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Migration and the Media in Nazi Germany
| Popular images and media coverage significantly shaped the views on migrants in the course of the 20th century. Mass media, such as the press and radio in particular, represented a specific aspect of a ruling „migration regime“, which can be defined as the totality of different institutions and state actors on the national, regional and local level.
In my paper, I aim at exploring the mutal relation of migration and media in Nazi Germany. Despite the relatively low numbers of immigrants during the 1930s, migration played an important role relating to Nazi rule. The discourse on migration reflected the violence of the Nazi regime and its pivotal concept of the envisioned Volksgemeinschaft (Folk Community).
German Jews were forced and put under pressure to leave the country, just like communists and other left-wing activits in the early phase of the regime. In contrast, European workers from Italy, the Netherlands, Austria (being annected in 1938) and other countrieswere recruited to work in the armament industry.
How did the media depict the mentioned and other cases of migration in Nazi Germany? What tells us the media coverage on German Jews and German emigrants outside of Germany about the Nazi migration regime and Nazi rule in general? Was the media, being “forced into line” (gleichgeschaltet), just a minor aspect of the regime’s policy and its notorious propaganda or did it noticebly contribute to the shaping of popular views on migration?
Did the media coverage echo the concepts of “race” and the official “Racial Policy” (Rassenpolitik)? What role did gender and sexual relations play, especially when millions of forced labourers from Eastern Europe were deported to Germany during the Second World War?
My presentation will raise and answer these questions. As the press and mass media became an integral part of Nazi propaganda, the media was integrated into the Nazi migration regime and propagated the racialized conceptions of migration. Migration and its particular discourse in the Third Reich was by no means marginal, as it will become clear, but leads to the core of the regime’s criminal character.
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