COnsidering that "poor men" greatly out number "rich men" that would only make sense. And the war was beneficial for the poor man as it removed a threat to the safety of many, many, poor men in Adolf Hitler. What hurts a rich man also hurts a poor man. That is why nation's have armies.
I find it ironic that most GIs and Tommies who fought WWII were puzzled by the over-subtle German propaganda posters, like the one in which a soldier is wrestling with a skeleton on one side of the mirror and on the other side a well-dressed gentleman was dancing and groping a woman in a parallel movement. It was supposed to tell the Americans that they were getting killed while their girls at home were getting laid but the Teutonic predilection for abstract and literary effect made it incomprehensible to the common Allied soldier, their target audience. Also the origin of the saying "Rich man's war, poor man's fight" was the Civil War. This saying was proved to be grossly wrong by historians of demographics. All classes except farmers were slightly under-represented in the Union Army (which was basically a volunteer army) and the oh-so-oppressed urban poor was the least likely to volunteer and most likely to purchase replacements through communal funds and the political machine. I am wildly off topic now...
Oh the many ways of black propaganda...They were pretty effective at times I do believe...not sure if the nazis were anywhere near as clever as the Allied... World War II OSS Black Propaganda Postcards
All propaganda, if it is to be effective in the slightest, must have a grain or two of truth to make it's appeal universal. Notice how all the names listed as benificiaries of American Defence contracts are prominent Jewish families? Anti-semitism runs like a stain through most German propaganda of this period. And there is something very familiar about "Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight." It was the same line towed by V.I. Lenin in his anti-war literature whilst in exile in Zurich. Lenin noted that war factories of the period were also turning big profits for relatively small groups of capitalists, whilst the masses went off to fight and die. As always, the similarities between the Bolsheviks and the N.S.D.A.P. are legion. Stalinist policy was as much to blame for the outbreak of WW2 as anything coming out of Germany....and as the SU began the war firmly encamped in the Axis section of the field, I can well agree with the Allied argument that Axis nations brought on the circumstances for WW2.
One interesting point I read about the Red Army troops when the Barbarossa begun, was that the soldiers of the Red Army believed that they had nothing to fear because the many "communists" in the Wehrmacht would start a revolution in a couple of days and the war would be won thus. Interesting belief, which I trust was told by the commissars??! I think it was in.. Amazon.com: Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (9780805074550): Catherine Merridale: Books
Many of these nations were removed from each other for decades so they might not have understood each other to the best of their abilities. The nations knew what it took to get the propaganda to work on their own people but I'm sure they had trouble getting it to work on others. I think the Germans must have had better success in Europe with their propaganda than else where becasue of the "Communist Threat" and the role it played in propaganda.
Fascinating! I wonder how did the trust worthy German POW moved behind German lines? They do not have passes and surely some could recognize them to be MIA soldiers. Do you have any information about that? Some Russian senior officers might have even believed it.The Soviet interrogator asked F. Paulus how likely would there be a proletariat mutiny or revolution in Germany. The men with stars and ribbons were present during the interview.
I am amazed at how accurate the poster was in describing Roosevelt. Although I am in no way an anti-semitist, The US economy was in shambles, Roosevelts New Deal was making things even worse, and the War was all that brought us out of the economic toilet. The US did have high taxes for many years after the war, and there were no radical cuts until the Kennedy administration. Back on topic, unless there is a firm understanding of the culture your propoganda is aimed at, it never comes across the way you want it to for the reader/hearer. People with no concept of communism can only write stereotypical propaganda about it. It is the same with Facism and free-market democracies.
Was this a big part of the Germans propaganda in regards to the U.S.? I have read before that one of the reasons the Final Solution was not mention more on the homefront in the U.S., was that Roosevelt's advisors believed that it would make anti-Jewish sentiment because it might appear that we were fighting the war for Jews. If this fear was true, then propaganda like this I would think would stick.
I just noticed that in the picture, Roosevelt is handing an American GI a potato masher (German grenade.) Oops.
