Report Shows Associated Press Cooperated With Nazis; AP: We Were Under “Intense Pressure”

March 31, 2016

2 min read

As the prophet Amos points out, it is not by chance that two entities work together. A new report demonstrates that the Associated Press was able to obtain its photo access in Germany from 1932 to 1941 by cooperating with the Nazi regime. The Guardian first reported on the research conducted by German historian Harriet Scharnberg.

When other major news agencies were booted out of Germany under Hitler, AP became an important source of information on the totalitarian regime. Now coming to light, however, is the devil’s pact the news agency was required to make to secure its position.

The Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), to which AP acquiesced, forbade the news agency from publishing anything “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home”. It also required them to hire reporters who worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. According to Scharnberg’s article, which was published in German in the academic journal Studies in Contemporary History, one of the four photographers employed by AP in Germany at the time was Franz Roth, a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division, whose photographs were personally chosen by Hitler.

The compact was mutually beneficial. AP allowed the Nazis to use its photographs, with several appearing in virulently anti-Semitic propaganda literature, such as “Der Untermensch (The Subhuman)” and “Die Juden in USA (The Jews in the USA)”.

While AP’s presence in Germany allowed the West to get a glimpse into events transpiring there, Scharnberg, of Halle’s Martin Luther University, contends it also enabled the Nazi’s to whitewash or conceal their worst atrocities. Thus, she argues, the Nazis were able to “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war”.

For example, in June of 1941, upon invading the Ukrainian town of Lviv, the Nazis carried out pogroms against the local Jewish population in “revenge” for Soviet killings.

“Instead of printing pictures of the days-long Lviv pogroms with its thousands of Jewish victims, the American press was only supplied with photographs showing the victims of the Soviet police and ‘brute’ Red Army war criminals,” Scharnberg told the Guardian.

“To that extent it is fair to say that these pictures played their part in disguising the true character of the war led by the Germans,” she continued. “Which events were made visible and which remained invisible in AP’s supply of pictures followed German interests and the German narrative of the war.”

AP responded to Scharnberg’s findings by removing Roth’s photographs from its website. It is conducting its own investigation into the allegations, saying her report “describes both individuals and their activities before and during the war that were unknown to AP”. This includes reviewing both the agency’s own archives and beyond to “further our understanding of the period”.

An AP spokesperson told the Guardian, “As we continue to research this matter, AP rejects any notion that it deliberately ‘collaborated’ with the Nazi regime. An accurate characterisation is that the AP and other foreign news organisations were subjected to intense pressure from the Nazi regime from the year of Hitler’s coming to power in 1932 until the AP’s expulsion from Germany in 1941. AP management resisted the pressure while working to gather accurate, vital and objective news in a dark and dangerous time.”

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