Control of Speech in Japan and Germany Censorship under the American Occupation
Download 0.89 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Planning of Censorship Policy
Planning for GermanyDrafting the Occupation PolicyAt first, planning for occupation of Germany took place in London, and was led by the U.K.77 Washington attempted to grasp the initiative, and the center of planning was more or less transferred to Anglo-American Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF).78 Nevertheless, they did not make up an integrated policy for the occupation of Germany, and the U.S. had to negotiate with the U.K. the Soviet Union, and later France until the end of the occupation.79 Different from the planning for Japan, the U.S. planning of the occupation of Germany was chiefly undertaken by the OSS. The staff of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS adapted methods of modern academic learning to the discovery and analysis of data. The OSS called in more than one thousand academic researchers, from universities, research institutes, and libraries.80 Along with that, the Central European Section of the OSS consisted chiefly of exiled intellectuals and German academic scholars who had stayed in the U.S., but also held German citizenship.81 By the autumn of 1944, the OSS concluded that the democratization of Germany might not be able to proceed solely through the German people’s initiative, as it had previously expected and finalized in SWNCC.82 This finding by the OSS came out at the same time the SWNCC came to its own conclusions about the Japanese case. At the end of August 1944, however, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau expressed his belief that it would be better to apply draconian policies toward a new Germany.83 Members of SWNCC did not trust Roosevelt because in spite of their efforts to maintain autonomy, they were often influenced by and subject to the Treasury Department. Once, Roosevelt did agree to harsh punishment for Germany at the behest of Joseph Stalin and even tried to persuade Churchill to accept this idea. Though Churchill agreed in exchange for U.S. aid, this plan was ultimately rejected owing to strong objections from some in both the U.K. and U.S. governments.84 Having rejected the Morgenthau Plan, then, the President soon professed a complete lack of interest in postwar planning for Germany. Roosevelt wrote to the new Secretary of State, “It is all very well for us to make all kinds of preparations for Germany, but there are some matters in regard to such treatment that lead me to believe speed in such matters is not an essential. … I dislike making plans for a country which we do not yet occupy.”85 This reveals that Roosevelt himself did not have a clear conception of the postwar world. At this point, his desire was to let U.K. power decline, and to punish Germany and Japan. In early October, the interim directive for Germany (JCS 1067) was drafted and was in effect a modified version of the Morgenthau Plan. The views of the JCS1067 came from the President’s expressed determination to punish Germany. At last, the revised JCS 1067 in SWNCC became a charter for members of the Control Council. JCS 1067 became U.S. policy, but as far as the SWNCC was concerned, the agreement was far from satisfactory.86 And yet, by the end of 1944, the War Department asked the OSS to draft a program for the occupation of Germany, particularly focusing on denazification, though a fundamental occupation policy of the U.S. or the Allies for Germany was not yet determined. The Army realized that “military governments” would be necessary in the near future in several ex-Axis countries, and that they should begin training soldiers who could manage civil affairs.87 They were collecting information about actual situations in the occupied areas and trying to look at all sides of the problems that the Americans would surely face in Germany. In spite of the harsh policy of JCS1067, the actual execution instructions were sufficiently reflected by the German émigré and German specialists' planning. Nevertheless, despite the long discussions on several levels, a basic policy for occupying Germany was yet not agreed upon among the Allies. The U.S., the U.K., and the Soviet Union began to discuss the disposition of the postwar Germany at Potsdam in July and August 1945. In the agreement reached there, they presented four primary goals for the occupation of Germany, the four “Ds”: denazification, democratization, demilitarization and decentralization.88 As a result, Germany was divided into three (later four) zones of Allied military occupation.89 At this time, the grand outline for occupying Germany was settled and focused firstly upon the concept of democratization. Planning of Censorship PolicyJCS1067 ordered the German mass media to shut down completely; this was in advance of further examination by the occupation forces and the reconsolidation of the media with the establishment of free speech and the press. However, JCS 1067 did not say anything about how these freedoms would be achieved. Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the establishment of the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of SHAEF to support the European psychological warfare campaign against Nazi Germany. PWD was produced by OSS, which was succeeded by the CIA in 1947. It controlled psychological warfare in order to support and wage war, including a variety of activities: propaganda, intelligence gathering, disinformation, sabotage, and myriad of additional covert operations. Simultaneously, the Office of War Information (OWI) functioned as the PWD’s resource for facts, news, and publication materials. The task of the PWD was inherited gradually during 1945 by the Information Control Division (ICD).90 Through 1944, the PWD was charged with the responsibility to develop public information policy. While setting freedom of speech and press as essential in high level decision making, they also declared the necessity for a program of censorship and control for military security, as well as to prevent Nazi propaganda in local areas. In the second week of October 1944, the PWD circulated its recommendations for a projected set of guidelines on military government propaganda in Germany. The guidelines proposed to offer them opportunities to rebuild for a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic future: It will take a quarter century to eliminate the theories on which Nazism came to power. This can only be done by education of the next generation for which we have made no preparations and have no plan. We are proposing to cast out Nazism-militarism, but we have nothing to put in its place. We offer no hope, no ideals of democracy or world citizenship, and no prospect of an economic future.”91 In the meantime, the occupation of Aachen had been already begun in October 1944, and as a result, the occupation was preparing for its involvement in civil affairs. The following month, the PWD began publishing a weekly American military paper, the Neue Zeitung, at its headquarters in Luxembourg, and delivered it to the occupied area. In January 1945, SHAEF issued Military Government Law No.191. The law ordered a cease operating of all media: press, radio, motion films, theater, musical performance, TV, and sound recordings.92 McClure was convinced it necessary to provide to Germans only official announcements and summaries of international news. He said, “It is PWD policy not to entertain the Germans.” The policy behind this involved first planning to reorient the German democratic press to avoid making the Army a permanent press service for Germany.93 In early 1945, the political advisor of the State Department Robert Murphy was ordered by the Department to make certain that PWD followed the principle of “unconditional surrender” and treated German civilians appropriately. This instruction led Murphy to consider placing tight control over the news media in occupied Germany.94 On 12 May 1945, SHAEF issued a “Manual for the Central Information Services,” which contained basic regulations and directions for setting up a licensing system for the German press. According to the German historian Ernst Meier, the manual was more than a set of instructions for OMGUS and it was fundamentally a new press law, mandatory in the American zone during the time the licensing system was in effect.95 Nevertheless, the military government, which was in charge of the enforcement all other aspect of occupation policy, was excluded from the propaganda mission. It seemed that the PWD, ICD, and OMGUS were competing with each other rather than working together.96 On 20 September 1945, the U.K., the U.S., the Soviet Union, and France declared their agreement on certain additional requirements for Germany, stating it was the German governments’ obligation to accept broad Allied censorship and information control.97
Directory: bitstream -> handle -> 1874 handle -> Master of science handle -> Healthcare utilization among persons living with hiv with attention to the influences of hepatitis handle -> The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole handle -> A dissertation handle -> The Rise of Digital Curation and Cyberinfrastructure: From Experimentation to Implementation, and Maybe Integration handle -> Mobile augmented reality applications for library services handle -> Libraries, Archives, and Museums as Epistemic Infrastructure1 1874 -> Artful Murder An Exploration of the Language of Raymond Chandler and its Translation into Dutch Master’s Thesis Translation Studies University of Utrecht Supervisors Download 0.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
|