Propaganda is a strange thing and I keep getting drawn back to considerations of it; whether it is a good or a bad thing, or simply a tool which depends on the context. The reason I’m drawn back into the subject at the moment is that I’m halfway through the fascinating biography of Bert Trautmann, by Catrine Clay. For transparency, I’m a massive Man City fan (just finished the Alex Williams autobiography too), so already know the details, but for the uninitiated, Bert was an ex-German paratrooper who was a POW after the way, and went on to star as City’s keeper, famously playing the end of a cup final with a broken neck.
I’d finished the first part of the biography, which is in part a social history of Germany in the 1930’s, and went back to re-watch the 2018 film ‘The Keeper’, which I really enjoyed first time, and was struck by the very different tones put forward. Both get across the supreme confidence (or arrogance) of a natural athlete, but they take quite different approaches to his adolescence and youth. The film, wanting to set up a ‘hero’ story, and much closer to the PR approach at the time, presents a man who had no choice except to go to war, and was haunted by what he saw there, and memories of how he tried to do the right thing where he could. The biography, explaining the strategically ruthless social agenda of recruiting to the Hitler Youth at ten, with sports and outdoor bonding activities to make the exercise fun, and being taught the history of economic ruin and hardship for Germany being the result of previous bad leadership and unfair international retribution on civilians, created a generation of young men already indoctrinated with the Nazi vision, and their duty to help make their country great again. It was hugely effective propaganda and capacity building on the part of the Nazis, and the book explains the background, but doesn’t shy away from admitting it was something Trautmann bought into. He did volunteer for the army. He did believe in the cause. He wasn’t the ‘good guy’, an example of the arrogance his upbringing created being that he would rather beat up Italians and steal their cigarettes than barter for them as some others did. A hugely successful athlete in his youth, at handball, Volkerball (dodgeball), and football (though as a centre forward, where he’d get more recognition), he competed nationally, and matching the Aryan PR ideal (tall, blonde, athletic, good at sports), had the natural confidence bolstered further into the arrogance of the young man who signed up, and volunteered to be a paratrooper, on finding he wasn’t academically gifted enough to be a pilot.
The two versions of ‘Bert’ aren’t contradictory, but it is telling that for entertainment and comfort, the version seen in the movie is the repentant sportsman who never wanted to fight or bought into the ideology, which the facts seem to suggest is untrue. But the Trautmann story is about forgiveness, coming together of communities after the war, and sporting heroism, so really isn’t too concerned about the inconvenient facts (his Iron Cross is brushed aside as ‘lots of people got them’, the fact he impregnated and left another girlfriend, that he wasn’t recuited from a POW camp at all).
It was off the back of this rewatch that my thoughts returned to The Dam Busters film, which I’ve previous mentioned. If you grew up in the 70s, it was a bank holiday TV staple, children would pretend to be airplanes in the playground, singing the theme tune, and even today, it is often held up as a great example of British pluck and success (https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-incredible-story-of-the-dambusters-raid). I think I was in my thirties when I first decided to dig a little deeper, trying to avoid the puff piece descriptions, and to look into what actually happened. It was quite shocking, and even more so as more has been researched over the years, that Operation Chastise (as it is properly known), wasn’t actually the massive setback for Germany that tended to be presented earlier, and in some cases is argued to be more of an annoyance than a problem for the Ruhr industries, as the initial destruction wasn’t followed up. What did come to light is that, although numbers and estimates vary due to the nature of the flooding, the major impact of the raid was that between 700 and 1000 Allied POWs and forced labourers, which the British knew full well were the main workforce, were drowned. Regardless of the German decision to use this workforce, in part, as a human shield, to disregard those lives, and on such a scale, is truly shocking. And hence not mentioned in many of the ‘celebrations’.
The Dam Buster raid was, and to some degree is still seen as, a massive PR and propaganda victory for the allies, but was militaristically limited, and in humanitarian terms, disastrous. Winners always write the main history, but if society was fair, the British High Command should have been tried for war crimes. In the case of ‘Bomber’ Harris, the range of his targeting of civilians would actually put him up there with the worst.
This section isn’t intended by any means to excuse German atrocities, or Bert’s attitudes and actions as a youth and young man, but reminded me of one of the earliest times I probably went in search of another, non-official, ‘truth’. In that, it is necessary to unpick bias and propaganda too (there are always two sides to a media presentation of events), but I think both the raid, and the story of Bert, are examples of where propaganda won the day, regardless of truth. Because the story told is more palatable to the populace, who have no motivation to seek out an unpleasant truth.
In the current media age, it is a good reminder that we should always question, consider, and try to understand, rather than just accepting the ‘official’ story.
Stay safe,
Kit x