KdF’s “Warfare for Joy”

Abstract

The Reichstheaterzug, had been on the road since 1934, and KdF celebrated its mobile theater for its ability to entertain in the “farthest patches of the [German] fatherland,” as described in Chap. 3.¹ But with the advent of World War II, the Reichstheaterzug set out on even longer journeys, now deployed by KdF to visit members of the Wehrmacht away at the front. In 1940, the Reichstheaterzug even voyaged to a new continent when it was shipped to Libya to entertain German soldiers stationed in North Africa. By 1943, on the occasion of KdF’s tenth anniversary, the Nazi press agency DNB boasted that the Reichstheaterzug had travelled a cumulative distance of over 215,000 km, or “five times the circumference of the earth.”²