Black propaganda, better known as psychological warfare, was a new concept developed by Sefton Delmer, former head of the Daily Express’s Berlin bureau during the rise of the Nazi party. The aim was to spread false information among Germany’s civilians and military, causing confusion and tensions, and undermining morale.
From August 1941 until the end of the war, propaganda in Britain was controlled by the secret Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a WW2 British clandestine body created to produce and disseminate both white and black propaganda, with the aim of damaging enemy morale and sustaining the morale of countries occupied or allied with Nazi Germany.
The Executive was formed in August 1941, reporting to the Foreign Office. The staff came mostly from SO1, which had been until then the propaganda arm of the Special Operations Executive. The organisation was governed by a committee initially comprising Anthony Eden, (Foreign Secretary), Brendan Bracken, (Minister of Information) and Hugh Dalton, (Minister of Economic Warfare), together with officials Rex Leeper, Dallas Brooks and Robert Bruce Lockhart as chairman (and later Director General). Roundell Palmer (the future 3rd Earl of Selbourne) later replaced Dalton when he was moved to become President of the Board of Trade. Ivone Kirkpatrick, an advisor to the BBC and formerly a diplomat in Berlin, also joined the committee, while Leeper left to become British Ambassador to Greece.
After D-Day most of PWE's white propaganda staff transferred to the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD/SHAEF) of SHAEF.At the end of World War II PWE were tasked with the re-education of German prisoners of war. As with different types of propaganda, PWE used the same 'white', 'grey', and 'black' classifications for German POWs. Prisoners classed as 'black' were considered dangerous ardent Nazis, with anti-Nazis classed as 'white' and regular non-political soldiers classed as 'grey'.
Activities of the PWE included distributing covert propaganda ranging from broadcasts to loudspeaker operations to lower morale and encourage desertion, leaflet drops, and underground publications in occupied countries, running rumour campaigns and creating forgeries, among others.
In order to deliver its subversive messages, PWE also disseminated information on events in Germany and the occupied countries, gathering intelligence from other services and agencies, including POW interrogations, and newspapers obtained from occupied countries, and bombing raid photo analysis. This latter source was used to broadcast lists of streets (and even individual houses) that had been destroyed and on occasion to mock up faked "real time" reports of the German media.Some PWE's activities were controversial, such as impersonating deceased German soldiers and sending food parcels to their families with pacifist messages on their behalf. Later, Sefton Delmer, who ran a British black propaganda radio station during the war, quipped that although family hopes to see their loved ones were false, the ham was real.
The PWE's purpose-built studios had the technology to create fake ‘German’ radio stations that offered the immediacy and apparent authenticity of live broadcasts.
Soldatensender Calais, which broadcast jazz interspersed with up-to-date news, whilst presenting events as negatively as possible.
The studio employed a multi-national, multi-lingual team of refugees and prisoners-of-war from Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to broadcast the propaganda. An intelligence section also edited a daily newspaper aimed at German troops stationed in France.
Broadcasts were sent down a dedicated landline to the world’s most powerful transmitter, the newly constructed revolutionary ‘Aspidistra’ – named after the popular wartime Gracie Fields’ song ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World.
Example of propaganda that aimed to cause panic and fear among the German population.
During Allied bombing raids on Germany, the military switched off their transmitters to avoid the masts being used as navigational aids.
Aspidistra would immediately begin transmitting demoralising propaganda on the same frequency (known as an intrusion operation), making it appear genuinely German.
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Psychologie des Foules; literally: Psychology of Crowds) is a book authored by Gustave Le Bon (7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) that was first published in 1895. (English, 1896)
From 1871 on, Le Bon was an avowed opponent of socialistpacifists and protectionists, who he believed were halting France's martial development and stifling her industrial growth; stating in 1913: "Only people with lots of cannons have the right to be pacifists." He also warned his countrymen of the deleterious effects of political rivalries in the face of German military might and rapid industrialisation, and therefore was uninvolved in the Dreyfus Affair which dichotomised France.
Le Bon's behavioural study of horses also sparked a long-standing interest in psychology, and in 1894 he released Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples. This work was dedicated to his friend Charles Richet though it drew much from the theories of Théodule-Armand Ribot, to whom Le Bon dedicated Psychologie des Foules (1895). Psychologie des Foules was in part a summation of Le Bon's 1881 work L'Homme et les sociétés—which Émile Durkheim referenced in his doctoral dissertation De la division du travail social.
According to Steve Reicher, Le Bon was not the first crowd psychologist: "The first debate in crowd psychology was actually between two criminologists, Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde, concerning how to determine and assign criminal responsibility within a crowd and hence who [sic] to arrest." While this previous attribution may be valid, it is worth pointing out that Le Bon specified that the influence of crowds was not only a negative phenomena [sic], but could also have a positive impact. He considered this as a shortcoming from those authors who only considered the criminal aspect of crowd psychology.
Le Bon theorised that the new entity, the "psychological crowd", which emerges from incorporating the assembled population not only forms a new body but also creates a collective "unconsciousness". As a group of people gather together and coalesces to form a crowd, there is a "magnetic influence given out by the crowd" that transmutes every individual's behaviour until it becomes governed by the "group mind". This model treats the crowd as a unit in its composition which robs every individual member of their opinions, values and beliefs; as Le Bon states: "An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will".
In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others..." Le Bon claimed that "an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer."
Le Bon detailed three key processes that create the psychological crowd: i) Anonymity, ii) Contagion and iii) Suggestibility. Anonymity provides to rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility. An individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional. This lack of self-restraint allows individuals to "yield to instincts" and to accept the instinctual drives of their "racial unconscious". For Le Bon, the crowd inverts Darwin's law of evolution and becomes atavistic, proving Ernst Haeckel's embryological theory: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Contagion refers to the spread in the crowd of particular behaviours and individuals sacrifice their personal interest for the collective interest. Suggestibility is the mechanism through which the contagion is achieved; as the crowd coalesces into a singular mind, suggestions made by strong voices in the crowd create a space for the racial unconscious to come to the forefront and guide its behaviour. At this stage, the psychological crowd becomes homogeneous and malleable to suggestions from its strongest members. "The leaders we speak of," says Le Bon, "are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen foresight... They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness."
A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions. Intolerance and fanaticism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardour proceeded from the same source.
Le Bon’s book, a bestseller in its time, has shaped popular understandings of crowd psychology ever since — even though it’s been largely discredited by over a century of psychological research. In fact, the latest work on mob psychology shows that “crowds are highly supportive, altruistic, friendly, and often fun places to be.” Crowds raise hundreds of millions of dollars for people with severe medical expenses not covered by insurance. They make concerts, festivals and weddings fun and enjoyable.
What’s more, even if participating in a collective effort emboldens them, people who join crowds remain very much in control of their actions. “An individual in a crowd behaves just as he would behave alone,” psychologist Floyd Allport argued in 1924, “only more so.” Nevertheless, the stereotype of the angry, unreasoning mob remains an object of terror and fascination in American culture. During the 1920s and 1930s, proto-fascist crowds — such as Ku Klux Klan parades or the pro-Nazi rallies of the German-American Bund — understandably came in for the most criticism. In reality, though, these crowds were menacing mostly because of the ideology of their members. A Klan rally was terrifying because it was made up of Klansmen, not because those Klansmen were together in a crowd.
But by the 1960s, fear of the angry mob became a tool to attack grass-roots organizing in the civil rights movement and student antiwar protests.
Ultimately, the myth of the angry mob serves to justify conservatives’ indifference to the outrage of those they disagree with. Classifying protesters as a mob rather than citizens engaging in democratic activity allows Republicans RepuGNicans to raise the specter of mob rule to avoid meeting their constituents’ needs. The result: They’re the ones doing violence to democracy. There’s nothing quite so irrational, so irresponsible or so dangerous as an entire political party trying to convince voters that sexual assault survivors confronting their senators constitute an “angry mob.”
It is the crowd—this late-19th-century creature theorized by Le Bon, then ridden by the likes of Mussolini and Hitler (both of whom read the Frenchman’s work)—that Idiot-in-Chief has apparently resurrected.
But here’s the rub: “le crowd” is, in part, a mythical creature. As contemporary sociologists and psychologists like Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews, argue, the crowd is less a feature of the modern political landscape than a creature of Le Bon’s private nightscape. Rather than surrendering their identity or losing themselves in the crowd, as Le Bon argued, individuals who join the group instead embrace a collective identity, one usually hedged by limits and informed by rules. In his work on riots in 18th-century England, the historian E.P. Thompson revealed how these so-called mobs were, in fact, governed by what he called a “moral economy.” Similarly, in his landmark work on crowds in the French Revolution, the historian George Rudé showed how the “mob” that took the Bastille was not bestial and base, but instead shaped by the actions of literate artisans.
Nor is it, as Reicher argues, that crowds are entities that exist outside of a specific social context. They are, instead, responses to specific events and shaped (and limited) by the various concerns of those who form a crowd. There is no social alchemy that creates a single or collective “mind,” but instead an aggregate of individuals who, to widely varying degrees, follow or ignore the leaders. [In other words, individuals choose their mob. Xenophobic bigots revel in Racist-in-Chief rallies precisely because they already share DUH's malevolent worldview.]
The intimacy of crowds: Crowds aren’t really crazed – they are made of highly co-operative individuals driven to shared interests and goals.
"The most popular theory was that rioters had surrendered their self-awareness and rationality to the mentality of the crowd.
This has been the overriding view of crowd behaviour since the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille. The 19th-century French criminologist Gabriel Tarde likened even the most civilised of crowds to ‘a monstrous worm whose sensibility is diffuse and who still acts with disordered movements according to the dictates of its head’. Tarde’s contemporary, the social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, tried to explain crowd behaviour as a paralysis of the brain; hypnotised by the group, the individual becomes the slave of unconscious impulses. ‘He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will,’ he wrote in 1895. ‘Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian… a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’
This is still the prevailing view of mob behaviour, but it turns out to be wrong. In recent years, social psychologists have found that, rather than surrendering rationality and self-awareness, people in crowds define themselves according to who they are with at the time; their social identity determines how they behave.
At the University of Sussex, researchers led by the social psychologist John Drury have coined the term ‘collective resilience’, an attitude of mutual helping and unity in the midst of danger, to describe how crowds under duress often behave. There are many documented examples of this. ... In each case, most of Drury’s interviewees recalled feeling a strong sense of togetherness during the crisis, and an inclination to help strangers. Without such co-operation, the casualty rates could have been far higher, says Drury, who refers to crowds as ‘the fourth emergency service’ – an attitude not often shared by police. In Drury’s view, it is wrong-headed to blame crowd disasters on the behaviour of the crowd. More often the real problem is poor organisation – too many people in one place – or inadequate venue design."
First Line of Defence is a short cartoon recruitment film for the RAF created in 1949 by animation duo Halas and Batchelor. The story follows a trainee pilot dreaming about the history of flight, and it's one of the dozens of films created by John Halas and Joy Batchelor for the War Office.
