Examines American journalists' and media companies' roles in Hitler's Germany, reigniting the debate on the relationship between political power and the media.
Despite Hitler's international use of propaganda, and despite the power of the US press, historians have neglected American journalists' activity in Nazi Germany. American media companies expanded their presence in Germany after 1933, and the Associated Press (AP) conducted business with Hitler's regime throughout the war.
Norman Domeier's study, now in English, is the first to examine critically and in detail the roles of American journalists and media companies in Hitler's Germany, showing that they knew about but kept secret the plans for rearmament, the occupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, and the invasions of Denmark, Norway, and the Soviet Union. The book documents the "companionship" between Adolf Hitler and Karl Henry von Wiegand, chief German correspondent of the Hearst press, who was the first and last American to interview him. Most important, it details the secret exchange of news photographs - discovered by Domeier in 2017 - between the AP and the Nazis from 1942 to 1945. Thousands of AP photos were used in the Nazi press, usually with anti-American or anti-Semitic spin, while the AP distributed ca. 40,000 Nazi photographs to US newspapers. Domeier's book reignites the debate on the relationship between political power and the media, opening up new perspectives on the political and cultural history of journalism beyond one-sided idealizations.