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

Media

The ministry tightly controlled information available to their citizens. Almost all recent innovation in art, including Impressionism, Cubism, and Expressionism, were ruled degenerate art and banned by the Ministry. Music such as Jazz and Swing, due to the vitally important role played by African American and Jewish American musicians in creating and performing both, were also banned as degenerate music, but remained very popular among the German people anyway and were always in very high demand on Nazi Germany's thriving black market. All works by composers of Classical music with Jewish ancestry like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were also banned.

Amongst those authors and artists who were suppressed both during the Nazi book burnings and the attempt to destroy modernist fine art in the "degenerate" art exhibition were:[2]

Artists banned include:

Composers banned include:

Dramatists banned include:

Philosophers, scientists, and sociologists suppressed by Nazi Germany include:

Politicians suppressed by Nazi Germany include:

To avoid censorship, some books were given innocent-looking covers and were called Tarnschriften.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Control and opposition in Nazi Germany". BBC Bitesize.
  2. ↑ Adam, Peter (1992). Art of the Third Reich. New York:, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.., pp. 121-122
  3. ↑ The Engineer as Ideologue: Reactionary Modernists in Weimar and Nazi Germany - J Herf - Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills …, 1984 –
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