112 | Mass Media and Historical Change
the supply situation and inappropriate advertisements. Highly detailed addi-
tions were made in the course of the following years, leading to a censorship
book in 1917 (printed in Fischer 1973: 194–215). Although prison sen-
tences and newspaper bans were occasionally imposed, punishments usually
consisted of confiscations or mere reprimands. Newspapers from neutral
countries, however, made military reports from opponents of war available.
In order not to deviate entirely from accounts written by front-line soldiers,
the Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL, Supreme Army Command) committed
them to more realistic reporting in 1917.
Also characteristic of the First World War was the state’s active propaganda.
The French war ministry made the Bureau de Presse central to propagandis-
tic purposes and roped in the Havas agency. The War Propaganda Bureau in
Great Britain came into existence immediately after the war’s outbreak, initiat-
ing approximately 2.5 million publications before mid-1915. Its cooperation
with the film industry stimulated film production, and in November 1915
the first cameramen were sent to the Western Front, while major publishers
such as Lord Beaverbrock and Lord Northcliffe assumed the leadership of state
propaganda (Thompson 1999).
The German Heeresleitung (army command), in contrast, had neither pre-
pared an individual media policy, nor was willing to make active use of the
new media in any comparable fashion until 1916. Faith in a quick victory,
scepticism towards the media, and the ‘Spirit of 1914’ were the reasons for
such apprehension. Initially, the military command tended to rely on cen-
sorship and on ‘old media’ such as placards and official newspaper articles,
maintaining a reactive attitude towards foreign propaganda. Compared to the
Western Allies, the OHL did little to standardise its propagandistic work, so
that by the end of the war a total of twenty-two press offices were under its
management. In 1916, ‘modernists’ more guided by economic advertising and
the Western Allies, finally gained an upper hand in the OHL, despite con-
tinuing difficulties in realising their ideas (Creutz 1996; Schmidt 2006: 140).
Still, even in Germany some innovations did appear in the field of media
policy during the First World War. These comprised the daily press confer-
ences held by the OHL as well as the ‘Zentralstelle für Heimatdienste’ (central
office for homeland services), designed to provide neutral countries with news-
papers, photographs and films, and the ‘Kriegspresseamt’ (the army’s public
relations office), founded in 1915. Around three thousand ‘press instructions’
reveal the attempt to covertly control publication (Wilke 2007: 51–57, 104).
Although little is known about how far such rules were put into practice, they
stood for an intensive and new type of information exchange between the state
and the media. Another important innovation was the foundation of the ‘Bild-
und Filmamt’ (Bufa; photo and film bureau) in January 1917, whose purpose
was to prepare and organise film and picture propaganda for the government