Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows part of a black-and-white propaganda film of 1941 warning Australians of the dangers of Nazi propaganda and the presence of those supporting it in Australia. Scrolling text describes the various dangers to wartime Australia and introduces a threat 'perhaps more destructive than any of the others’, the fifth column. Scenes re-create a radio station in Berlin, a map of Australia is shown with the shadow of the swastika moving across it, a woman reads from a pamphlet entitled 'Hitler speaks’ and scenes showing the destruction of war all support the voice-over, which describes Hitler’s fifth columnists in Australia feeling 'insane joy’ at hearing of another town 'blown from the face of the Earth’. The music of Richard Wagner, the 19th-century German composer, accompanies the clip.

Educational value points

• This low-budget example of film as propaganda exhibits features that were common to the wartime propaganda films on each side during the Second World War. A sense of urgency is conveyed by the dramatic soundtrack, both in the selection of music and in the tone and emotive language of the voice-over and scrolled text. Black-and-white re-creations of scenes and careful use of light and shade create fear of the shadowy threat represented by the 'enemy within’. There is a juxtaposition of images, contrasting the freedoms enjoyed by Australians with the chaos and destruction caused by the War in Europe.

• The power of radio to influence people is depicted and referred to in the clip. Radio was a growing form of entertainment in the 1920s. From 1933 Joseph Goebbels, the first propaganda minister in the cabinet of the Third Reich, used radio as his primary medium for Nazi propaganda, and strictly controlled and manipulated information dissemination and programming. Goebbels made cheap radios available to the public and ensured that all Hitler’s speeches were broadcast through this medium. Broadcasters required approval from the Nazi Party before any material was aired.

• The claim made in this clip that some people in Australia supported the enemy was borne out to some extent by the Australia First movement. This short-lived organisation, which attracted a few hundred members, ended when its leaders and some of its members were secretly interned in 1942. Its roots were in strong Australian nationalism and anti-British and anti-imperialist sentiment. Sympathetic to the Japanese Government and the anticommunist German and Italian governments during the Second World War, it became, through its obscure journal The Publicist, a vehicle for the anti-Semitism of some of its members.

• The clip is from the newsreel series Australia Today, made by Rupert Kathner (1904–54) and his filmmaking partner, Alma Brooks (?–1988), at a time when the newsreel companies Cinesound News and the foreign-owned Movietone News dominated the market. Kathner and Brooks made newsreels to finance feature films as well as to provide an alternative product illuminating Australian social issues for Australian audiences. Subjects for Australia Today ranged widely and included cocaine smuggling, delinquency, unemployment and alcoholism. The filmmaker Alec Morgan has called Kathner and Brooks Australia’s first documentary makers. As well as newsreels they made feature films.

• The 'master schemer Goebbels’ (1897–1945), referred to in the clip, was a man who demonstrated the ability of propaganda to promote and maintain a leader in power. Hitler had been impressed by the power of Allied propaganda in the First World War and used Goebbels’s talent as a propagandist to gain power in the election campaigns of 1932. In 1933 Hitler appointed Goebbels to the position of Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, giving him full control of the communications media. Goebbels’s notebooks, which included his principles of propaganda, were found in the bunker in which Hitler, the Goebbels family and others died as the Soviet troops entered Berlin in April 1945.

• The suspicions concerning the 'enemy within’ that are expressed in the clip were held by the broad Australian population during the Second World War and reflect a common belief during wartime and periods of perceived threat to national security. 'Enemy aliens’, people who had been born in enemy countries or were the descendants of immigrants from those countries, were interned throughout nations allied to Britain during both the First and Second World Wars. During the Second World War Australian authorities were inundated with letters and petitions calling for the indefinite imprisonment of so-called 'enemy aliens’.

• 'Fifth columnists’ is the name given to spies or collaborators who live within one’s own country or community. The expression was first used by the nationalist General Emilio Mola, who besieged the city of Madrid with four columns of troops during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when he referred to his ‘fifth’ column of supporters – meaning those who were within the city. His claim was widely reported in British and US newspapers and the term caught on.

• Reference is made to those commentators 'selected from traitors’ who broadcast German Nazi propaganda in English. The most famous of these was William Joyce, who was nicknamed 'Lord Haw-Haw’ because of his affected upper-class accent. His broadcasts were first heard in 1939 and were popular with English listeners seeking entertainment in the early years when the War seemed remote. Virulently anti-Semitic, his broadcasts lost popularity after the Battle of Britain. Joyce was executed in 1946 for treason.