'Times change and we change with them': The German advertising industry in the Third Reich - Between professional self-interest and political repression

Prominent West German advertisers who had worked under the Nazis looked back on the Third Reich with highly ambivalent feelings. In 1981 Harry Damrow, former Hoechst advertising chief and a leading member of post-war professional bodies in the advertising industry, wrote in his memoirs: 'In politics, National Socialism operated with lies and half-truths. In commercial advertising, however, it re-established clarity and truth and a level playing field for all.'(1) Similarly, in 1972 the head of German Coca-Cola's advertising department judged that advertising in 1933 had been prepared 'to sacrifice certain freedoms for the sake of creating a salutary order in which this hitherto unruly industry could thrive'.(2) this essay looks at the German advertising industry between 1933 and 1939. It focuses on the aims and methods as well as the successes and limits of the regime's regulation of advertising. In particular, it analyses the advertising industry's suppression, adaptation, and self-assertion. Finally, it takes up the ongoing discussion of the regime's modernising impact on German society.(3) Did the dictatorship have a dynamic or a retarding effect beyond 1945?