JoJo Signal

I was originally planning on discussing not merely the WWII German propaganda magazine, Signal, but also Soviet Military Review.  Upon scanning through three volumes of hardbound Signal compilations and seeing “JoJo Rabbit” in the movie theaters, I realized that the latter was a more appropriate complement to Signal and I’ll deal with SMR in a later blog.  Sorry, comrades.

JoJo Rabbit.  Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is a 10 year old boy in Nazi Germany late in the war.  Of course he’s in the Hitler Youth, Nazi Germany’s equivalent of the Boy Scouts.  The “leader”, a disgraced and blithely cynical Wehrmacht hauptmann (captain) (Sam Rockwell) and his NCO subordinate (Alfie Allen, probably best known as Theon Greyjoy in “Game of Thrones”) gives a somewhat halfhearted sermon to the boys and girls at the camp.  Jojo himself is ridiculed heavily when, upon given a live rabbit to kill, naturally balks at summarily executing an innocent animal.

His mother Rose (the ever-babacious Scarlett Johansson) looks after him and a Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hidden in their house in Falkenheim, somewhere in central Germany (actually filmed in the Czech Republic).  Jojo himself has an imaginary friend, none other than the Fuhrer himself, Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi), very much a comic character rather than a serious dictator.  His father, if the jacket Rose wears in the film is his, seems to be a private in the German Army, described as “missing in action”.  This could mean “killed on the Eastern Front like so many other German soldiers” or “eagerly surrendered to the Amis, to spend the rest of the war in peace and safety in a POW camp somewhere in the US”; the camp leaders treat Jojo as if they assume it’s the latter and they’ll hold him personally responsible for his father’s apparent cowardice.

By the end of the film, the town becomes a battlefield which Jojo manages to survive.  Then German soldiers, Volksturm warriors, and terrified children like Jojo and his friend, are replaced by triumphant GI’s – and also some fairly ruthless and less friendly Red Army soldiers.  This was my favorite part of the film.

Rebel Wilson is even in here as a BDM (girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth) leader.  She throws some propaganda materials at Jojo, which somehow don’t include Signal.   Which leads me to my next topic.

SIGNAL was the flashy, full color, slick propaganda magazine of Nazi Germany, produced by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, under the auspices of the Wehrmacht (German armed forces).   Lots of impressive photos of German soldiers, tanks, pilots, etc.  If you see a WWII photo of a German soldier and it’s in color, chances are it was taken for Signal and originally appeared in that magazine.  The writing was propaganda, of course, in flawless – a little too flawless – English.  I zoned out on that and simply enjoyed the scenery.   While there is fair amount of claiming that the Nazis only had Europe’s best interests at heart, since the magazine was for worldwide consumption there was no mention of the Final Solution, Einsatzgruppen, or any of less palatable elements of Germany’s war efforts.  I see a few Waffen SS soldiers but nothing about Dachau or Auschwitz. 

Actually, this whole business of publishing in English is a bit strange.  The magazine started in April 1940, at which time Germany was at war with the #1 English speaking country, the United Kingdom, and this also included Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  That left Ireland and the US as remaining targets.   In December 1941 the US and Germany were at war, which ended any circulation of Signal in the US, and logistics made delivery to otherwise neutral Ireland difficult.  So where did that leave?

The Channel Islands!  These small islands off the coast of Normandy, mainly Jersey (Old) and Guernsey, wound up being the #1 target audience of the English speaking version of Signal.   Why the Nazis should bother with the inhabitants of these islands, I don’t know.  Another strange thing is that these islands remained under German control when the surrender occurred in May 1945, although the Germans had been cleared out of France by September 1944.  I can understand leaving China, Vietnam and Korea in Japanese hands while you island hop up to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but the Channel Islands couldn’t have been heavily defended.

One issue has Grant on the cover, and the article on the US Civil War (“The Anaconda System”) covers Sherman’s March to the Sea in which he deliberately obliterated Atlanta and much of Georgia and South Carolina to make the war as unpleasant as possible, destroying as much Confederate infrastructure as possible, though summary executions of Southern civilians wasn’t part of this, and plunder was forbidden.  Somehow the Channel Island inhabitants were supposed to believe that the US Army would do the same to western Europe.   Uh, yeah…  Ironically the article fails to mention that the main US battle tank of WWII was named after Sherman.

The magazine has lots of ads for fountain pens and Agfa, but no Pervitin ads.  Too bad.  As noted, it was obviously a propaganda magazine and taken as such, but aesthetically there was certainly some impressive imagery.   I have three hardbound volumes: a general first volume, Years of Triumph (1940-42), and Years of Retreat (1943-44).  No idea if the three together are the entire collection, but they certainly give us alot to read and see.  Nazi Germany at its most persuasive, for those of us who read English best.