The Associated Press news agency entered a formal cooperation with the Hitler regime in the 1930s, supplying American newspapers with material directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry, archive material unearthed by a German historian has revealed.
When the Nazi party seized power in Germany in 1933, one of its first objectives was to bring into line not just the national press, but international media too. The Guardian was banned within a year, and by 1935 even bigger British-American agencies such as Keystone and Wide World Photos were forced to close their bureaus after coming under attack for employing Jewish journalists.
Associated Press, which has described itself as the “marine corps of journalism” (“always the first in and the last out”) was the only western news agency able to stay open in Hitler’s Germany, continuing to operate until the U.S. entered war in 1941. It thus found itself in the presumably profitable situation of being the prime channel for news reports and pictures out of the Reich.
In an article published in Studies in Contemporary History , historian Harriet Scharnberg shows that AP was only able retain its access by entering into a mutually beneficial two-way cooperation with the Nazis.
The agency ceded control of its output by signing up to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.” This law required AP to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. One of the four photographers it employed in the 1930s, Franz Roth, was a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division, whose photographs were personally chosen by Hitler. AP has removed Mr. Roth’s pictures from its website since Ms. Scharnberg published her findings.
AP also allowed the Nazi regime to use its photo archives for its virulently anti-semitic propaganda literature. Publications illustrated with AP photographs include the bestselling SS brochure Der Untermensch (The Sub-Human) and the booklet The Jews in the USA , which aimed to demonstrate the decadence of Jewish Americans with a picture of New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia eating from a buffet with his hands.
When approached, AP said that Ms. Scharnberg’s report “describes both individuals and their activities before and during the war that were unknown to AP,” and that it is currently reviewing documents in and beyond its archives to “further our understanding of the period.” —© Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2016
