'Times Change and We Change with Them': The German Advertising Industry in the Third Reich - Between Professional Self-Interest and Political Repression

In 1933 the German advertising industry welcomed the Nazi regime because it promised to overcome the Great Depression and to improve the trade's organisation and social status. Hitler's government immediately subjected advertising to comprehensive political regulation, which was not in every case efficient or practical. This essay examines the aims and methods of the regime's measures and the industry's responses, which alternated between opportunism and assertion of its self-interest. Although in the years 1933-39 a number of long-standing professional problems were solved, the industry incurred a high price, namely the arbitrary intervention of a racist and to some extent anti-capitalistic dictatorship chiefly interested in preparing and waging war.