Hitler's Paper Yoke

In 1920 an obscure, brown-shirted band of fanatics who called themselves the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei--Nazis for short--bought their first newspaper. It did not seem much of a buy. The Volkischer Beo-bachter (People's Observer), was a slender Munich biweekly with barely 7,000 subscribers and not a pfennig in the till. Its new publisher, one Adolf Hitler, made it a daily and rang up a blustering new masthead slogan: "Combat Organ of the National Socialist Movement of Germany."

From this tiny seed, sown a full 13 years before Hitler's accession, sprang the most perverted, rapacious and successful propaganda apparatus the world had ever known. By 1936, after just three years in power, the Nazi party owned two-thirds of all German news circulation outright and tightly controlled the rest. Not a line was printed without official approval, not an editor escaped the role of Nazi stooge. How this happened--and, more significantly, how easily it happened--is told in The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton University Press; $6.50), by Oron J. Hale, 61, chairman of the history department of the University of Virginia and an acknowledged authority on the Hitler years.

Pure Publishers. Hale's book suggests that the German press was overripe for a predator like Hitler. There were far too many papers, and far too few good ones. Mostly they were what the Germans called "Kase blatter"--cheese wrappers. Harsh laws were passed as early as 1922 to discipline the more scurrilous members of the political press. They were not harshly enforced --but their potential was not lost on the country's budding Fuhrer.

Hitler's press boss was Max Amann, a stupid, brawling dwarf bullock who had been Corporal Hitler's wartime company sergeant. Amann had assembled a press empire of 59 dailies even before the party took power. For the sake of Nazi recognition, scores of nonparty papers agreed to print Nazi propaganda free and to take no ads from Jews. By way of disaster insurance, dozens of German advertisers cynically bought space in official Nazi organs. The German people were partly to blame, for they did not support the few honest papers that warned what Hitler was up to. After daring to call the Nazi election victories of 1932 a TRIUMPH OF FOLLY, the Hannoverscher Kurier lost one-fifth of its circulation in a fortnight.

Once Hitler became Chancellor, Presseleiter Amann peeled off his gloves. In 1933, the entire Social Democratic and Communist press, totaling some 150 papers hostile to Hitler, vanished without trace. That same year, the party passed a law decreeing that editors must "regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life." The Amann ordinances, passed two years later, required publishers to trace their own and their wives' racial "purity" back through four generations. Amann outlawed publications that appealed to "confessional groups"--an assault on Germany's Catholic press.

Dupe Sheets. Though Amann's measures caused nearly 1,500 newspaper casualties, the German press went docilely to its fate.

Surviving papers, Nazi or otherwise, lined up so meekly that Hitler himself complained: "It is no great pleasure to read 15 newspapers all having nearly the same textual content." Turning out such dupe sheets could have been no great pleasure either. Twice daily the Ministry of Propaganda sent every paper the Tagesparole, the word for the day, specifying content down to the headlines and the required epithets for Roosevelt ("gangster," "criminal," "madman"). Every level of government sent handouts accompanied by demands that they appear on Page One.

Propaganda proved hugely profitable. In 1942, Eher Verlag, the party's tax-free publishing combine, poured $68 million into the Nazi war chest. But as the war worsened for Germany, the Nazis' captive papers shrank in number from 2,500 to 500, in size to a single page. Hitler's first paper was also his last. On April 17, 1945, Volkischer Beobachter published Der Fuhrer's last military order of the day: to stand fast against the Russian march on Berlin. Then it, too, went under.

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