Himanil

Was there any such similar coverage or emphasis in any other nations?

tjadams

I do reserve my encomiums praise for the bulls-eye responses.

Richard Stanbery

I understand from a WWII veteran on another forum that I frequent that Hitler was taken quite seriously in the US. The radionews shows were usually 15 mins of local news and 15 mins of national/international news.

All of the big rallys were covered in the American media, mostly by the newsreels as seen in the theatres. Of course, the newspapers were still probably the primary source of news in that day. Just about everybody took the papers if they could afford them.

Pedro...that post was solid gold!

I found an answer to a question that you shed some light on regarding Hitler in a radio studio. I was wondering why I cannot find any more than one single news interview that Hitler did with a reporter, and that one dated back to 1923. Apparently Hitler just didnt give interviews...am I right in that assumption? Im struggling here guys, need help understanding Hitler and interviews.

So Pedro answered that question. Here is the link to Hitlers declaration of war on Poland 1939. It does sound as if he needed to gas himself up in fron of an audience for it...

YouTube - ADOLF HITLER SPEECH DECLARING WAR ON POLAND

YouTube - ADOLF HITLER SPEECH DECLARING WAR ON POLAND

Chamberlin is here giving his declaration of war from a studio. He sounds so hurt and dissillusioned as compared to the bombastic Hitler...

By the way, was Chamberlian really taken by surprise by Hitlers invasion of Poland? I think not, as troop movements are complex and take time. Surely he knew about the invasion before it happened. Yet in his radio broadcast, we can almost feel Chamberlains hurt feelings, as he had put so much of himself into the peace process. What to make of this? Was this an act on his part to build sympathy at home and from the US?

These old radio broadcasts give me the creeps listening to them. They sound so appocolyptic, made more so by the vagaries of the old school radio technicalities. Creepy and frightening stuff!

I wonder if the AP news wires were syndicated with the newspapers in such a way that the news was presented with the radios going in lock step with the radio news (Outside of Germany)? I understand that American audiences had to get up very early if they wanted to hear the shortwave broadcasts from Europe in the mornings.

You guys are giving me a lot of good info here. Thanks!

Richard Stanbery

Royal Avenger, I have been researching this a lot lately, and I am getting a fuzzy picture about how the media was handled.

Hitler had a lot of support in some countries, like Holland in the early-mid 30s, especially in the border areas. That started to erode after about 1936 when he started to show his dark side. The Dutch govt asked thier media to place some voluntary sensorship on themselves so as not to criticize Hitler too much. Nobody wanted to stir up a war, or provoke Hitler.

We must remember the Yellow Press of the turn of century USA. Other nations rememberd this, and I am thinking that there was some press control going on inWestern Europe in the late 1930s(Outside Germany).

I havnt got to the British Press yet, still trying to figure that one out. Was there a stiffling job going on the the British govt to keep the British press from criticising Hitler too much? Maybe some other members can help us to understand that one?

Pedro

A few notes on the Nazi print media. PART ONE

The Gleichschaltung of the press proved infinitely more complicated for the Nazis than the radio, which had, for some time, experienced a degree of State involvement. The press, on the other hand, was associated with a whole plethora of political parties, pressure groups, religious bodies and private companies. In 1933 Germany could boast more daily newspapers than the combined total of Britain, France and Italy.

According to O. J. Hale, the Third Reich adopted a three-pronged approach to the control of the press:
first, all those involved in the press industry were rigorously controlled;
second, the Party’s publishing-house, the Eher Verlag, gradually acquired the ownership – directly or indirectly – of the vast majority of the German press; and,
third, the RMVP controlled the content of the press by means of the State-controlled press agency (Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro) and daily press briefings and directives. The response of the publishers and journalists to the Nazi take-over is most revealing. The publishers’ association (Verein deutscher Zeitungsverleger), effectively ‘coordinated’ themselves. They immediately sought a modus vivendi with the new regime by first of all replacing politically ‘unacceptable’ members and then appointing Max Amann, the head of Eher Verlag, as chairman of their organization, under the revised title of the ‘Association of German Newspaper Publishers’ (Reichsverband deutscher Zeitungsverleger). On 15 November 1933, Amann was appointed president of the Reich Press Chamber to which the publishers were affiliated.

The Reich Association of the German Press (Reichsverband der deutschen Presse) likewise felt compelled to appoint the Nazi press chief, Otto Dietrich, as their chairman. On 30 April 1933, the Association announced that membership would be compulsory and that all members of the Association would be screened for their ‘racial and political reliability’.

In his speech to the press of 15 March 1933, Goebbels referred to the press as a piano on which the Government could plan to influence the public in whatever direction it desired. However, although the Nazis looked upon the press as an instrument of mass influence, they were aware that their success had been due more to the spoken than to the printed word.

In order to reassure his audience, Goebbels presented himself to the press as a fellow-journalist who had experienced the frustrations of working in opposition to the Government of the day: ‘If opposition papers claim today that their issues have been forbidden, they can talk to me as a fellow sufferer. There is, I think, no representative of any newspaper banned fifteen times, as mine was!’ According to Goebbels, the press must not ‘merely inform; it must also instruct’. He argued that there was ‘no absolute objectivity’, and the press should expect to receive not simply information from the Government but also instructions: ‘We want to have a press which cooperates with the Government just as the Government wants to cooperate with the press. . . . We do not want a state of daily warfare.’

He also urged the press to change its style of reporting in order to reflect the ‘crusading’ spirit of the time: ‘The reader should get the impression that the writer is in reality a speaker standing behind him.’ Newspapers in the Third Reich were to capture the atmosphere of the emotion-laden mass meetings. In this respect, the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, would give the lead.

One of the most important tasks confronting the RMVP when it came to power was the elimination of alternative sources of information. However, the fact that the German press was not centralized like its British counterpart proved a major obstacle. The lack of a ‘national’ press, together with long-standing regional loyalties, persuaded Goebbels to undertake the Gleichschaltung of the German press in gradual stages. This would have the dual advantage of allowing Nazi journalists to be trained for their future role and, more importantly, of not suddenly breaking readers’ habits.

The emergency decree issued immediately following the Reichstag fire on 28 February 1933 allowed the regime to suspend publication and include the spreading of rumors and false news as treasonable offenses. The Reichstag fire served as the pretext for the suppression of the Communist and Social Democratic press, which was either destroyed or taken over by Nazi newspapers. Catholic and other middle-class democratic dailies soon followed, as Nazi-controlled advertising agencies switched their contracts to the Nazi press. However, some liberal papers, notably the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt, were still permitted to publish.

So too, for a while, was the flourishing Generalanzeiger press, which showed little interest in politics; but its confessional character posed a moral threat and its popularity a competitive one. The Nazis disapproved of both and eventually undertook measures to prohibit them.

At the beginning of 1933, the Nazis owned fifty-nine daily newspapers with a combined circulation of only 782,121, which represented only 2.5 per cent of the population. By the end of the year, they had acquired a further twenty seven dailies and increased their circulation by 2.4 million copies per day.

In 1934, they would acquire the large Jewish publishing firm of Ullstein. By 1939 the Eher Verlag, largely as a result of Amann’s ordinances, controlled, either directly or indirectly, two-thirds of the German press.

Many of these papers retained their old names so that their readers would be unaware of the change of ownership. The elimination of many non-Party newspapers was followed by the fusion of Germany’s two principal news agencies, Wolff’s Telegraphisches Büro and Hugenberg’s Telegraphen- Union, into a new official agency, the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (DNB). It was soon providing over half the material which appeared in the German press, and newspapers were often confined to simply publishing verbatim a story put out by the news agency.

The other important instrument of political control over the newspaper industry was the Reich Press Chamber, and particularly the professional institutions under its tutelage. The Reich Association of the German Press became a corporate member of the Press Chamber, which not only acted as a kind of labor exchange for the profession by keeping registers of ‘racially pure’ editors and journalists, but also regarded the ‘regulation of competition’ within the industry as a perfectly legitimate function. The Press Chamber was determined to imbue all members with a strong National Socialist bias and to educate a new generation of journalists along strict Party lines so that they would, in Goebbels’ words, ‘take a stand for the new Reich and its Führer, not because they have to, but because they wish to do so’.

continued.................

Pedro

PART TWO....

Having regulated both entry into the profession and the flow of news from its source, Goebbels then tackled the problem of editorial policy and content. From 1933 the press department of the RMVP took over the daily press conferences which had been a regular feature of journalistic life during the Weimar Republic. The content of the newspapers was rigidly controlled through the very detailed directives issued by the RMVP, which even covered the length of articles on particular topics and where they should be placed in the paper. Admission to these conferences was now severely controlled along Party and racial lines. As one senior journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung observed: The press conference with the Reich Government established in 1917 was changed by the National Socialists on their seizure of power in Germany in 1933 into a ‘press conference of the Reich Government’. So it was now an institution of the Government. There it gave directives, laid down language variations, and brought the ‘press into line’. . . . Before 1933, these press conferences were run by journalists and the Government was their guest; after they were run by the Government.

Such restrictions were soon to be reinforced by the so-called ‘Editors’ Law’ (Schriftleitergesetz) of 4 October 1933. From now on editors of newspapers and political periodicals would be made responsible for any infringement of Government directives. In effect, the law reversed the roles of the publisher and the editor, reducing the publisher to the position of a business manager. The obligatory character of all directives and decrees was stressed repeatedly, ruling out editorial independence. Clause 14 of the regulations obliged editors to keep out of the newspapers everything which is calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home, the resolution of the community, German defense, culture or the economy, or to injure the religious sensibilities of others, as well as everything offensive to the honor or dignity of a German’. By turning the individual editor into the regime’s censor, this piece of legislation went a considerable way towards achieving uniformity of the press by transforming journalism into a public corporation. Editors and journalists could now only work if they were officially accredited, and Goebbels, as Minister for Propaganda was appointed president of the Press Association with the power to veto any journalist entering the profession. A system of professional courts was set up to enforce the law with the power to reprimand, fine or expel offenders.

Once some degree of uniformity had been achieved, Goebbels believed it important that the content of the press should not become lifeless. This proved difficult given the fact that newspapers were restricted to publishing Government directives. Therefore the themes commonly associated with Nazi propaganda – charismatic leadership, appeals to national unity, anti-Semitism, etc. – were supplemented by special appeals and special campaigns aimed at securing repeated gestures of conformity from the people. Such appeals and campaigns were ideally suited to the medium of the press. They would take the form of a positive discussion of the deeds of the Führer, or of some aspect of the Volk community life, such as the ‘Strength through Joy’ program. A particular favorite of Goebbels was the campaign to obtain more public money for the ‘Winter Help’ schemes. This invariably manifested itself in the slogan ‘A Sacrifice for the Community’, by which housewives and workers were urged to restrict their eating consumption to the Eintopfgericht (‘one-pot meal’) in order to conserve food, especially meat (‘the meal of sacrifice for the Reich’).

Alternatively, there was the annual ‘National Day of Solidarity’, which developed out of ‘Winter Help’ and which was a sort of plebiscite for the regime. Here the press was urged to stress not only the amount of money that was collected for the community, but also the uniqueness of the event and the voluntary character of the donations. The press was also instrumental in the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitic campaigns. Sections of the press, particularly Der Stürmer and the Völkischer Beobachter, continued to depict the Jew as barbaric and ‘subhuman’ and denounced alleged Jewish ‘criminality’ and the ‘conspiracy’ of foreign Jews against Germany. Campaigns waged in these papers might be used to prepare the public for some forthcoming anti-Jewish legislation. The press was also directed to answer foreign criticism of their racial policy by means of counter-attacks which were also intended to heighten people’s awareness of their Aryan origins and characteristics. Anti-Semitic propaganda became so omnipresent that in terms of everyday journalism few news items or articles could be published without such a slant.

Quantitatively as well as qualitatively, the national press declined during the Third Reich. When the Nazis came to power there were approximately 4,700 daily newspapers, reflecting a variety of political persuasions. The NSDAP controlled less than 3 per cent of all German dailies and periodicals; in 1944, 82 per cent of the remaining 977 newspapers were firmly under the Party’s control. Between 1933 and 1938 a total of 10,000 periodicals and learned journals had been reduced to 5,000, a decline symbolizing the basic anti-intellectualism of National Socialism in general.

The overriding feature of the press until the outbreak of war at least was the deliberate sacrifice of speedy reportage of news in favor of staggeringly comprehensive, but unwieldy, press directives. In many respects Nazi propagandists favored broadcasting at the expense of the press. Hitler, who was a voracious newspaper reader, is said to have been hostile to the press and to journalists. Not only did he believe that pictures and spoken words had greater impact than printed words, but he also resented the press for its vehement criticism of him during the years when the Nazis were in opposition. Although he rarely received journalists, he would occasionally praise the press for their performance. The most celebrated occasion was on 10 November 1938, when he addressed 400 representatives of the German press in Munich. Complimenting them for their work preceding the Munich Conference, Hitler went on to describe the role of press propaganda both abroad and at home as ‘decisive’ in the acquisition of the Sudetenland by Germany: ‘Gentlemen, this time we have actually obtained 10 million men with over 100,000 square kilometres of territory through propaganda in the service of an idea. This is something momentous.’

Goebbels, on the other hand, who recognized good journalism, was never entirely happy about the drab uniformity of the German press which was the outcome of his policy. He nevertheless defended the press laws by arguing that the free expression of opinion could seriously threaten the National Socialist State, and continued to reject suggestions that problems should be frankly discussed in the press. His directives became so minutely detailed that the papers were virtually written for the editors by the Ministry for Propaganda. The Government straitjacket so destroyed journalistic initiative that Goebbels was prompted to remark in his diary: ‘No decent journalist with any feeling of honor in his bones can stand the way he is handled by the press department of the Reich Government . . . Any man who still has a residue of honor will be very careful not to become a journalist.’

Richard Stanbery

Wow Pedro, that was an excellent post! You are quite an expert conversationalist with this subject. Well Done!

Pedro

aaah shucks.

Gile na Gile

Pedro,

This evidently demands the closest of scrutiny.

I would love to be able to post a sensible remark after lunch.

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