The Inside Stories of Propaganda in the Cold War Era

The Russian military invasion into Ukraine and the recent Israel-Hamas conflict have once again drawn attention to disinformation and propaganda. Reflecting on history is an imperative step in analyzing the status quo. How Did the Western and Eastern blocs disseminate advantageous information to themselves during the Cold War era? This paper reviews the case of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), former East Germany, divided by the Berlin Wall from the Western counterpart, where propaganda for the world including the Western block was also broadcast. With more than thirty years having passed since the end of the Cold War, people involved who know what happened back the are dwindling. For this survey, the author interviewed six former broadcasting personnel of Radio Berlin International (RBI), the international broadcaster of the East Germany, to obtain inside stories. The interviews reveled several circumstances including the following. - The basic policy of RBI was determined by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). - A meeting with SED officers in charge of international issues was held approximately every four weeks. - RBI’s central editorial division would draw up texts on specific topics regarding the country’s foreign policy, based on which translated versions were made in each foreign language. The interviewees had different ideas about propaganda and different acknowledgments of their involvement. All of them asserted that the purpose of broadcasting was to gain diplomatic recognition of GDR by foreign powers. While some admitted that they were carrying out propaganda, others asserted, “It was just that we did not disseminate inconvenient information, but we never lied and never spread disinformation, unlike today,” revealing a part of inside stories of those days.