2026/05/25 by Peter Busch · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #European history and politics #German History and Society #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
paper · doi:10.1080/02684527.2026.2671979
openalex publication_date 2026/05/25 · openalex created_date 2026/05/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Broadcast monitoring in the Second World War provided intelligence services and propagandists with important information. This article explores how Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry utilised Nazi-Germany’s principal monitoring service, the Sonderdienst Seehaus. Based on previously neglected archival documents, it shows that the ministry, as an open-source intelligence consumer, tightly directed international broadcast monitoring. The ministry feared that monitoring summaries would fuel defeatism. It therefore strove to shape reports before they were written and strictly limited their circulation. Officials also believed that targeted broadcast monitoring would reliably yield information that could support Nazi propaganda, even when facing disastrous news from the battlefields.