Moonshot

for both sides. For example, Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points outlined what America and its allies were fighting for in the first place. They boosted morale and helped the American people understand why the country had entered the war. They also so formed the foundation of a committee designed to infiltrate the newspapers, publishing industry, and higher education in order to change public opinion in support of the war from the

ground up. The Fourteen Points gave way to what was known as atrocity propaganda, which depicted the horrible actions perpetrated by the German and Austro Hungarian armies against American and European soldiers. Similar tactics were used during the Second World War which now included newsreels, comic books, and music. Everywhere they looked, young men were being encouraged to enlist, while their family members back home bought war bonds to help

support their efforts. And it wasn't just the good guys using propaganda to further their agendas. Nazi Germany hired directors like Lenni Riefenstahl and Karl Ritter to film propaganda films meant to inspire the public into supporting the war and Nazi policies. But perhaps one of the most unique methods of German propaganda during World War Two was Charlie and his Orchestra, also known as the Templin Band and Bruno and his Swing Tigers. Charlie and his Orchestra was a

Nazi swing band. German leadership had noticed how swing music had captivated the American and European public on both the radio and in dance halls. Propaganda Minister Joseph Gebels saw an opportunity to use music as art designed to affect human emotion as a way to influence the people who heard it. He developed radio broadcast that aired every Wednesday and Saturday night. Record albums of the band were printed

and sent to pow camps as well. From one to nineteen forty three, Charlie and his orchestra made over ninety recordings. They reworked popular tunes of the time with pro Germany lyrics that predicted the eventual defeat of the Allied forces. During performances, Charlie, the band leader would stop singing and begin a monologue about the plight of the German people and how important it was that the Master Race succeeded,

all while the band continued playing behind him. When their original studio came under attack from Allied bombing raids, they moved their operations self. The band kept up its broadcasts as long as it could, but eventually the war spread to all facets of Germany. There was nowhere else to hide. Charlie and his orchestra performed right up until the very end. When we think back to the influential German parties of World War Two, Charlie and his orchestra don't get much

of a mention. Ninety recordings doesn't mean much when the target audience doesn't want anything to do with the group. And I'm not talking about the German people. They loved Charlie but the band wasn't put together to appeal to German ears. It was meant to sway Americans and Europeans

to the other side. Gebel's believed that by co opting jazz music, which he called degenerate, for use by the Nazis, he could hypnotize American and European audiences into supporting his cause, and the perform moments as were broadcast Canada, England, and the United States, where they fell on more discerning ears than he'd expected. Nobody was hypnotized. In fact, many laughed at the man yelling in German through their speakers. However,

people did enjoy the music. Those German players were very talented, after all. When the war ended, the musicians from the band, still wanting to play together, even formed a new group under a different band leader. Unfortunately, everyone still recognized them as Gebel's band, which made finding a venue pretty tricky. Some of the musicians went on to success in other bands, but the Nazi musical experiment had all but disappeared by the end of World War two, deemed a complete failure.

The old adage says that the show must go on, but thankfully that's not always true, and in the case of Charlie and his Nazi swing band that turned out to be a good thing. In a young girl named Virginia O'Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Sun. It was only a few lines, but it was a question heard around the world. Is there a Santa Claus? But it was what she wrote in the preceding letter that made the editor's answer even more powerful.

She wrote that her father often told her, if you see it in the Sun, it's so. The Sun is no longer in circulation, but in it's heyday it was considered as honest and serious as the New York Times. It was the first paper to report on such things as homicides, suicides, and divorces of everyday people, rather than news only about politicians and celebrities, just like every other paper at the time, which is why people took notice.

In eighteen thirty five, two years after its debut, when The Sun printed a series of articles about a far away land, a land where creatures like bison, goats, and even unicorns roamed freely. Two legged beavers had been spotted as well. The dominant beings who lived there were humanoid in shape and covered in fur with wings on their backs. They built temples among the many hills and rivers that

made up the area's geography. There were six articles in total, all written by a man named Dr Andrew Grant and reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. Grant wanted to make sure the whole world saw what he had dedicated months of his life to studying. He had worked alongside Sir John Herschel, an astronomer who had built an observatory

in Cape Town, South Africa, one year earlier. Within this observatory was a telescope more powerful than any on Earth, through which Grant and Herschel made their discovery there was life on the Moon. They commented on the geography of the Moon's surface, noting giant craters and cliffs of amethysts jutting out of the ground as ocean waves crashed against them from below. Sales of the Sun skyrocketed once the

public had started talking about the articles. They were reprinted in other papers along the East Coast, going as far west as Ohio in only two weeks. After a month, they were all over Europe as well. Moon fever had captivated the world. An Italian newspaper printed lithographs of what the men had been describing in their report. Plays were written about them. Artists painted what they imagined the creatures

and colonies to look like. Yale University even sent a team of scientists to New York to get copies of the original journal articles for their records. When they arrived at the Sun, employees they're kept bouncing them from printing office to editorial office. It seemed no one had the original articles on hand, perhaps lost or misplaced, and visiting the observatory in Cape Town was a non starter as well.

It and down after the telescope got the Sun in its sights, the light from which traveled down through its many lenses and started a massive fire inside the building. None of that matter did the end. All of that obsession about the colony on the Moon had been for nothing. Not long after their publication, the Sun came clean. The whole thing had been a hoax. Sir John Herschel really was an astronomer, But Andrew Grant was no doctor. He

wasn't even a real person. It was a pen name for a reporter for the New York Sun. The story about the Moon had been a satire of recent astronomical discoveries of the time, such as that of a professor of astronomy at Munich University in Germany who had observed colors in lines on the lunar surface, which he theorized were part of a large city with roads and farms. Readers of the Sun didn't seem to mind being duped, though in fact, sales of the Sun didn't suffer at

all after the newspapers in mission. One person, however, wasn't so pleased with Richard Locke Little ruse. Two months before The Sun published their Moon Hoax, a well known author had published a short story in the Southern Literary Messenger that told the tale of a man who voyaged to the Moon in a hot air balloon. Once there, he observed strange creatures of flourishing landscape and formed a bond

with the lunarians who lived there. The Sun's articles had relegated this author's short story to obscurity, all because his editor, Richard Locke of the New York Sun, had stolen his work and his thunder and the author's name. Edgar Allan Poe. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities, subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership

with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,