A 'Soviet Paradise,' A Nazi Nightmare

In German-occupied Prague, a disturbing exhibition of “souvenirs” captured during the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R. shows how one totalitarian regime sought to discredit the other.

Inside the exhibition, which was open to the public daily from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. throughout March 1942, an entire village lane from Soviet territory had been transported from the fighting front and recreated to show the “gray misery” of life under Bolshevism.

Both Nazi and communist regimes made extensive use of crude propaganda. Adolf Hitler described his vision for propaganda in 1925: “…all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”

Gerbeev told RFE/RL, “The Czechoslovaks ignored the depictions of miserable living conditions but were enthusiastic about the Soviet military equipment.”

Hitler youth view a Soviet secret police cell at the exhibition in Berlin in May 1942.

After Prague, the exhibition was held in the German capital, where it was viewed by some 1.3 million people. Members of an underground anti-Nazi group reacted to the exhibition by putting stickers around Berlin declaring:

These are great! In the metro there is a plaque for soviet paradise that I saw in person but have been unable to find online. Has parents happy to send their son to war, huge vegetables, etc. All ridiculous. Some russian friends took me to see it. I keep forgetting more about it.

Interesting!

In the late 1990s I visited the “World War II Through Russian Eyes” traveling museum exhibition at San Diego’s Balboa Park.

Though both Germany and the USSR started WWII with their pact to invade and carve up Poland, they soon became hated enemies and rivals towards each other once Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.

It would be even more interesting to have both of these highly propagandistic museum displays exhibited together, at the same time, one alongside the other.

See: https://www.rferl.org/a/1089247.html

The Soviet anti-tank mine dog program was fraught with problems. They trained them on stationary (and noiseless) diesel-powered Russian tanks, then employed them against moving gasoline-powered German tanks that made frightening noises. And most of the dogs couldn’t make the adjustment.

Dogs that returned with their bombs still attached were supposed to be shot by their trainers. And trainers who had had to kill their own dog showed a strong dislike for having to train its replacement.

But dogs that returned to Soviet lines without deploying their bombs or being killed by their trainers sometimes exploded in the midst of Russian troops, with predictable consequences.

The Soviets claimed the dogs had damaged some 300 German tanks but the historical record only documents a few dozen “successes.” By 1941 the Germans had figured out that it was in their best interest to shoot every dog they came across on the battlefield, which made an already shaky weapons program dramatically less effective. And they used it as an anti-Russian propaganda campaign, claiming that the Soviets were too cowardly so they were sending their dogs to do their fighting for them.

The program wasn’t active for very long, probably because the Russians feared the dogs as much or more than the Germans did.

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