Propaganda und Terror in Weißrussland 1941–1944: Die deutsche “geistige” Kriegsführung gegen Zivilbevölkerung und Partisanen (review)

Since the conclusion of the Second World War, many scholars have focused on the Third Reich’s murderous occupation regime in the conquered portions of the Soviet Union. In the decades following the conflict, historians such as Alexander Dallin and Gerald Reitlinger charted the contours of German occupation policy in the Soviet Union and underscored Nazi brutality against area residents. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, scholars gained access to previously inaccessible Soviet-held documentation that allowed them to reconstruct the occupation’s local dynamics and integrate the Holocaust more systematically into their analyses. Owing to the unparalleled brutality of the German occupation in Belorussia—during which one quarter of the population perished, including more than 500,000 Jews—historians have devoted particular attention to this region. During the past generation, Bernhard Chiari, Martin Dean, Christian Gerlach, and other scholars have explored an array of topics related to wartime Belorussia, including everyday life under German rule, local collaboration in the Holocaust, and the Third Reich’s plans for economic exploitation of local populations. Babette Quinkert’s study of German propaganda efforts in Belorussia under Nazi rule, Propaganda und Terror in Weißrussland 1941–1944, is an important contribution to this rich vein of research. Quinkert’s book, a revised version of her doctoral thesis, convincingly refutes the occasionally explicit but more often tacit scholarly assumption that German authorities overlooked propaganda as a way to cement their rule in occupied Soviet territories. Drawing primarily on German-language sources housed in Belarus, Germany, and Russia, the author reconstructs wartime German propaganda campaigns, finding that they constituted an integral component of the machinery of destruction in the region.

The author organizes her monograph into three roughly chronological sections. The first explores the antecedents to and preparations for German propaganda efforts in occupied Belorussia. Quinkert convincingly traces the origins of German propaganda campaigns in the conquered Soviet Union to a broader European interest in psychological warfare. She argues that, in the wake of the First World War, European militaries, and especially that of Germany, began to develop war plans that included propaganda targeting civilians. Quinkert submits that, growing out of this broader European phenomenon, the Third Reich began to plan during the 1930s for psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. These preparations, the author argues, anticipated many of the foci of wartime German propaganda, including the exploitation of anti-Russian sentiment among the Soviet Union’s non-Russian ethnic minorities and the identification of Communist Party officials as a special threat.

In the second section of her monograph, Quinkert surveys the many German authorities responsible for propaganda in occupied Belorussia. Aptly reminding her readers of the Third Reich’s polycratic nature, she identifies more than half a dozen major groups of German propagandists in occupied Belorussia, some operating under military jurisdiction and some under civilian. Quinkert treats each of these groups, including those within the German military, the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Reich Ministry for Peoples’ Enlightenment and Propaganda, the Foreign Office, and, perhaps more surprisingly, the Security Police and Security Service.

The author also addresses the myriad ways in which German authorities disseminated their propaganda. Although she focuses on printed forms, such as newspapers and placards, Quinkert also examines traveling propaganda exhibitions, radio broadcasts, films, and public lectures. Her analysis not only outlines the diversity and complexity of wartime German propaganda efforts in occupied Belorussia, but also underscores the difficulties she faced in sketching a comprehensive picture of German propaganda in the region. The author’s final section explores the implementation of German propaganda policy during the occupation. The section’s four chapters proceed chronologically, charting the evolution of German propaganda against the background of the Third Reich’s changing military fortunes. Quinkert begins this portion of the monograph by discussing initial German propaganda plans for occupied Belorussia. The section’s opening chapter...