Foreign Journalists in Nazi Germany Battled to Expose the Truth - Hitler, Loss of Democracy
Last edited Tue Mar 7, 2023, 09:29 PM - Edit history (2)
- 'Reporting on Hitler: how foreign correspondents in Nazi Germany battled to expose the truth,' History Extra, BBC, May 3, 2019. Ed.
The foreign press corps in Nazi Germany witnessed the brutal reality of Hitler's regime in the 1930s. But getting the truth out was far from easy, with hostile authorities threatening expulsion or worse, & proprietors at home reluctant to hear of Nazi excesses. In his book, Reporting on Hitler, Will Wainewright sheds light on the British press who covered the Nazis during the Second World War…The Taverne was an Italian restaurant in the heart of Nazi Berlin, owned by an amiable fat German and his slim Belgian wife. But it served as more than an eatery in the years of the Third Reich, doubling as a refuge where correspondents working for the international media would meet night after night to share stories and ensure each other’s safety.
Life became dangerous for foreign correspondents working in Germany as soon as Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. The Nazi regime made it clear that critical reports would not be tolerated, with propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels leading efforts to influence and pressurise the foreign press. The sources reporters had relied on for information started to fear for their lives. “I beg you not to let anybody know that you heard this from me, or it might get around and I should be arrested,” Rothay Reynolds, the Daily Mail’s bureau chief in Berlin, heard from one source soon after Hitler took power. Hermann Göring, another of Hitler’s chief associates, invited foreign newspaper journalists based in Berlin to meet him early in 1933. Vernon Bartlett, one of the British journalists in attendance, recalled how Göring began an attack against the foreign press unlike any he had previously witnessed.
Göring informed those present that he knew “not only what they sent in their telegrams and telephone messages, but also what they wrote in their private letters”.
It was not just the Nazis who made life difficult for these correspondents. Several British newspapers had owners or editors sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s. Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere believed the spread of Communism was a greater threat to Britain than the Nazis and felt passionately that a strong Germany under Hitler was necessary to form a “bulwark against Bolshevism”. “Herr Hitler has won his majority cleverly,” the Daily Mail wrote in an editorial welcoming the result of the March 1933 election in Germany. - “If he uses it prudently and peacefully, no one here will shed any tears over the disappearance of German democracy.” Lord Rothermere’s beliefs put Rothay Reynolds in an exquisitely difficult position.
Based on the ground in Germany, he saw how quickly life was changing for the worse.
“In less than a month Germans had lost freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly,” he later recalled.
My research into Reynolds began as a family history project — he was a distant relation and worked, as I do, in journalism. It resulted in a book, Reporting on Hitler, which tells his story and sheds new light on the experiences of British journalists in Hitler’s Germany. A conflict in perspectives. While Lord Rothermere’s infamous “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” comment piece in Jan. 1934 celebrated the rise of fascists across Europe, Reynolds could see what Nazism meant for Germany: gangs of storm troopers ran wild, while Jews and many minority groups were oppressed. The lauded economic growth under the Nazis, which Lord Rothermere and other supporters celebrated, was built on sand. The conflict in perspectives soon had consequences for Reynolds’s reporting. In April 1933 he filed a piece on the boycott of Jewish goods and services in Germany..
(Photo). Sir Oswald Mosley, English Fascist leader, receives a fascist salute from his followers in 1936. The movement proved "a violent embarrassment" says Will Wainewright. ...
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https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/reporting-on-hitler-how-foreign-correspondents-in-nazi-germany-battled-to-expose-the-truth/
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