After the excitement had died down, it was found that the novelty of the German war effort lay in two special fields:
first, the perfect or perfect-seeming synchronizing of political, propaganda, subversive, and military efforts;
second, the use of the findings of modern psychology for the attainment of military goals.
The Germans set the pace, in the prewar and early war period and United Nations psychological warfare tried to keep up, even though the two efforts were different in scope and character.
In conquering Europe, the German staff apparently used opinion analysis. Much of this analysis has turned out to have been superb guesswork; at the time, it looked as though the Nazis might have found some scientific formula for determining just when a nation would cave in. In the conduct of war, the Germans waged a rapid war--which was industrially, psychologically and militarily sound, as long as it worked. Their "diplomacy of dramatic intimidation" used the war threat to its full value, with the result that the Czechoslovaks surrendered the Sudetenland without a shot and then submitted themselves to tyranny half a year later; the Germans wrung every pfennigs worth of advantage out of threatening to start war, and when they did start war, they deliberately tried to make it look as horrible as it was. The psychologists had apparently taught the German political and military intelligence people how to get workable opinion forecasts; German analysis of anti-Nazi counterpropaganda was excellent. Add all this to strategy and field operations which were incontestably brilliant: the effect was not that of mere war, but of a new kind of war--the psychological war.
The formula for the psychological war is not to be found in the books of the psychologists but in the writings of the constitutional lawyers. The totality of war is a result of dictatorship within government; total coordination results from total authority. The "secret weapon" of the Germans lay in the power which the Germans had openly given Hitler, and in his use of that power in a shrewd, ruthless, effective way. The Führer led the experts, not the experts the Führer. If the Germans surprised the world by the cold calculation of their timing, it was not because they had psychological braintrusters inventing a new warfare, but because they had a grim political freak commanding the total resources of the Reich. Even in wartime, no American President has ever exercised the authority which Hitler used in time of peace; American Cabinet members, military and naval figures, press commentators and all sorts of people are free to kibitz, to offer their own opinions, to bring policy into the light of day. That is as it should be. The same factors which made "psychological warfare" possible in the beginning of the war were the ones which led to Germany's futile and consummate ruin in 1944-45: excessive authority, an uninformed public, centralized propaganda, and secret political planning.