CHAPTER XX

The First Freedom

ICD Organization and Policy

Of President Roosevelt's Four Freedoms the first was freedom of speech and expression. As it applied to the individual, freedom of speech was regarded by U.S. occupation policy as a natural right, although for the Germans somewhat circumscribed. Collectively, in regard to the communications media, it was to be granted to the Germans under tutelage after Nazi and other undesirable influences had been eliminated. The instrument to do both was the Information Control Division (ICD), USFET.

The ICD, headed by General McClure and composed of the personnel who had formed the US side in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF, was a Special Staff division of USFET.1  Until December 1945, when it was transferred to the newly created Office of Military Government (US zone), ICD functioned separately from military government, as had PWD, SHAEF. Its chief field agencies were two District Information Services Control Commands (DISCCs). The 6870th DISCO, pinpointed for the Eastern Military District, had been organized in January 1945.

The 6871st DISCO, assigned to the Western Military District, was formed in February around the press control team that had founded the Aachener Nachrichten. Later the ICD also created the 6840th Theater Information Services Control Command (TISCC) to supervise certain zonewide activities and the Information Control Section for the Berlin sector.2

The ICD and its subordinate commands had two missions: the first was to act as the communications link between the German people and the US occupation authorities; the second was to control and reconstitute the German information services "as instrumentalities of a democratic, peace loving society." 3 These missions were to be accomplished in three phases. In the first, using the authority of Military Government Law No. 191, all media of public expression in Germany would be shut down, which was done as areas were occupied. In the second phase, PWD and ICD would operate selected instruments of public information, such as newspapers and radio stations, as "overt" organs of the occupation. The third phase called for a gradual revival and return of the media to German hands through licenses to be given to "carefully selected anti-Nazi, democratic-minded Germans." 4

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At the time of the surrender all SHAEF occupied territory was in the second stage. Newspapers and radio stations were shut down and theaters, moving picture houses, and concert halls were closed. The information Germans received came from Die Mitteilung, other Army newspapers, and Radio Luxembourg. PWD's second phase policy was to "maintain and deepen the mood of passive acquiescence [to the occupation]," to encourage food production, and "to arouse a sense of collective responsibility for Germany's crimes." This last point was going to be a permanent -and permanently frustrating- element of US information activities.

Undoubtedly influenced by the more dulcet timbre of Soviet-operated Radio Berlin, PWD relaxed its policy slightly at the end of May. In the press and radio, German anti-Nazi writers were to be given limited opportunities to express themselves on political subjects; and cultural activities, particularly music, were to be encouraged. Stories and broadcasts having to do with German guilt would differentiate between the Nazi criminals, who were to be punished, and the German people, who were to be told that they could atone "by hard work, national restitution, and a change of heart."

In late June, two events ushered in the third phase: on the 27th, Hollands, editor of the Aachener Nachrichten, received a license, and on the 28th, PWD authorized limited licensing of other newspapers. These papers were to be subject to prepublication censorship and their tone and content would be the same as those of the official papers, the rationale being that the Germans would be more willing to accept ideas from other Germans, especially the concept of collective guilt to which their resistance increased as more crimes were revealed.5

As it turned out, only one paper, the Frankfurter Rundschau, was licensed under the 28 June directive. The Potsdam promises of free speech and press and Eisenhower's offer in the 6 August speech to extend these freedoms "by a gradual process" to the Germans in the US zone brought another directive on 9 August. In the directive, ICD authorized licensing of German information services to engage in reporting, editorial writing, and discussion on a "wide variety of subjects, provided military security is not jeopardized." Postpublication scrutiny supplanted prepublication censorship, and full freedom of speech and press were envisioned in future stages.6

Press Control

When the redisposition was completed and SHAEF dissolved in mid-July, the only newspapers being published in the US zone were eight overt Army papers, all weeklies, with a combined circulation slightly over three million. They were slated to be phased out as licensed papers took over the areas they served; but in the meantime, in August, two more were added, one in Stuttgart, to serve the parts of Wuerttemberg and Baden acquired from the French, and the Allgemeine Zeitung, in Berlin. The Allgemeine Zeitung appeared three times weekly, alternating with

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FIRST LICENSED NEWSPAPER COMES OFF PRESS. On the left Editor Hollands of the "Aachener Nachrichten." General McClure on the right.

FIRST LICENSED NEWSPAPER COMES OFF PRESS. On the left Editor Hollands of the "Aachener Nachrichten." General McClure on the right.

a British-published paper to give the Western sectors in effect a daily newspaper. In September, reflecting the progress in licensing, the overt papers declined to five, and in late November the last of them stopped publishing.

The 6870th DISCC, under Lt. Col. John Stanley, had moved into Munich at the end of April; and at the same time, 6871st DISCC, under Col. Bernard B. McMahan, had settled at Wiesbaden in the Western Military District. Since the overt papers were edited centrally in PWD and ICD and printed and distributed by army press teams, the DISCCs concentrated from the first on working with the Germans. Enforcing Law No. 191 was the least of their jobs. Although military government detachments, often unaware that information control was not one of their functions, sometimes briefly tolerated so-called black newspapers, the German newspaper industry was dead. The problem, preliminary reconnaissance showed, was going to be to recruit acceptable Germans and find enough plants and presses to resurrect the country's newspaper industry. Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry had kept a tight hold

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on all public information media, and few people who had worked during the twelve year Nazi period, practically none in journalism, could meet the DISCCs' political standards. In the bombed-out cities, the presses were still buried in the rubble.

Nevertheless, in the beginning, the licensing procedure influenced the pace of press revival more than the availability of people and presses did. The 28 June and 9 August directives made licensing possible, but the procedure required both ICD and DISCO clearances, and ICD alone had the authority to issue licenses. Under this system only two papers secured licenses, the Frankfurter Rundschau on 31 July and the RheinNeckar Zeitung in Heidelberg on 5 September. The program first began to move in earnest after 11 September, when ICD delegated the licensing authority to the military district commanders, who acted on the DISCCs' recommendations. During the month, five papers received licenses in the Western Military District, including one in Bremen. At the end of the month in Berlin, Der Tagesspiegel received a license; in the first two weeks of October, The Eastern Military District licensed five papers in Bavaria, beginning in Munich on the 6th with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. By the end of the year, twenty-three papers, with a combined circulation of more than three million, were publishing in the zone, Bremen, and Berlin. Because of the paper shortage, all were restricted to twice-weekly publication except Der Tagesspiegel which was a daily.

After January 1946, redeployment, the paper shortage, and the dearth of qualified and acceptable German journalists increasingly made themselves felt, and in the next six months only twelve newspapers received licenses. Both DISCCs had begun the occupation with close to a hundred officers. In the first three months of 1946, redeployment reduced this strength by half. The pool of potential licensees had begun to run dry already in the fall of 1945, and the 6970th DISCO had had to look for émigré journalists in France. For three months beginning in February 1946, 6870th DISCO stopped licensing newspapers in Bavaria completely while it sent scouts to Switzerland, France, England, and the British and French zones.7  USFET slowed the licensing program further after the turn of the year when, to save paper, it restricted the total press run for the zone to one paper for every five persons. Consequently, the papers licensed later were fewer and smaller. A dozen of the papers licensed in 1945 had allotted press runs of more than 100,000 copies. Der Tagesspiegel, the Frankfurter Rundschau, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and the Stuttgarter Zeitung printed 400,000 to 450,000 copies, and several others among the 1945 papers had circulations ranging from 150,000 to 300,000 copies. Among the 1946 papers only the Badische Neueste Nachrichten, in Karlsruhe, received a 100,000-copy allotment, a figure that was apparently not reached.8

Finding licensees was the press control officers' first and usually most critical task. Besides having newspaper editorial and management experience, the candidates had to have been anti-Nazi-not merely non-Nazi-and prodemocratic. ICD added one other requirement: that, as a rule, licenses lie granted to groups of individuals representing different social, political, and religious outlooks rather than to single persons. Because no more than one paper could be licensed in a single area, ICD

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wanted each paper to represent several opinions, hoping thereby also to break the German habit of a partisan press. 9

In setting up the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich, the 6870th DISCO reduced a field of 250 applicants to three. The chief editor, Emil Goldschagg, had edited a Social Democrat newspaper in Munich before 1933, had been arrested by the Gestapo twice, and had been rejected as an Army reserve officer when he refused to sign a paper stating that he would abide by Nazi principles. August Schwingstein, the publisher, had been a member of a liberal peasant group and a leader in the anti-Nazi Reichsbanner movement during the 1920s and early 1930s, and before 1933 had published several provincial newspapers in southern Bavaria. The cultural editor, Franz Schoeningh, had edited the independent Catholic literary periodical, Hochland, until the Nazis put it out of business.10

In the long run, the most distinguished early licensee was Dr. Theodor Heuss, who was a founder of the Rhein-Neckar Zeitung and Minister of Culture in the first Land government for Wuerttemberg-Baden and later served two terms as President of the German Federal Republic.

Almost without exception, the licensees had been away from newspaper work for a decade or more and thus needed advice on content and makeup and help at turning out papers in plants where electricity, paper, ink, machine parts, and everything else were short. The DISCCs supplied the assistance, including technical advice on rebuilding plants and controlling circulation and supplies. In Wuerzburg, the 6870th DISCO brought in American civilian specialists to rebuild a plant out of a pile of rubble.11 Censorship was not a problem. Possibly because the licenses were valuable (no paper failed to sell out every edition), the editors were elaborately careful to respect the limits on what they could publish, although some complained about having to hush up incidents involving US soldiers.12

Since none of the licensees owned printing plants and the rule against licensing corporations limited their ability to acquire capital to buy plants, USFET permitted ICD to use the confiscation and requisitioning powers of the occupation to put them in business; these powers were not used in any other instance to benefit Germans. Plant owners, who in the first place had no choice and the second place could not use the plants without licenses anyway, usually were willing enough to turn over the property at a reasonable rent; but ICD had to be concerned also for the future when American protection was gone. Viewing low capital and plants acquired by forced rentals as poor foundations for a democratic press, ICD worked to assure the survival of the licensed papers. In the German Land governments it promoted tax exemptions and other favorable legislation, and it required the licensees to pay 20 percent of their gross receipts into a capital fund. Most important, ICD secured authority for the DISCCs, as custodians of requisitioned plants, to offer the licensees long-term leases with options to buy.13

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While attempting to put the press on a sound business footing, ICD also had to consider a personnel problem. As was the case in public service, the youngest licensees were in their midforties and most others were in their fifties and sixties. Qualified, politically acceptable younger men were scarce. To perpetuate a German democratic press, a new generation of journalists would have to be recruited and trained. Work on this enormous task began in 1945 in the Deutsche Allgemeine Nachrichten Agentur (DANA), the German General News Agency.

Late in June, in an attic room of a hotel in Bad Nauheim, two ICD lieutenants, four enlisted men and a half dozen civilians from the Office of War Information started the German News Service to provide a news file for the overt and licensed press. Because the initials, DND in German, looked and sounded too much like those of the Nazi news agency, DNB, they later changed the name to DANA. After the Allied Press Service, which SHAEF had operated in London, closed in September 1945, DANA became the exclusive source of world and national news for the licensed press in the US zone. Although DANA thereafter quickly became a full-fledged news service, having contracts with the US press services, exchange agreements with the New York Times and Herald Tribune, and teletype links to Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and Nuremberg, it consistently regarded training young Germans in journalism as a primary mission. Expecting to turn DANA over to German licensees, the Americans began recruiting young men in the summer of 1945, giving preference over those who had worked on Nazi-era papers to those with no experience but anti-Nazi backgrounds. The first three recruits were hired on 31 July directly out of prisoner of war cages. By the end of the year, 130 were trained and working as reporters. Their average age was twenty-six. 14

ICD Overt Operations

Although emotions (and policy) discouraged any thought of entertaining the Germans, much less courting them, during the first months of the occupation, ICD recognized from the outset the need to enlighten them and to maintain direct contact with them. Enlightenment could best be accomplished, after years of Nazi-dominated intellectual isolation, by giving the Germans a view of the outside world, especially of the United States. The first step, aimed specifically at widening their horizons, was the opening of the American Library in Bad Homburg on 4 July 1945 with a stock of 3,000 books, 100 US periodicals, and 10 British and French periodicals. To reach a wider audience, a magazine, Die Amerikanische Rundschau (American Review), devoted to descriptions of American cultural life and edited and printed in New York, went on sale in August. For the time being, in the summer of 1945, radio -and Army newspapers provided adequate links within Germany between the occupation authorities and the population. Looking ahead, the ICD also planned to maintain

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one newspaper after the Army papers were phased out, as an organ of the US forces and as a reminder to the licensed press that it could be replaced if its performance was unsatisfactory.15

When the Information Control Division succeeded PWD, its primary mission, as its title implied, was to control the German information services. Apparently the ICD assumed that any US information to the Germans would come from other agencies, such as the Office of War Information, which published Die Amerikanische Rundschau and furnished materials from the American Library. The passive supervisory phase, however, barely outlasted the changeover. While emerging east-west strains in the wartime alliance increased the need to make the United States known to the Germans, practical advantages demonstrated the logic of having all US information activities centered in Germany. ICD was on the scene, had experienced people, and had in Munich the Voelkische Beobachter printing plant which could produce all kinds of publications for the Americans as it had for the Nazi party. Materials printed abroad, however, had to be brought long distances through an uncertain transportation system. The Office of War Information printed an edition of a second magazine, Heute (Today), in London in June 1945, but because of transportation troubles the magazine did not go on sale in Germany until mid-September.

Die Amerikauische Rundschau, made up mostly of reprinted articles of well-known American writers, continued to be edited in New York but was printed in Munich after December 1945, when the volume of its quarterly issues was increased from 50,000 to 300,000 copies. Heute, a picture magazine similar to Life and Look, moved its entire operation to Munich in December, where it published biweekly issues of 350,000 copies. Neue Auslese (New Selections), a Reader's Digest type of monthly, carried articles from Allied (including French and Soviet) publications and was edited in London; it also began printing US zone editions of 300,000 copies in Munich in December.16

The American Library opened in Bad Homburg in July but moved to Frankfurt in September; two similar libraries were opened in November and December, one in Berlin and one in Munich.17 Founded primarily as reference libraries for writers, educators, and other professionals, they proved so popular as soon as they opened that reader's cards had to be issued. The library in Munich, set up in three rooms in the University of Munich's medical library, issued 250 cards its first week of operation and had a waiting list of 500 people. After the turn of the year, the libraries, redesignated "US information centers," admitted the general public as quickly as their facilities could be expanded, and the stocks of US newspapers and periodicals, for which the Germans seemed to have an endless hunger, increased.

In the fall of 1945, as the licensing program gathered momentum, the Publishing Operations Section, ICD, began work on the permanent overt paper projected early in July, to which it gave the name used briefly in Aachen a year before, Die Neue Zeitung (The New Newspaper). The mast-

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head of the first issue (18 October) announced it as "The American Newspaper for the German People." Although it was still an organ of the US forces and a tacit admonishment to the licensed press, its concept had expanded since July: it was now also to provide an example for the German press of objective reporting and high journalistic standards and to widen the view of the readership, giving them information about the world and educating them "to the tasks which lie ahead of them." McClure also changed the orientation somewhat in November when he specified that 50 percent of the space be devoted to America and its viewpoints, 25 percent to world news, and 25 percent to German news of national interest.18

Printed in Munich on the Voelkische Beobachter presses, Die Neue Zeitung appeared twice a week, on Thursday and Sunday, in the US zone, Berlin, and Bremen. At first produced entirely by US personnel under Maj. Hans Habe and Maj. Hans Wallenberg, who had been newspaper editors in Germany and Austria before Hitler, Die Neue Zeitung, like DANA, later undertook to give opportunities and training to Germans. The circulation rose from 500,000 to 1,500,000 in two months without getting close to saturating the market. Dealers reported a demand for at least 3,000,000 copies, but the paper shortage held the press run to 1,500,000 after January 1946. In one survey, 50 percent of the people questioned said they read Die Neue Zeitung, often third, fourth, or fifth hand, in preference to any German paper because its quality was superior to that of the licensed press. While Die Neue Zeitung avoided financial competition with the licensed press by not carrying advertisements, it admittedly had two important competitive advantages: better access to world and national news and freedom from the constraints, real and psychological, under which the licensed editors worked.19 Nevertheless, it was probably the best and possibly the most effective of all the attempts to demonstrate freedom of speech and press as understood by Americans.

Other Media

In another branch of the press -book publishing- and in radio, film, theater, and music, ICD was also committed to the elimination of Nazi influences and the propagation of democracy through controls and licensing. Even more than the newspapers and periodicals, among which some scattered sparks of independence had stayed alive for a few years after 1033, these other media had been instruments of the Nazi regime. As nazism's intellectual and emotional props, they would have to be purged of undesirable people and of practically the entire previous twelve years' output of books and films. At the same time, Soviet competition and the Germans' need for escape from their everyday existences exerted strong pressures to sweeten the resulting cultural deprivation.

Books were a special problem. Normally, per capita German book consumption was at least four times that in the United States and after the book-dealers had cleared Nazi-influenced and other unacceptable works off their shelves, they had nothing left to sell. 20  ICD suspected that books influenced

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AUTHOR SUBMITS MANUSCRIPT FOR ICD CLEARANCE

AUTHOR SUBMITS MANUSCRIPT FOR ICD CLEARANCE

German opinion as much or more than any Other medium, which increased the need to prevent Germans from reading the wrong material. In any event, getting rid Of the old hook industry, although it was more work than in the other media and successive inspections always turned up some objectionable volumes, was easier than getting the industry restarted on a new course. To avoid the stigma of Nazi-style book-burning, ICD issued strict orders against burning, arranged to have sample copies deposited in research libraries in the United States, and pulped the rest.

The cleanup opened the market, but the industry suffered from paper, ink, and machine shortages and most of all from a dearth of publishable manuscripts. Books took time to write, and the war and nazism had crippled the literary profession. ICD's insistence on the same political standards for look publishers as for newspaper licensees further slowed the revival, especially in comparison with the Soviet zone where the policy was to license the books rather than the publishers. ICD issued its first licenses in mid-July 1945, one to a publisher of religious literature in Munich and the other to a publisher in Heidelberg who proposed to issue general works. By

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October, the DISCCs had received a thousand applications but granted only ten licenses. In the next three months they issued eight times as many, but the increase was not immediately reflected in production. The first eight books came off the presses in October, twenty-four more in November, and sixty-nine in December; but most were either technical or liturgical works or reprints. To help relieve the drought of general reading material, the Office of War Information had in the meantime supplied 35,000 copies each of twenty-five US titles in translation.

During the early months of the occupation the film exhibitors were in as bad a situation as the booksellers. Although ICD had over 8,000 reels of feature film in vaults in Frankfurt, very few were likely to be approved for German postwar viewing; ICD's reluctance to sponsor entertainment for the Germans persisted longer with regard to films than to any other medium. ICD slowed the opening of movie houses through the summer of 1945 and, together with acute shortages of electronic equipment and raw film, delayed the licensing program for new productions throughout the whole first year. Although ICD held large, government-owned UFI (Universum Film G.m.b.H.) studios in Munich and Berlin, the only film made in them before 1947 was the U.S.-British newsreel Welt in Film (World in Film).

In mid-July 1945, the only movie houses open in the US zone were the ten in Stuttgart that the French, less devoted to sanitizing the German mind than the Americans, had let stay in business with the films they had on hand. By then the DISCCs had inspected nearly a thousand movie houses in the zone but had approved very few for reopening. More than 80 percent of the exhibitors, they found, had been party members; and while the exhibitors could not influence the content of the films they showed, ICD decided that, having profited from running Nazi propaganda, they should not also be allowed to profit under the occupation. At the end of July, ICD authorized a gradual reopening of movie houses, beginning with four in Berlin and eleven in the zone, all to show one-hour newsreel programs.21

The gradual approach would probably have persisted longer than it did if the advent of winter had not intensified the need to take the Germans' minds off the hardships of cold weather and to keep the young people off the streets. In late September less than a hundred cinemas were open; by the end of the year 350 were showing films and others were scheduled to open in the new year at a rate of two a day. In September, ICD released a dozen German-made films and acquired thirty-three American features.

However, not all the American films turned out to be suitable for German audiences. Some, comedies and fantasies in particular, were simply unintelligible to the Germans. Others seemed to confirm the Nazi propaganda picture of America. One such film, briefly exhibited and hastily withdrawn, was the Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart, a lightweight thriller which, taken literally, seemed to glorify the underworld and demonstrate the ineptness of the American police. The audiences themselves preferred any kind of German film to the American products. After an undistinguished German picture called Operette consistently drew larger audiences than the American features by as much as 60 percent and after other films promised to do the same, ICD established a policy

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OUTDOOR CONCERT in Heidelberg for Americans and Germans.

OUTDOOR CONCERT in Heidelberg for Americans and Germans.

requiring all exhibitors to show American films for two weeks before and after each run of a German feature.

Until 11 November 1945, when USFET returned the studios and transmitter to the Luxembourg government, broadcasting for the US zone was centered at Radio Luxembourg. Radio Munich had started operating in May with 100 kilowatts. Radio Stuttgart, with 100 kilowatts, and Radio Frankfurt (first with 1 kilowatt and later with 20) went on the air in June, but until November all three received their programs from Radio Luxembourg. The three stations in the zone joined in the summer to form one network, the Sueddeutsche Rundfunk, but because of troubles with the land lines, the network did not function well in the early months, and Radio Munich finally withdrew to become an independent station.22  The stations remained under Army control throughout the first year,

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while ICD negotiated legislation in the Land governments that would allow the stations to be turned over to independent broadcasting corporations.

The stern radio fare of the postsurrender weeks gave way in mid-July to more varied programing. Besides news and military government announcements, Radio Munich offered broadcasts of Sunday church services, concerts by the Munich Philharmonic orchestra, and various instructive features, such as "The Buergermeister Speaks" and "For the Farmer." In October, for the same reasons that had inspired a change in the policy on films, Radio Munich added a program for young people; an audience participation program "The Listener Speaks"; a comedy series; a popular song series and one of American folk songs; and "Ten of the Week," modeled on the US program "Your Hit Parade," in which the German listeners chose the ten most popular American songs. Military government officers in the field still complained about the programming. One described Radio Munich as being "as popular as a flea on a dog's back," to which ICD retorted that the Bavarians probably did not want to listen to anything but yodeling. ICD's own surveys in late 1945 and early 1946 showed that the listeners preferred German music to any kind of American music, excepting possibly folk songs, and many were continuing to tune in the Soviet-operated Radio Berlin because it broadcasted more German music. However, a large majority preferred the US stations for news, other than that of the war crimes trials.23

Music and the theater, although technically the easiest of the media to control, offered their own distinctive problems. Because the legitimate theaters, opera houses, and concert halls were usually located in the centers of cities, many had been destroyed in the bombing and those that had survived were requisitioned for US troops. ICD licensed 130 theater companies and musical groups by November 1945, but most had no place to perform regularly. In Wiesbaden, Army Special Services requisitioned the Deutsches Theater for the Red Cross. An antiaircraft artillery unit occupied the Prinzregenten Theater in Munich. In Nuremberg, the music-loving 610th Tank Destroyer Battalion monopolized the local opera company, which was fortunate for the performers since many of them were Nazis who would not have been permitted to perform for civilians anyway. The state opera house in Stuttgart was an American enlisted men's club, and the occasional German performances there played to the accompaniment of ping-pong games in the foyers.24

The denazification procedures in the two media required that not only certifiable Nazis be removed but also that performers and producers whose work had been closely associated with nazism be blacklisted and kept from working under the occupation. One of the most distinguished personalities on the blacklist was Wilhelm Fuertwaengler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Very likely, the most thoroughly blacklisted individual-by a special quadripartite decision-was Norbert Schulze, composer of "Bombs Over England" and "Lili Marlene." On the whole, however, blacklisted performers fared better than the ether subjects of denazification. To the

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lingering chagrin of ICD and DISCC, unit Special Service officers, looking for entertainment for the troops, were often all too willing to overlook the blacklists.

Music control officers had a special worry. SHAEF Music control. Instruction No. 1 (19 July 1945) prohibited all military marches and all songs associated with the Wehrmacht or with nazism; furthermore, it cited a need to prevent performances of other types of "inflammatory" music as well, without seeming to resort to Nazi-style cultural regimentation. This instruction imposed on the DISCCs the large, and often pettifogging, job of scrutinizing concert programs in order to eliminate such Nazi-appropriated works as Siegfried's funeral march from the Goetterdaemmerung and the slow movements of Beethoven's Third and Seventh Symphonies; to prevent "musical sabotage," such as the playing of Beethoven's Eroica or Strauss's Ein Heldenleben on Hitler's birthday; and to identify and exclude non-German works that could "encourage dangerous tendencies," for example, Sibelius Finlandia or Chopin's Revolutionary Etude because of their intense nationalism.

With the appointment of Pruefungsausschuesse (examining boards), theater and music became the first entertainment and information media to acquire a degree of self-regulation. The first such board, made up of union delegates, Land and city cultural affairs representatives, and private citizens, began to function in Stuttgart in March 1946. The boards screened the Fragebogen of producers, performers, and theater owners and compiled lists of approved applicants. From these lists, after they were checked by the military government, the municipal authorities could select their theater companies and orchestras. 25

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Endnotes

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