Cornwall M. The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds

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4 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

atrocities which the West circulated in neutral lands. Both types of information

might well eventually reach the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hun-

gary) and have some demoralizing impact, but they were part of psychological

warfare only in its broadest sense rather than in the shape of `front propa-

ganda'. As

such, they are only mentioned in the current study when they form

part of a specifically military campaign of ideas, for it is usually possible to

separate the latter and to write about the propaganda campaigns in a concrete

and defined sense. Indeed, if this is not done, there is the danger that `propa-

ganda' will

be discussed in the same way as it was by many of the Austro-

Hungarian or German elites during and after the war, as a vague term to

embrace or excuse all evils, something which was easily exaggerated because

it was rarely defined. It is necessary therefore to be clear about the actual

machinery of the propaganda campaigns and their potential effectiveness,

while at the same time indicating how their influence was often exaggerated

and blown into a myth by both sides by the end of the war.

Front propaganda

was a feature of the war soon after it started. It is well known

that on the Western Front the Germans had begun to drop leaflets over Allied

troops by September 1914, and proceeded to produce and distribute the Gazette

des Ardennes for French soldiers.

Less well known is the similar initiative taken

by the Russian army on the Eastern Front, which, even if it was more sporadic

with less of an immediate follow-up, belies the notion that the Germans were a

lone wielder of the weapon in these early months.

The idea that the morale of

the enemy might be subverted with the written word stemmed rather naturally

from the fact that the mass armies at war were more educated than in the past,

and that the regimes, in mobilizing their own populations for war, were more

conscious of enemy opinions which might also be influenced or discredited. A

particular precondition for such an attack with ideas was the level of censorship

of news which engulfed all the belligerent states from August 1914. Both sides

correctly assumed that the enemy, particularly in the war zone, was trying to

keep its troops in quarantine from any ideas harmful to their morale, and this

formed an essential basis for all propaganda efforts. At its most mundane, the

opposing troops would be told about items of news which their superiors were

trying to conceal from them, such as details of a recent enemy exploit or the

`reality' of how well prisoners were treated in the enemy camp. But it was after

1916 that propaganda arguments could become more sophisticated. It was then,

with President Woodrow Wilson's appeal to the belligerents in January 1917,

that both sides were forced to publicly announce their war aims. This greater

`openness' undoubtedly gave an impetus to the shaping of front propaganda

material, even if it also formed a serious area of friction between allies (on either

side) if they tried to coordinate their propaganda guidelines too precisely. The

first allies to take advantage of the medium were the Central Powers on the

Eastern Front. In early 1917, with revolution in the Russian interior and its

A Theory of Front Propaganda 5

echoes at the front, they saw for the first time an opportunity in the enemy ranks

to stimulate the idea of peace in a coordinated fashion.

A further

ingredient which made front propaganda possible was the character

of the war which had developed. `Front propaganda was a child of trench

warfare', or at least of the enduring stationary fronts which had quickly emerged

in west and east.

Since armies were having prolonged contact with the enemy

forces, it became more likely that attempts would be made to influence their

morale, and more possible to do so than during a fast or moveable campaign.

This was undoubtedly one of the reasons why propaganda in the first half of the

war was more noticeable on the Western Front, where the belligerents were

concentrated for years on the same terrain; a similar trend can be observed on

the largely stationary Italian Front from 1915. In contrast, on the Eastern Front,

although some material was always distributed by both sides, and regular

fraternization occurred at religious festivals (especially Easter), the vast expanse

of terrain which was contested and the mobile nature of the war were factors

which did much to limit front propaganda until the Central Powers' campaign

of 1917. In many ways, therefore, front propaganda emerged naturally from the

character of hostilities, assuming a `mature' form in the East only after March

1917 when sustained fraternization seemed possible and war aims were more

developed.

Similarly, it

was logical that it was the Intelligence officers of the various

armies who were usually the real pioneers in this activity. As the `eyes' of the

army, required to find out as much as possible about the enemy, the Intelli-

gence services

became in the course of the war more and more sensitive to the

character of the opposing forces and the potential which was there to be

demoralized. It was Intelligence officers, for example, who were most closely

involved with interrogating prisoners or deserters, thereby sensing the type

of information which could usefully be sent over to the enemy in order to

encourage further unrest or desertion. Since their primary task was to deal with

information, the Intelligence services were at the forefront of those who saw

the potential for its dissemination as well, and it seems clear that their percep-

tions did

much to shape the development of propaganda on each of the

military fronts. As we will see, Italian Intelligence officers significantly paved

the way for a sophisticated propaganda campaign against the Habsburg Empire,

and continued to contribute to such activity until the very end. Similarly,

British efforts on the Western Front were, until the last months of the war, in

the hands of a special section of the War Office under the Director of Special

Intelligence, General George Cockerill.

An added dimension to such propaganda ± the material smuggled in via

neutral states ± was also, for both belligerent sides, largely organized by their

Intelligence services. Their agents, notably in Switzerland or Holland, often

had a dual Intelligence and propaganda role.

This was again primarily under

6 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

military supervision, like the front propaganda specifically carried out in the

military theatres. In the latter case, however, it is true that by 1918 for the

Allied countries (Britain, France, Italy), journalists or other civilians were being

allowed to play a larger role in front propaganda, lending an extra political

colour to what had previously been a largely military activity. This in itself was

highly significant. It showed the degree of political±military rapprochement,

part of a `secondary state mobilization', which was taking place in the Allied

countries from 1917. In contrast, the propaganda of the Central Powers, which

had always been exercised by military Intelligence at the front, continued to

remain in the same hands, with no civilian or journalistic participation per-

mitted. For

Austria-Hungary and Germany, front propaganda would always be a

strictly military activity, something which reflected the more delimited milit-

ary spheres

of influence which persisted throughout the war in these empires.

This gave the western Allies' front propaganda a certain advantage by 1918, for

their campaigns were beginning to rely on a slightly wider range of people to

formulate their propaganda material and participate in the organization.

Despite this

distinction, we should not exaggerate the primacy of the western

Allies in wielding the weapon of front propaganda. What follows will reveal the

degree to which the Central Powers played a major role in developing this

weapon, and ran at least two crucial propaganda campaigns of the war: on

the Eastern and Italian Fronts. For various reasons, neither of these campaigns

receive much mention in literature about front propaganda, or propaganda in

general, even in the histories published in central Europe. It will be shown that

this has caused a significant distortion in the historiography. Until now the

standard or accepted version of events has been to place the British firmly at the

forefront of any analysis, as pioneers in all aspects of wartime propaganda; in

front propaganda too, according to one authority, `the leading practitioners

were the British'.

It was they, as `born propagandists', who were most meth-

odical and

active with propaganda in the early years on the Western Front. And

from February 1918, when Lord Northcliffe was appointed by Lloyd George as

director of a Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, the British organ-

ization became

a notorious model of what could be achieved in attacking the

morale of the enemy. Northcliffe's department, based at Crewe House in Lon-

don, was

reputedly responsible in 1918 for organizing and achieving major

successes in propaganda campaigns directed against both Austria-Hungary and

Germany. According to its own spokesman, `Crewe House had every reason to

be proud of the successes of its work against Austria-Hungary . . . The result was

the greatest victory achieved by war propaganda.'

Crewe House's famous role was first questioned in 1944 in the memoirs of

General Cockerill, who wrote that it was he who had directed propaganda

against Germany for most of the war. In 1979, Michael Balfour proposed that

Crewe House needed to be `demythologized', since its contribution to the

A Theory of Front Propaganda 7

collapse of Germany had been vastly exaggerated.

When a few years later

Sanders and Taylor wrote their influential study of British propaganda, they

duly accepted that some adjustment was needed where Germany was con-

cerned, but

they continued to suggest that Crewe House could take the credit

for leading a successful campaign against the Habsburg Empire.

In doing so,

they retained a certain amount of the myth about Crewe House which, as we

will see, needs to be further deconstructed. They also, by presenting a wholly

British perspective of propaganda, contributed themselves to reinforcing the

previous historiography which had always overemphasized Britain's primacy.

While it might be accepted that British propaganda at home and in neutral

countries such as the United States was quite innovative and influential

(although this too has recently been queried),

in the field of front propaganda

the British were no more pioneers than their allies or adversaries. The rest of

this book will demonstrate this thesis by presenting an alternative perspective

which draws in many of the other belligerent states.

The myth

of British primacy in front propaganda, which was fostered after

the First World War, owed much to the fact that the British publicized their side

of the story while others had their own reasons for remaining silent. Admit-

tedly one

of the biggest publicity coups in this regard occurred during the war

itself with the public announcement in 1918 of Northcliffe's appointment.

Rather than being `bad tactics', as Harold Lasswell once suggested,

the

announcement in itself had a demoralizing effect and did more than anything

in German and Austro-Hungarian ruling circles to feed their paranoia about

`ubiquitous enemy propaganda'. Their reaction also indicates that Britain's

reputation abroad, as a manipulator of public opinion through the press or

other channels, was indeed already firmly established. When Austrian MPs first

complained about Northcliffe's appointment a week after it happened, they

noted how England, from the start of the war, had been influencing world

opinion `with unsurpassed virtuosity and the most unscrupulous methods'.

Thus the name of Northcliffe, as a notorious newspaper-tycoon, dramatically

focused European attention upon Britain's special role in the use of enemy

propaganda. While Northcliffe would personify enemy propaganda to the

Central Powers in the last months of the war, the supposed importance of his

organization at Crewe House was fully detailed in its immediate aftermath.

His deputy Campbell Stuart used a number of official reports in order to write

Secrets of Crewe House: The Story of a Famous Campaign (which ran into three

editions in 1920); at the same time, The Times History of the War contained a

sizeable chapter on `British Propaganda in Enemy Countries', claiming that

Northcliffe's department had achieved `devastating results'. Four years later,

Northcliffe's faithful lieutenant Henry Wickham Steed published his memoirs,

Through Thirty Years, which reinforced Crewe House's image as the leading

wartime propaganda centre.

These three works gained a wide publicity in

8 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

central Europe, where Steed's memoirs were translated into German, Czech

and other languages.

For many

German writers in particular, these accounts confirmed an increas-

ing myth

that the Central Powers, in losing the war, had been subverted by

unchivalrous or underhand methods rather than defeated on the battlefield.

The views of Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler were undoubtedly the most

influential in this regard. Writing immediately after the war, Ludendorff noted

how he had regularly complained in the latter half of the war about Germany's

total failure to shape morale or public opinion when compared to the operation

of the enemy; Germany had been `hypnotized by enemy propaganda as a rabbit

is by a snake. It was exceptionally clever and conceived on a great scale.' In Mein

Kampf, Hitler mirrored Ludendorff's views, but perhaps also relied on his own

memories of psychological warfare on the Western Front when he wrote that

enemy propaganda was `a real work of genius' in response to which `there was

no counter-propaganda'.

But this exaggerated perception was not confined to

Germany. It found an exact parallel in the postwar memoirs of the former elite

of Austria-Hungary. Enemy or Entente propaganda was mentioned as a parti-

cular evil

which had conspired with domestic influences to stab the armies of

the Central Powers in the back; Northcliffe's organization was usually cited as

the leading exponent. Thus, one former Habsburg officer observed that `North-

cliffe's apparatus' had shaken the foundations of the Central Powers in a way

impossible with conventional military forces: the Entente had cleverly chosen

their moment for launching a psychological offensive.

The former Austro-

Hungarian Chief of Staff, Franz Conrad von Ho

tzendorf,

concurred but wrote

more bitterly. In private notes which were posthumously published, he castig-

ated `the

Jew Northcliffe' for exercising shameless propaganda:

While we

conducted the war according to traditional practices, our enemy

did so with all the tricks of modern skulduggery [Gaunertum] . . . In a vulgar

fashion, the Entente states soiled the chivalrous clothing of their soldiers

with the dirty filth of a base and despicable propaganda, which reckoned on

the grossest stupidity and depravity of the masses.

While Conrad had nothing but contempt for propaganda, though admitting

that Northcliffe had skilfully judged the masses' gullibility, other writers in

postwar Austria had a grudging admiration for the performance of `enemy

propaganda'. In their accounts, whether in memoirs or in syntheses about the

collapse of Austria-Hungary, they tended to incorporate what was known from

the British side as well as occasionally adding knowledge from more personal

sources of their own. The phrase `enemy propaganda' was often used rather

vaguely, as in the work of Arz von Straussenburg (Conrad's successor) who

wrote of how `a large-scale enemy propaganda [had] prepared and advanced

A Theory of Front Propaganda 9

disintegration in the Empire and at the front'.

When front propaganda was

mentioned more precisely, as in Edmund von Glaise-Horstenau's important

synthesis Die Katastrophe, or in the Austrian official history (in a section also

written by Glaise), it was usually in the context of an effective campaign

organized from Crewe House.

The accounts of Stuart, Steed and some others

remained therefore prime sources for historical syntheses of the interwar

period. In Hungary, for example, they assumed a prominent place when Jeno

Pilch discussed propaganda in his three-volume history of wartime Intelligence

and espionage.

Only rarely did front propaganda as wielded by the Central

Powers receive much attention, most notably in the memoirs of Max Ronge,

the wartime head of Austrian military Intelligence. His work was rare in dealing

at some length with front propaganda against Russia in 1917. But his version of

how enemy propaganda was organized still underlined the British dimension,

relying on British accounts as well as some exaggerated reports and rumours

which had reached him as head of Intelligence.

A different, more accurate or balanced, interpretation of how front propa-

ganda had

developed did not emerge for a number of reasons. Firstly, although

various memoirs were written in the interwar period which could shed more

light on the diverse character of front propaganda, it was always not surpris-

ingly those

in the English, French and German languages which gained the

widest publicity; these tended to reinforce the myth of western (and especially

Anglo-French) primacy. Antoni Szuber's book of 1933 shifted the focus to the

Italian Front, but still concentrated on Entente propaganda. And his assessment

in Polish was not accessible to most historians anyway; indeed, he was expli-

citly writing

for a Polish audience which he felt to be ignorant of wartime

propaganda.

Other colourful memoirs, in Slovene by Ljudevit Pivko or in

Czech by Vojte

ch Hanzal and Frantis

ek Hlava

ek, for instance, all of which

leant a vital new dimension to the story of propaganda against the Habsburg

Empire, were only published in Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. Therefore (like

Szuber) they fell victim to the new diversity of inter-war Eastern Europe.

For

the Czechs in particular, and for Slovenes and Serbs in the new Yugoslavia to a

lesser degree, their recent exploits in front propaganda against Austria-Hungary

were a significant element in their wartime experience. Front propaganda was

not a shameful activity to be forgotten about, but something to be celebrated,

an integral part of the heroic struggle which had ended in the creation of the

Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states. In the 1920s and 1930s the collections of

memoirs which emerged in these states reflected this. They showed the influ-

ence of

war veterans at all levels of society and their desire to remember what

had happened. At the same time they were one way in which the new regimes

fostered an immediate national consciousness or history for their peoples,

building where possible upon the myth of a common wartime sacrifice in

which the adventures of front propaganda could not be ignored.

10 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

It was a different story for those European countries which ended the war in a

dissatisfied or dismembered state. Their critical attitude to wartime propa-

ganda, as

something either dishonourable or irrelevant, was a second and

particularly influential reason for the Anglo-French bias in the historiography.

The example of Italy is particularly instructive. Although the Italian Front had

witnessed the most sophisticated campaign of front propaganda during the

whole war, it received little attention in Italian literature in the interwar period

(or indeed thereafter).

Mussolini's Fascist state after 1922 promoted the image

of an Italy which had sacrificed all to achieve a heroic victory at the battle of

Vittorio Veneto in October 1918, only to be prevented from securing its well-

earned territorial prizes by the western peacemakers in Paris and by the new

Yugoslavia on the other side of the Adriatic Sea. In this atmosphere, most

Italian military writers preferred to ignore an episode of the war which

exemplified official Italy's short-lived support for the Slavs of Eastern Europe

(including, most embarrassingly, the Yugoslavs). To do otherwise might suggest

that the Italian war had been won with less than traditional or honourable

methods. When one Italian Intelligence officer, Cesare Finzi, published his

memoirs around 1930 they were either pulped immediately or remained an

exception to the rule, for they opened a vista which did not accord with the

official Italian myth.

The latter was clear in the official Italian histories as well

as in an account of Italy's war, published in English by the Fascist writer Luigi

Villari. Villari gave a straight military description of what had occurred, but still

felt it necessary to explain in his introduction that the works of Stuart and

Steed, in suggesting that front propaganda had had a role to play, were `frankly

comic': they `need not be taken seriously'.

As we have noted already, a similar sceptical or ethical approach to wartime

propaganda was prevalent among military writers in the defeated nations of

Germany, Austria and Hungary. The Austrian official history gave only a brief

and dismissive mention to Austria-Hungary's propaganda campaign of 1917

against Russia and completely ignored its subsequent campaign against Italy.

The lessons which the Austro-Hungarian military had learnt during the war

about how to wield the propaganda weapon were not usually transposed into

their postwar writings; even Max Ronge, as an exception, still felt bound to call

the `successful' campaign against Russia a `nauseating' activity.

When war-

time propaganda

in any of its aspects was discussed in Germany, it was almost

always viewed as the special preserve of the enemy, and as a way to understand

the catastrophe that had engulfed the Central Powers.

In this way, the tone

which Ludendorff had set early on and which Hitler had made part of his creed,

in simultaneously bemoaning and admiring the skills of British propaganda,

was consistently taken up by writers in Nazi Germany. The classic example was

Hermann Wanderscheck whose work on The World War and Propaganda was

almost exclusively a study of `Britain's campaign' against the Central Powers as

A Theory of Front Propaganda 11

described by the Entente propagandists themselves. Northcliffe as usual was

given the most prominent place in the discussion since, as Wanderscheck

concluded, the press-magnate would `appear in history perhaps as the most

fatal figure of the great world catastrophe'.

With the outbreak of the Second

World War, the demonization of British propaganda could assume even larger

proportions: as an organization which under Northcliffe had directly destroyed

the old German Empire and was continuing deviously to spin its web around

the whole world.

Despite this trend, which was matched on the British side as well,

some

works had appeared by this time which attempted a more serious study of

propaganda as practised on the Western Front. Both Hans Thimme and the

American scholar George Bruntz revealed how from 1915 there had been

consistent Entente attempts to undermine the morale of the German armies

by distributing propaganda leaflets.

Besides the British effort, supervised by

Cockerill from March 1915, the French had been particularly active, setting up

in August their own Service de la Propagande Ae

rienne under the control of

military Intelligence at the War Ministry. From January 1916, when the French

established an overall propaganda agency, the Maison de la Presse, this Service

had a closer political liaison but was otherwise a largely military concern until

Clemenceau reorganized the French propaganda machinery in 1918. What

these analyses showed was that a propaganda war of sorts had been waged on

the Western Front from 1915. Yet it was also clear that it had not developed

into a fully systematic campaign until the final year of the war (when, for

example, the British launched their Air Post series of 94 numbered manifestos).

Until then, even if Anglo-French propaganda was often more active or imagin-

ative than

the front propaganda in other theatres, it may still be described as

rather unprofessional and sporadic, without any clear political guidelines or

consistent aims.

While Thimme

and Bruntz in the 1930s uncovered the machinery of front

propaganda in the West, no similar analysis has been attempted of the (argu-

ably) even

more significant propaganda campaigns which were carried out on

the Eastern and Italian Fronts. A brief summary shows that in 1917 it was the

Central Powers who were the first of the belligerents to launch a coordinated

campaign of front propaganda: this was against the Russian army. On the basis

of this experience in the East, Austria-Hungary turned to wield the same weapon

against Italy. And partly as a result of this onslaught, the Italians perfected their

own particularly sophisticated campaign to undermine the morale of the

Austro-Hungarian troops. The Habsburg Empire therefore was central to three

of the major campaigns of front propaganda, experiencing the weapon both as

practitioner and victim. Most modern histories of Austria-Hungary in the First

World War have duly made mention of part of this experience, even if the

tendency has often been to revive the myth of Crewe House's role.

Most

12 The Undermining of Austria-Hungary

significantly, Leo Valiani and Luciano Tosi have usefully weakened an overly-

British perspective by emphasizing the central Italian dimension to the

`Allied' propaganda campaign against the Empire.

Others, such as Manfried

Rauchensteiner and Jo

zsef Gala

ntai, have referred in passing to the Eastern

campaign in their broad discussions of the Monarchy at war.

By reassessing these perceptions and by bringing much new archival evidence

to bear, we can explore and examine for the first time the phenomenon of front

propaganda as it was exercised on the Italian and Eastern Fronts. The Italian

Front is accorded most attention, as the scene of the most sophisticated `propa-

ganda duel'

of its kind. Through this prism it is also possible to make new

judgements about military and civilian morale in Austria-Hungary and the

viability of the Empire in its final years. We may be unlikely to share the view

of one propaganda enthusiast that enemy propaganda `played an essential part

in bringing about the collapse of Austria-Hungary'.

To suggest that propa-

ganda in

wartime could have such a grandiose role is undoubtedly misleading.

But it will be possible to show that the ideas scattered in front propaganda,

whether on the Eastern or Italian Fronts, could indeed act as a catalyst upon

existing moods or trends in the war zones and hinterlands. Perhaps more

importantly, a close analysis of front propaganda is valuable in its own right

because of what it can tell us about the mentality of those who practised it and

of those who were the recipients. Besides the many in the Austro-Hungarian

Monarchy who scorned or belittled the weapon, there were an increasing

number of people who admired or feared or exaggerated its influence: they

came to view propaganda as an integral part of the new warfare to which the

Habsburg Empire was exposed.

Notes

1. Ljudevit Pivko, Informatorji (Maribor, 1925) p. 38.

2. Herodotus, The

Histories, translated by Aubrey de Se

lincourt (Penguin, 1972) pp. 531±

2, 551.

3. Philip M.

Taylor, War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War

(Manchester, 1992) p. 154.

4. The Guardian,

17 April 1999, p. 3; 21 May, p. 3; The Observer, 2 May 1999, p. 20:

`Hundreds of thousands flee to avoid the pogrom of Milos

evic

. Do not allow your mis-

guided patriotism

to be used.' Before the war, the Serbians too had adopted this tech-

nique, their

helicopters showering leaflets over Albanian refugees which promised

them an amnesty if they surrendered their weapons (see The Guardian, 7 October

1998, p. 16).

5. Z.A.B. Zeman

, Nazi Propaganda, 2nd edn (London, Oxford and New York, 1973) p. 160.

6. See, for

example, Taylor, War and the Media, pp. 151ff for radio propaganda during the

Gulf War.

A Theory of Front Propaganda 13

7. Harold D.

Lasswell, `Propaganda', in Propaganda, ed. Robert Jackall (New York, 1995)

p. 13.

8. See most

recently, Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds), European Culture in the

Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914±1918 (Cambridge, 1999).

9. M.S. Sanders

and P.M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the First World War 1914±1918

(London, 1982). Taylor has since tried to take this even further in his Munitions of the

Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day, 2nd edn

(Manchester, 1995).

10. Ute Daniel

and Wolfram Siemann (eds), Propaganda. Meinungskampf, Verfu

hrung

und

politische Sinnstiftung 1789±1989 (Frankfurt am Main, 1994) pp. 10, 44.

11. For example,

A. von Cramon, Unser o

sterreich-ungarischer Bundesgenosse im Weltkriege

(Berlin, 1920) p. 135; Edmund von Glaise-Horstenau, Ein General im Zwielicht,

ed. Peter Broucek, 3 vols (Vienna, 1980±8) I, p. 425.

12. Sanders and

Taylor, British Propaganda, p. 211.

13. See below

Chapter 3, p. 41.

14. Friedrich Felger,

`Frontpropaganda bei Feind und Freund', in Was wir von Weltkrieg

nicht wissen, ed. Friedrich Felger (Berlin, 1929) p. 498.

15. George Cockerill

, What Fools We Were (London, 1944) pp. 60ff.

16. See, for

example, Wilhelm Ernst, Die antideutsche Propaganda durch das Schweizer

Gebiet im

Weltkrieg speziell die Propaganda in Bayern (Munich, 1933); Peter Schubert,

Ètigkeit des k.u.k. Milita Èhrend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Osnab-Die Ta

Èrattache

s in Bern wa

ruck, 1980).

17. Taylor, Munition

s of the Mind, p. 187. This emphasis continues to be repeated: see

Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998) p. 225; Roshwald and Stites (eds),

European Culture in the Great War, p. 350.

18. Campbell Stuart,

Secrets of Crewe House: The Story of a Famous Campaign (London,

1920) pp. 48±9.

19. Cockerill, What

Fools We Were, p. 62; Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War 1939±

1945: Organizations, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany (London, 1979).

20. Sanders and

Taylor, British Propaganda, pp. ix, 222ff, 251, 255. The point is repeated

in Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Man-

chester and

New York, 1992), p. 6; and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the

Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, 1999) pp. 56±8.

21. See the

useful discussion in Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the

Great War, 1914±1918 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 743±7; Gerald DeGroot, Blighty: British

Society in the Era of the Great War (London and New York, 1996) p. 180.

22. Harold Lasswell,

Propaganda Technique in World War I (New York, 1927) p. 15.

23. See Erich

Ludendorff (ed.), Urkunden der Obersten Heeresleitung u Ètigkeit

ber

ihre Ta

1916±18 (Berlin, 1922) pp. 284±5.

24. Campbell Stuart,

Secrets of Crewe House: The Story of a Famous Campaign (London, 1920);

The Times History of the War

, vol. XXI (London, 1920) pp. 325±60; Henry Wickham

Steed, Through Thirty Years 1892±1922: A Personal Narrative, 2 vols (London, 1924).

25. General Ludend

orff, My War Memories 1914±1918, 2 vols (London, 1919) I, pp. 361±

83; Ludendorff (ed.), Urkunden der Obersten Heeresleitung, pp. 280ff; Adolf Hitler, Mein

Kampf, tr. James Murphy (London, 1939) pp. 156, 164.

26. General Emil

Woinovich, `Feindespropaganda', O

sterreichisch

e Wehrzeitung, 10 June

1921, p. 4. (Woinovich was a former director of the War Archives.) For a less official

view of events which assumes that `Northcliffe propaganda' was effective, see A. Zell,

Warum haben wir den Weltkrieg verloren? (Klagenfurt, n.d.) p. 80.