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Examples of material published in Signal | ||
Signal |
PK Robert Grimm |
PK Hanns Hubmann
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Cover of first issue of Signal, April 1,
1940. |
Long-distance wedding—10 km from enemy lines
A short celebration during a firing pause. The long barrels of the heavy artillery go silent. A young corporal steps forward from the ranks of his comrades. The division commander performs the ceremony and seals the festive occasion with a handshake. [Transl. note: PK stands for Propaganda Company] |
Specialist Szepan Sverloisch and his wife together earn
900 Rubles per month. "You can see from our clothing what this buys us. My
wife and I could go to the movies once a month. We technicians lived in
constant fear of being called saboteurs because any time something went
wrong with a machine we were held responsible. It's good that you've come.
Naturally, we're suffering because of the war, but we're hoping that you
can smash Bolshevism soon." |
Signal was a glossy, 40 page, biweekly magazine with at least 8 pages of color photographs in each issue. It was modeled on Life magazine of the same era. It's planning began in late 1939 at the initiative of a small group of advertising specialists within the propaganda department of the German army. After a brief bureaucratic turf war with Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, its first issue appeared in April 1940 and it continued to be published until March 1945.
It was managed by Dr. Albrecht Blau, a psychological warfare expert, and advertising executive Fritz Solm. Solm was a graduate of Columbia University in New York. At its point of greatest success in 1943, 2.4 million copies were printed in more than 20 diffferent languages.
The mission of Signal was to create a climate of public opinion favorable to National Socialism's New World Order in Europe and positive toward the German soldier. In other words, to combat, on the psychological front, the perception that Germany's foreign policy was imperialist and that the German soldier was the agent of that imperialism. This is the classic function of propaganda: To destroy the true perception of an inconvenient reality and substitute for it a comfortable fiction in the minds of the target population in order to facilitate the achievement of self-aggrandizing objectives set by a national elite. Examples of its headlines are:
The agent of German imperialism, the German soldier, was depicted as capable of achieving anything and whom nothing could deter. The war was a romp for him. Among the German soldiers there was camaraderie, and toward their captives and their enemies they were noble.
A critical study of Signal analyzes its early years as follows:
If you believed Signal, one lived very well in Germany. Women were a kind of symbol for the home front and there things were going well. That meant one went to the North Sea coast on vacation and basked in the sun or Signal showed provocative "ski-bunnies." The whole thing was geared toward freedom of movement and, of course, to encourage the readership to do the same. And it worked.
Rainer Rutz, Signal: A German Illustrated Magazine As An Instrument Of Propaganda In WW2, Klartext Publishers, Essen (2007)