Tag: Adolf Hitler

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“You Can’t Do Business With Hitler”: A “picture of Nazi trade methods” Re-Viewed in the Second Age of MAGA

First page of the script for the first episode of You Can’t Do Business with Hitler

“This is Douglas Miller speaking. I’ll be very blunt and to the point.  I want to give you a picture of Nazi trade methods and Nazi business methods as I saw them during my fifteen years in Berlin.”  Intimate and immediate in the means and manner in which, in the days before television and internet, only network radio could reach the multitudes of the home front, the speaker addressed anybody and somebody—the statistical masses and the actual individual tuning in.  The objective was to persuade the US American public that “You Can’t Do Business with Hitler.”

The statement served as the title of a radio program that first went on the air not long after the US entered the Second World War in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, an act of aggression that prompted the United States, and US radio, to abandon its isolationist stance.  Overnight, the advertising medium of radio was being retooled for the purposes of propaganda, employed in ways that were not unlike the methods used in Nazi Germany.

You Can’t Do Business with Hitler was also the title of a book by Miller on which the radio series was based.  Upon its publication, lengthy excerpts appeared in the July 1941 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the editor of which introduced the article by pointing out that Miller had personally “observed German industry and particularly noted the ruthless determination with which it was directed after Hitler came to power.”

During the 1920s and ‘30s, Miller had served as Commercial Attache to the American Embassy in Berlin and had subsequently written an account of his experience.  In You Can’t Do Business with Hitler, he argued that his long record of service “entitle[d]” him “to make public some of [his] experiences with the Nazis and—after drawing conclusions from them, discussing Nazi aims and methods—to project existing Nazi policy into the future and describe what sort of world we shall have to live in if Hitler wins.”

Posting this—the 855th—entry in my blog, on the day after the national election in Germany in 2025, in which the far-right, stirred by Elon Musk and JD Vance, chalked up massive gains, and in the wake of the directives and invectives with which the second Trump administration redefined US relations with many of its global trading partners—I, too, am projecting, anticipating what “sort of world” we shall find or lose ourselves if “Nazi methods” take hold in and of western democracies.

Far from retreating into the past with a twist of the proverbial dial, I am listening anew to anti-fascist US radio programs of the 1940s to reflect on the MAGA agenda in relation to the strategies of the Third Reich regime, asking myself: Can the world afford to do business with bullies?

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Of “historical value”: Hitler’s “Best” Straight Talk and Other Continuity Types

As soon as I decided to make radio plays written in the United States in the 1930s, ‘40s and early ‘50s the subject of my doctoral study, I set out to scour New York City University libraries for scripts published during that period. My degree is in English, and I was keen not to approach broadcasting as a purely historical subject. The play texts and my readings of them were to be central to my engagement with the narrative-drama hybridity that is peculiar to radio storytelling. Whenever possible, I tried to match script with recording—but, to justify my study as a literary subject, I was determined to examine as many print sources as possible. One text that promised to provide a valuable sample of 1930s broadcast writing was Radio Continuity Types, a 1938 anthology compiled and edited by Sherman Paxton Lawton.

Back in the late 1990s, when I started my research, I was too focused, too narrow-minded to consider anything that seemed to lie outside the scope of my study as I had defined it for myself, somewhat prematurely. Instead, I copied what I deemed useful and dutifully returned the books I had borrowed, many of which were on interlibrary loan and therefore not in my hands for long. It was only recently that I added Radio Continuity Types to my personal library of radio related volumes—and I was curious to find out what I had overlooked during my initial review of this book . . .

Radio Continuity Types is divided into five main sections: Dramatic Continuities, Talk Continuities, Hybrid Continuities, Novelties and Specialties, and Variety Shows. Clearly, the first section was then most interesting to me. It mainly contains scripts for daytime serials, many of which I had never heard of, let alone listened to: Roses and Drums, Dangerous Paradise, Today’s Children. There are chapters from Ultra-Violet, a thriller serial by Fran Striker, samples of children’s adventures like Jack Armstrong and Bobby Benson, as well as an early script from Gosden and Correll’s Amos ‘n’ Andy taken from the period when the program’s format was what Lawton labels “revolving plot drama.”

Aside from a melodrama written for The Wonder Show and starring Orson Welles, I got little use out of Lawton’s book, mainly because I concentrated on complete 30-minute or hour-long plays rather than on serials I could only consider as fragments. Besides, I was not eager to perpetuate the notion of radio entertainment as being juvenile or strictly commercial.

Anyway. Looking at the book now, I am struck by Lawton’s choices. Never mind the weather report on page 346 or Madam Sylvia’s salad recipe. How about the editor’s selection of “Occasional speeches”? Historically significant among them are Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural, a “Welcoming” of Roosevelt by Getulio Vargas, President of Brazil, as well as Prince Edward VIII’s announcement of his abdication.

No less significant but rather more curious are Lawton’s “Straight Talk” selections of fascist propaganda by Benito Mussolini, Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler: “Long live the National Socialist German Reich!” and “Now and forever—Germany! Sieg Heil!” Surely, such lines draw attention to themselves in a volume promising readers “some of the most successful work that has been done in broadcasting.” What, besides calling Goebbels’s “Proclamation on Entry into Austria” and Hitler’s “I Return” speech (both dated 12 March 1938) “straight” and “occasional,” had the editor to say about his selections? And what might these selections tell us about the editor who made them?

In a book on broadcasting published in the US in 1938, neutrality may not be altogether unexpected, as US network radio itself was “neutral”; but Lawton—who headed the department of “Radio and Visual Education” at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri—seems to have gone beyond mere representations of “types.” Introducing a translation of Hitler’s speech, which comments on the reluctance of “international truth-seekers” to regard the new “Pan-Germany” as a choice of its people, Lawton argued it to represent “some of the best work of a man who has proved the power of radio in the formation of public opinion.” There are no further comments either on technique or intention. No explanation of what is “best” and how it was “proved” to be so. No examination of “power,” “public,” and “opinion.” It is this refusal to contextualize that renders the editor’s stamp of approval suspect.

The “continuity” Lawton was concerned with was of the “type” written for broadcasting—not the “continuity” of democracy or the free world. When he spoke of “historical value,” the editor did so as a “justification for a classification” of the kind of “continuity types” he compiled (among them “straight argumentative talks” by Senator Huey Long and Father Coughlin). And when, in his introduction, he speculated about radio in 1951 (“when broadcasting [would] be twice as old” as it was then), he did not consider what consequences the “best” and “most efficient” of “straight talk” might have on the “types” that were still “in common use” back in 1938.

Given its definition of “historical value,” it hardly surprises that Lawton’s anthology was not in “common use” for long. There was no second edition.

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You’ve Got Mail, Herr Hitler

As of this writing, various episodes of The Shadow have been extracted some four-hundred thousand times from that vast, virtual repository of culture known, no, not as YouTube, but as the Internet Archive. This seems encouraging. At least, the most famous of all radio thrillers is still being remembered or rediscovered today, in part due, no doubt, to the misguided efforts of bringing Lamont Cranston back to the screen that cannot contain or render him. It is rather disheartening, though, that what is being so widely regarded as classic radio, perhaps even representational of American culture, is not the kind of non-matter likely to induce anyone to consider the aural arts as . . . art.

Sure, The Shadow has provided material for quite a few cultural studies, including this journal, and no history of popular entertainment in the United States ought to be called comprehensive, let alone complete, without at least a mention of this conceptually inspired if at times dramatically insipid neo-gothic phenomenon. Still, an injustice is done to a generation that had more on its mind and in its ears than vicarious thrills.

Few who rummage for old-time radio in the Archive appear to have been sufficiently intrigued by an item curiously labeled Dear Adolf. I, for one, was excited to find it there, having read the published scripts and discussed them in my dissertation without having come across those recordings. I argued against reading in lieu of listening; but, in the case of Dear Adolf, it would have been a mistake not to make a compromise and consider what I deem ersatz for ear play.

The series, after all, was written by the aforementioned Stephen Vincent Benét, a once highly regarded American poet who has long fallen out of fashion. While it did not do much damage to the name of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the writing of radio propaganda may have discredited Benét, along with his insistence on telling stories or retelling history, rather than being lyrical, experimental, or elitist.

Dear Adolf is unjustly neglected by those who enjoy such ready access to recordings from radio’s so-called golden age. The six-part program, tossed into the hole left by shows on summer hiatus back in 1942, was commissioned by the Council of Democracy and designed to turn detached listeners into active contributors to the war effort. As the title suggests, Dear Adolf was a proposed as a series of open letters to the enemy, written, we are to imagine with the help of seasoned performers from stage, screen, and radio, by ordinary Americans seizing a rare opportunity to communicate their fears, their hatred, and their defiance to the German dictator.

On this day, 12 July, in 1942, it was Helen Hayes’s task to portray an American “Housewife and Mother.” Well known to millions of listeners, the previously featured Hayes was one of the few theater actresses to embrace radio early on, if mainly, by her own admission, to be able to devote more time to her family and her rose garden.

The war suggested more urgent reasons for stepping behind the microphone, and the airwaves became a passage through which playwrights, poets, and performing artists could exit their ivory retreats and present themselves to the broader public for a cause worth the tempering of high art with an appeal to the lowest common denominator—the need for a clear image of what America stood for and was up against during a war whose objectives, it seems surprising today, were not appreciated or understood by a great many of its citizens. Their support—their money—was needed to provide the funds for a war of uncertain duration and, initially at least, less certain success.

Without becoming an outright fascist tool in a democratic society, radio needed to function as a unifier. In doing so, it had to address and engage a populace rather than assuming it to be homogenous. As I pointed out in my study, “Letter from a Housewife and Mother” is particularly interesting in this respect. Playing the part of a homemaker and part-time First Aid instructor, Hayes is meant to be—and her character insists on being—representative of free women everywhere. Rarely questioned, much less contested, in network radio, her white voice is being countered by that of a black woman, who protests:

Free women? What of me?
What of my millions and my ancient wrong?
What of my people, bowed in darkness still?

Despite her awareness that the enemy would further drive her people back to the “old slavery of whip and chains,” the speaker expresses her disillusionment with American democracy:

And yet, even today, we find no place
Even in war, for much that we could do
And would do for—our country.

However manipulative in its attempt to calm such unrest, the play is remarkable for its acknowledgment of such dissatisfaction with the status quo among those who felt themselves to be disenfranchised. It is a rare moment in American radio drama, far removed from the popular exploits of Amos ‘n’ Andy, which depended for its success on the general acceptance of conditions it refused to problematize.

Minds not clouded by crowd-pleasing commercial fare like The Shadow might appreciate Dear Adolf as an experiment in leveling with the marginalized rather than assuming or declaring their differences leveled. While in the business of pleasing everybody, radio did not always reduce difference to the aural stereotypes of regional and ethnic accents.

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"Round and Round Hitler’s Grave"

It took a while before the news got around the world; but on this day, 30 April, in 1945, Adolf Hitler got around facing trial and execution by committing suicide in his bunker. It would take another six decades until that hideout was opened for public inspection, when, in 2004, the Führer’s final days became the subject of a German film Der Untergang (2004). The Great Dictator had often been the subject of caricatures and crude character sketches, which are so much easier to accomplish than a life-size portrait. They are so much easier to take, as well, considering that a realistic image forces us to acknowledge that, far from being super- (or sub-) human, Hitler was one of us.

Throughout the Second World War, parodies and revenge fantasies boosted the morale of the Allies, comforted by way of comic deflation or enraged through violent melodrama. Radio popularized songs like Spike Jones’s previously mentioned “Der Führer’s Face” and Pete Seeger’s “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave.” If he could not be assassinated, potshots had to do:

I’m-a going to Berlin
To Mister Hitler’s town
I’m gonna take my forty-four
And blow his playhouse down.

This is how, a few days after the Führer’s death, the Almanac Singers modified those lines of Seeger’s original song when they performed it for a live broadcast of Norman Corwin’s celebrated VE-Day tribute “On a Note of Triumph,” the highest-rated American radio play of all time:

We’re gonna tell the postman,
Next time he comes ’round,
That Mr. Hitler’s new address
Is the Berlin buryin’ ground.

The Führer was dead, all right. Some eager radio writers had already killed him off, in fantasies like the aforementioned “Death Comes for Adolf Hitler.”  And yet, did that “playhouse” of his ever shut down only because its director, its producers, sponsors, and select members of staff were found dead, along with an audience of millions or, as discussed here, tried and executed in the spectacle of Nürnberg?

Corwin cautioned the American public, asking listeners to “fix [their] eyes on the horizons” and swing [their] ears about.” The old regime did not simply expire, no matter how many rounds had been shot to silence the enemy or how loudly one went “Round and Round” the problem of facing the aftermath.

Lately, I have been watching a number of German post-war films that dealt with the recent past of the fallen Reich and were less than sanguine about the Wunder of the nation’s reinvention as a republic. That is, they dealt with the inconvenient truth that the Nazis were not all below ground. Some had gone underground. They went on to make it big during the US-financed Wirtschaftswunder (or economic boom). Both Wir Wunderkinder (1958) and Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (1959) comment on the big fascist business and bureaucracy behind Germany’s capitalist society and its corruption by Nazi big shots who, rehabilitated without remorse, managed to get high up by keeping a low political profile.

It is this sense of a hidden presence, of an unresolved, let alone conquered past, that, many decades after Germany’s surrender, made it difficult for me to face life in that country, a country where fascists old and new still dance round and round Hitler’s grave as if in hopes of a resurrection; where those in denial of the past or in support of its policies still trample on the graves of millions; and where the radical left not only opened wounds, but fire, perpetrating acts of extremist terror.

I have not been back these seventeen years. We all have our baggage, you might say. Sometimes it weighs so heavily on our souls, it keeps us from dancing . . .

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Who Knows What Heart Lurks in the Evil of Men?

Driving Miss Daisy it ain’t.  The Last King of Scotland, I mean, with which I finally caught up last night at the local movie house. Like Downfall before it, this portrait of a dictator breaks with the conventions of Hollywood melodrama by challenging us to discard with the convenient absolutes of good and evil, the very binaries that clarify much but explain so little. Director Kevin Macdonald—whose next project, a documentary promisingly titled My Enemy’s Enemy, will deal with Nazi Germany and feature archival footage of Adolf Hitler—does not presume to judge his subject, Idi Amin, but to show or suggest the workings of his mind, his joys, sorrows, and fears.

In traditional Western storytelling, be it for stage or radio, for big screen or small, sketches of a certain enemy “other” are often crudely drawn for the sake of ready identification; the resulting picture is not that of an ostensibly evil person, but of evil personified. It is the very stuff of satire and sensational melodrama in which the alleged shortcomings of a dangerous individual may be exposed or playfully defused for the purpose of stirring an apathetic populace or boosting the morale of those stifled by terror. Historical portraits or caricatures of villainy rarely dare to encourage empathy and thus avoid to render their subjects human; they shun any approach suggestive of naturalism—the attempt at a serious and sincere depiction of what is.

Then again, what is? No matter how convinced I was by Forest Whitaker’s deservedly Oscar-nominated performance, I did not once think of The Last King as anything other than a work of fiction, a response largely owing to a lack of knowledge about the historical figure depicted, the culture represented, and the events on which it is based—the kind of ignorance I might pass off as skepticism if I were not hoping to achieve some semblance of naturalism in these soundings of my mind. Years of schooling and pop cultural exposure seem to have made it difficult for me to think of history as anything I sense to be reality. By virtue of seeming real, Whitaker’s Amin became a fiction to me.

My own reservations and prejudices aside, Macdonald’s film raises questions about what, beyond verifiable data, the records that have not been lost or suppressed, should make it into our histories, those stories we (or those acting on our or someone else’s behalf) construct out of scraps of documented facts upon which historians impose the comforting logic of causality. Like All the King’s Men, The Last King documents the corruption of power; yet it is also a corruption of documents. The figure of the young Scottish doctor, through the interaction with whom Amin’s personality is being revealed (for the cinema has to tell by showing), does much to render suspect the historicity of the drama, suspicions that even the facts and figures appended to the film after the conclusion of its narrative cannot lay to rest.

After all, how are we to know what heart lurks in the evil of men? What does it mean to accept that historical figures like Hitler or Idi Amin were thinking, feeling men rather than destructive forces? Perhaps we dread real people in our histories because they make us aware that, given human nature, no tools of social science can prevent us from repeating the horrors of the past.

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Spike Jones: The Man Who Found His Hit in Hitler

Well, this is a tough time for heroes. There might still be a need for them, but we stop short of worship. The nominal badge of honor has been applied too freely and deviously to inspire awe, let alone lasting respect. Even Superman is not looking quite so super these days, his box-office appeal being middling at best. And as much as I loathe the cheap brand of sarcasm that passes for wit these days, I am among those who are more likely to raise an eyebrow than an arm in salute.

Compared to the hero, the villain has proven a more durable figure. After all, it takes considerably more effort to forgive than to forget. Besides, we appreciate the convenience of a scapegoat, of a stand-in for our collective guilt; one hideous visage to represent what we dare not find within ourselves.

In government propaganda, the villain serves to remind us against (and, by indirection, for) what we are supposed to fight—a single face to signal what we must face lest we are prepared to face doomsday.

So, who is the next big thing in villainy—fading pop icons excluded? Is there any such person alive today who is as reviled or dreaded as the man who paved the career of one of the most successful US musicians of the 1940s? Adolf Hitler, I mean. That’s the villain. The musician, of course, was bandleader Spike Jones.

A California native born in 1911, Jones had his breakout hit in the early 1940s with the song “The Führer’s Face,” a merry war mobilizer of a tune that went something like this:

When Der Führer says, “We ist der master race”
We Heil! Heil! Right in Der Führer’s face,
Not to love Der Führer is a great disgrace,
So we Heil! Heil! Right in Der Führer’s face. 

When Herr Goebbels says, “We own der world und space.”
We Heil! Heil! Right in Herr Göring’s face.
When Herr Göring says they’ll never bomb this place,
We Heil! Heil! Right in Herr Göring’s face. 

Are we not the supermen?
Aryan pure supermen?
Ja we ist der supermen,
Super-duper supermen. 

Ist this Nutzi land not good?
Would you leave it if you could?
Ja this Nutzi land is good!
Vee would leave it if we could. 

We bring the world to order.
Heil Hitler’s world New Order.
Everyone of foreign race will love Der Führer’s face
When we bring to der world disorder. 

When Der Führer says, “We ist der master race”
We Heil! Heil! Right in Der Führer’s face,
When Der Führer says, “We ist der master race”
We Heil! Heil! Right in Der Führer’s face.

Are we still singing chart-topping songs like this about any one of our present-day (mis)leader? Should we? Is to laugh at them enough? Might the laughter perhaps be cheap and the joke on us? I don’t presume to have any answers. Listen to Spike Jones and his famous song on BBC Radio 4 this week, a song initially banned by the BBC. Don’t starting hitting your grandma with a shovel, even if yours, as mine, was working for one of Germany’s biggest names in fascism.