A Comparative Analysis of Cultural Control: The German Military Occupation of France (1940-1942) and theAmerican Military Occupation of Germany (1945-1949)

A transformative military occupation aimed at the radical ideological change of an occupied country must exercise cultural control. The occupiers must complement repression with propaganda and censorship to create new narratives and prohibit those deemed undesirable. Do transformative military occupations carried out by dictatorships and liberal democracies differ in the way in which they handle information control? I argue that the mechanisms of cultural control used by the Third Reich in France (1940-1942) and by the United States in Germany (1945-1949), shared significant similarities in spite of the fact that their respective agendas were inspired by opposite ideological tenets.