Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 127‘medium that trained people to turn a blind eye’, which served to create posi-
tive identification patterns and covered up ‘negative’ memories like war crimes
(Sachsse 2003: 14–18). Magazines even printed pictorial reports about con-
centration camps and ghettos but played them down completely by staging
them as ‘reformatory camps’ (Knoch 2001: 76–88). The heroicised picture
world of the magazines also played a prominent role during the Second World
War, visualising soldiers as ‘well-trained craftsmen of war’ and battles as sports
events. On the other hand, not only in Germany but in democratic countries
like the United States, one generally saw only enemy corpses in the media,
with America demonstrating a discriminatory attitude by showing mainly the
bodies of Japanese. Only as of 1943 did the United States allow a few faceless
pictures of its own casualties to appear in the press, precisely because the Allies
now knew that their side would win (Paul 2004: 237–40, 252f.).
The Nazis tried to learn from the First World War and the poor German
propaganda. They now created a modern international magazine as a means
of improving their reputation in occupied and ‘friendly’ territories: as of 1940
the magazine Signal appeared, distributed by the Wehrmacht under partic-
ipation of the Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry and published
abroad in approximately two dozen languages, with up to 2.4 million copies
(Rutz 2007). Signal was quite subtle in its use of modern journalistic tools
to promote National Socialism. Modelled on the American Life magazine,
it printed reports with excellent colour photographs showing heroic soldiers,
idyllic family life and pretty women. In order to gain a wide readership abroad,
the ideological tone of the articles was kept deliberately low key.
In what measure individual press organs offered resistance is debatable
(most recent: Studt 2007; Heidenreich and Neitzel 2010). There was prob-
ably greater leeway in the Spanish dictatorship, where at least the renowned
daily ABC was able to express monarchic viewpoints (Lorenzen 1978: 154).
A subject of debate for Germany has been the degree to which the former
liberal Frankfurter Zeitung possessed and utilised certain freedoms since it was
a respected flagship abroad. In any case, it hired leftist-liberal journalists who
had been fired by other papers, and even employed Jewish editors under the
guise of salesmen. Its wary distancing from the regime was usually expressed in
subjunctives and quotes, avoidance of Nazi vocabulary and uncensored reports
taken from local newspapers (quite one-sided: Gillessen 1987: 200–229). Yet
such small, carefully shared-out latitudes simultaneously served to stabilise the
regime, especially as the Frankfurter Zeitung contained articles that supported
the system (Sösemann 2007: 34f.). Forms of resistance can also be discerned
in several discriminating Catholic organs like the magazine Hochland and
the Catholic diocesan press, whose circulation rose at the end of the 1930s –
despite or perhaps because of its ‘theologising’. Nevertheless these papers, too,
were intended to provide outlets.