When Donald Duck Heiled Hitler

During World War II, Walt Disney Studios produced many propaganda cartoons for the government, starring Donald Duck and other well-known characters. Their subjects ranged from the importance of paying your income tax to farting in Der Fuehrer's Face.

"The Spirit of '43":

https://archive.org/details/TheSpirit...

"Education for Death":

https://archive.org/details/youtube-l...

"Der Fuehrer's Face":

https://archive.org/details/DerFuehre...

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Transcript

During World War II the government partnered with all branches of the entertainment industry to create propaganda, morale building, and instructional materials. Broadway, Hollywood, visual artists, composers and writers and tap dancers and jitterbuggers all did their part for the war effort.

Cartoon and comic book characters chipped in too. Captain America’s comic book debut featured him socking Hitler on the jaw. Popeye was only too happy to beat up on crudely stereotyped Japanese characters. Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig all did their part.

Walt Disney Studios produced many short propaganda, morale and instructional films for various branches of the government throughout the war. Although the pay wasn’t great, it was a godsend. Disney entered the war years in desperate financial straits. The lavishly budgeted Pinocchio of 1940 and Fantasia in 1941 bombed at the box office. To make finances worse, after Pearl Harbor the army commandeered the studios in Burbank to make an anti-aircraft installation for a nearby Lockheed plant. Disney was forced to lay off many employees, including its animators, which led to a strike. It must have been some relief to Walt and his brother Roy when the government came calling with contracts in hand.

Disney produced propaganda cartoons till the end of the war. Three that you can screen on the Internet Archive demonstrate their range from the serious to the silly.

“The Spirit of ’43,” starring Donald Duck, exhorted viewers to pay their income tax. The war forced the government to rely heavily on income tax revenues to pay for military equipment -- “taxes to bury the Axis,” the narrator says. Accordingly, Income tax rates shot up after Roosevelt’s so-called Victory Tax Act of 1942. On payday, Donald is torn between his thrifty side, a Scotsman, and his spendthrift side, a zoot-suited  hepcat. The cartoon makes a forceful argument that, as the narrator practically shouts, “Taxes will keep democracy on the march!” 

“Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi” is very serious, even grim. It’s adapted from the 1941 best-seller by Gregor Ziemer, an American who spent the 1930s in Germany watching Hitler’s rise. The story follows little Hans as he grows up in the Nazi police state and is brainwashed into an obedient soldier goose-stepping his way to his own death. Despite the harsh story, “Education for Death” is a dazzling example of mid-century Disney Technicolor gorgeousness.

“Der Fuehrer’s Face,” one of the best-known wartime cartoons, also stars Donald Duck. It’s propaganda as parody. Donald has a goofy nightmare about living and working in Nazi Germany, sieg-heiling as he struggles to keep up at a munitions conveyor belt, only to wake up happily in the land of the free. The theme song “Der Fuehrer’s Face” mercilessly mocks not only Hitler and Goering and Goebbels but Hirohito and Mussolini as well. The great Spike Jones and his City slickers put out a single of it, a sped-up, ragtimey cover wackily orchestrated by Jones’s partner Del Porter. It’s littered with Jones’ signature gongs, toots, tweets and fart sounds, making it more cartoony than the cartoon. It went to number 3 on the Billboard chart.

Many wartime propaganda cartoons were hidden away in the vaults when the war was over. Their racist stereotypes and ethnic slurs may have helped motivate Americans to bury the Axis during the war, but were now embarrassing. But they’re history and deserve to be seen, so it’s a good thing venues like the Internet Archive have saved them from oblivion.