Pro-Axis Propaganda and Press Manipulation

Pro-Axis Propaganda and Press Manipulation turns the Spanish press into a contested front: facts do not simply disappear but are renamed, reordered, and given a flattering frame. Josef Hans Lazar, press attaché at the German embassy in Madrid, is its indispensable operator. His handling of the defeat at Stalingrad shows the method at full strength: readers see the ruins, but not the surrender; they receive a story of heroic resistance, not the collapse of an army.

The Stalingrad defeat rewritten

On 2 February 1943, Lazar is in Madrid and knows what has happened at Stalingrad. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus has surrendered the remnants of the German Sixth Army to the Soviet Union after German losses approaching two hundred thousand men. Hitler had promoted Paulus to field marshal in the expectation that he would kill himself rather than be captured. Lazar understands that the defeat may mean the war is lost. His immediate concern is instead to prevent Spaniards from learning its true scale.

The sequence of ABC headlines and stories shows how that concealment works. On 3 February, a photograph of the ruined Soviet city appears beneath a report titled simply Stalingrad. The account compares the last German soldiers’ resistance to the stand at Thermopylae and to the Spanish nationalist legend of the Alcázar of Toledo. It omits the words surrender and capitulation, and does not name Paulus. On 4 February, ABC claims in its inside pages that the Sixth Army is rapidly rebuilding after the setback. On 5 February, its front page turns to a supposedly triumphant Axis submarine campaign in the Atlantic. A visible photograph of destruction is thus made compatible with a story of heroism and recovery: the images do not correct the account because the accompanying language assigns them a different meaning.

This manipulation is not presented as an isolated lie about one battle. Spanish reporting repeatedly gives the Axis favorable treatment despite Spain’s theoretical neutrality. Lazar’s success lies in directing the press as if it were an obedient chorus, suppressing decisive facts while supplying emotionally resonant analogies: ancient sacrifice, national glory, and a promised recovery. The reporting does not need to deny every visible sign of defeat. It can acknowledge ruins and still withhold what those ruins mean.

Lazar’s press network and its methods

Lazar’s position rests on a combination of access, money, and personal influence. He is the sole German diplomat in Madrid who remains steadfastly at his post, serving three successive ambassadors with equal effectiveness. The influence he acquires is said to exceed that of the tall, impeccably Aryan ambassador Eberhard von Stohrer. Lazar rewards influential journalists generously, but the account distinguishes this bribery from the larger achievement: the outlets he has bought do not simply sell themselves to another bidder, even while many Francoist generals are already receiving extra payments in sterling.

His social performance helps turn access into loyalty. In postwar Madrid he becomes a conspicuous figure in society: cosmopolitan, multilingual, highly cultivated, elegantly dressed, and known for his gold monocle and impeccable manners. His wife, Baroness Elena Petrino Borkowska, hosts dinners at which selected journalists eat well and drink fine wine in the company of senior Francoist officials and Nazi diplomats. The guests are made to feel admitted to a privileged circle, close to power. The dinners therefore do more than reward particular reporters: they bind professional opportunity and social prestige to Lazar’s political world. His personal charm, intelligence, and understanding of the regime make his influence harder to reduce to a simple transaction.

The network also reaches beyond newspaper pages. Lazar first enters Spain in 1938 as a correspondent for Transocean, a German news agency established to spread the ideas of the new Germany in Spain and Latin America. After Franco’s victory, he becomes embassy press attaché. He uses connections and Spanish organizations to place Berlin’s point of view beyond the embassy’s plainly visible channels, including by infiltrating the newly founded EFE news agency so it can disseminate German opinion in Latin America. The operations are arranged so that no one can prove the German embassy, much less the German government, is behind them. Propaganda here is both a message and an infrastructure: control over intermediaries allows political influence to travel while its source is obscured.

From Austrian annexation to Madrid’s influence

Lazar’s Spanish work follows an earlier record of serving Nazi expansion. Born in Istanbul in 1895 to an Austrian diplomat and an Albanian mother of partly Jewish ancestry, he moved to Austria as an adolescent. The First World War interrupted his education; serious wounds sustained in the Austro-Hungarian army left him with chronic pain and a lasting morphine addiction. In 1927 he became a Bucharest correspondent for the official German news agency Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro. He married the Romanian aristocrat Elena Petrino Borkowska in 1937, and in 1938 moved with her to Berlin to become press attaché at the Austrian embassy to Hitler.

The Austrian government had selected him because of his public Nazi sympathies, hoping his contacts might help preserve Austrian independence. Instead, working under Joseph Goebbels, Lazar became an ardent propagandist for the Anschluss, Austria’s annexation by Germany. Once it was complete, he told foreign correspondents in Vienna that the country of his ancestors had become another region of Hitler’s Germany. That success led Hitler to send him to Spain, where he would remain for the rest of his life. The political irony is pointed: Lazar’s Jewish ancestry violates the regime’s racial laws, yet it does not prevent him from serving a state that owes him an extraordinary debt for his propaganda work. His usefulness to the regime outweighs the contradiction his own genealogy presents.

In Madrid he also profits personally from the conditions propaganda helps sustain. The poverty of Spaniards in the harshest postwar years offers him opportunities to assemble a large art collection. The account thus places cultural influence beside material acquisition: Lazar does not only shape public opinion for the Axis but advances his own interests within the unequal society around him.

Counter-messages, testimony, and strategic lies

The novel sets Lazar’s management of public knowledge against other attempts to prepare for political change. In a clandestine appeal for democratic unity, a communist organizer argues that the interest of the country must come before the interest of the party and proposes bringing together forces ranging from Basque nationalists and anarchists to non-fascist monarchist and conservative circles. The listener is moved by the speaker’s apparent sincerity and by the hope of restoring the Republic and civil liberties after an Allied defeat of the Axis. The scene offers a counter-model to Lazar’s press work: persuasion grounded in a proposed common political purpose rather than the selective presentation of battlefield news. Yet the narrator recognizes that the same words might not sound as convincing when spoken by someone else, drawing attention to the personal authority on which political communication can depend.

A second counter-message takes the dangerous form of clandestine testimony. The text published in Les Temps Modernes in December 1949 presents itself as a statement from Madrid in January 1946. Its anonymous writer says the manuscript was written, typed, copied, and carried across borders at grave risk, and insists that it records what is happening rather than serving as autobiography or propaganda. Its appeal is urgent: the outside world must act before the remaining resistance has fallen. The novel then reveals a further complication in its chain of transmission: the passage’s French-like constructions show that the Spanish text is a reverse translation of the French version published in 1949, not an original Spanish text simply translated into French. Against the controlled news account, testimony must cross borders through intermediaries and emerge in a form that conceals its own route.

The same concern with managed truth appears in a later account of Clara Stauffer’s escape network. When Sefton Delmer asks whether she directs a network helping Nazi leaders and war criminals escape, she acknowledges that she helps people leave Spain, including those seeking another country. She describes links to a German woman in Buenos Aires and to the Vatican, through which some fugitives travel from Genoa. Asked whether the Spanish government knows, she claims that it is aware of her work and that she enjoys its understanding and the protection of Franco; she also invokes her friendship with Pilar Primo de Rivera and her closeness to the regime’s builders. But her confident claim of security is not wholly true. She lies to Delmer by asserting that she has also helped members of the Spanish Communist Party leave the country, a claim the narrator identifies as implausible to Spanish listeners. Delmer, as a foreign interviewer, records it. The interview becomes a public sensation when the Daily Express announces it on the front page a few days later.

The meaning of control over the news

Across these episodes, propaganda is shown not as one-sided fabrication but as a struggle over the conditions under which claims can be believed. Lazar makes the truth of Stalingrad compatible with a false impression of German recovery by selecting comparisons, withholding the surrender, and shifting attention to a new victory. His dinners and cultivated relationships turn that editorial control into a durable social network; covert distribution channels let Berlin’s position circulate without a demonstrable official hand. Counter-testimony faces the opposite burden: writers and couriers risk their lives to get a record beyond Spain, and even then translation complicates the reader’s understanding of where that record began.

The novel also refuses to treat every confident statement as reliable. Stauffer’s boast that the regime protects her is undercut by the lie she tells to a foreign interviewer, while the clandestine appeal’s apparent directness is unsettled by its reverse-translation history. These contrasts make media manipulation a question of provenance as well as content: who speaks, through which channel, at what risk, and with what facts withheld. Lazar’s work is decisive because he can make the Spanish public encounter the Axis war not as it has unfolded, but as a sequence of images and claims arranged to preserve its prestige.