Der Stürmer

Der Stürmer appears in the officers’ club as a material emblem of Nazi antisemitic propaganda: a paper whose grotesque imagery Paul Doll considers politically damaging, even as he himself embraces antisemitic ideas and the regime’s violence. His response is not a repudiation of persecution but an effort to regulate how it is represented and to demonstrate that his orders will be enforced.

The Paper in the Officers’ Club

On a Friday, Doll finds a copy of Der Stürmer in the officers’ club. Its front page offers an artist’s image of Albert Einstein in a sexualized scene with Shirley Temple. The cartoon’s deliberately degrading construction gives Doll grounds to describe the paper as an impediment to the movement’s public standing, rather than as evidence against the ideology it promotes.

Doll argues that Julius Streicher’s work has harmed the Nazi movement and that Der Stürmer may be the principal reason exterminatory antisemitism has failed to gain acceptance in the West. The claim reveals a distinction central to his response: he objects to the newspaper’s effect on an audience, not to the antisemitic project itself. The paper’s crudity is, in his view, a liability of presentation.

Doll’s Ban and the Performance of Authority

Doll posts a warning on the officers’ club noticeboard. Any officer found with the paper will lose a month’s pay and forfeit a year’s leave. He acknowledges that he can do little about the other ranks, so the rule is directed at the officers whose conduct he can discipline. The sanction turns his distaste into a test of command: the issue is not only what the paper says, but whether his order will be obeyed.

He frames the punishment as proof that he means what he says and will enforce his rules without favour. The severity of the penalty therefore serves two purposes at once: it removes a publication he considers politically embarrassing and helps Doll stage himself as a decisive commander. The scene does not make him an opponent of antisemitism; it shows him policing its public form while preserving his authority.

The Paper Beside Other Propaganda

The novel places Der Stürmer within a wider environment in which antisemitic claims and managed accounts of the war circulate through different channels. In his private thoughts, Doll regards Jews as a fifth column while weighing pressure to increase forced labour against demands to dispose of evacuees. At a November 9 ceremony, he repeats antisemitic distortions of German history and presents the 1938 pogrom as a spontaneous popular uprising. His objection to Der Stürmer thus sits alongside, rather than contradicts, his own use of antisemitic explanations.

Radio provides a revealing contrast. Doll says his Volksempfänger properly receives only the National Socialist station; its broadcasts describe the German position in the Caucasus as heroic, and later recast the surrender at Stalingrad as a heroic sacrifice. When Hannah’s listening brings a BBC broadcast into the room, Doll interrupts with the prohibition against enemy radio and doubts about victory. Print, public speech, and radio differ in form, but these scenes repeatedly show information being judged by its usefulness to Nazi authority and the control of what may be heard or said.

Narrative Significance

Der Stürmer makes visible the distinction between ideological commitment and strategic calculation. Doll can denounce a newspaper’s influence abroad while entertaining the premise that Jews constitute an internal enemy; his ban is an exercise in propaganda management, not moral resistance. The noticeboard rule also sharpens the portrait of a man preoccupied with appearing in control: a grotesque image becomes an occasion to punish subordinates and assert that his word carries consequences.