A century ago, Hitler declared war on the ‘lying press’ and targeted a feisty little newspaper — sound familiar?
In the 1920s and ’30s, Germans failed to heed the warnings of the Münchener Post
Nazi youth collect “un-German” books from the back of a truck, 1933. Photo by Getty Images
For about a dozen years, the pages of the Münchener Post newspaper were splashed with headlines warning that Adolf Hitler was an existential threat to Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic, and calling on the citizenry to stand up against his ambitions for absolute power.
The Post acquired leaked documents from the Nazis’ Munich headquarters, dirt on Adolf Hitler from disgruntled followers, and whatever else they could get their hands on in their dauntless pursuit of der Führer, which lasted from the early 1920s until the Nazi leader brutally shut down the paper after he came to power in 1933.
This epic clash between a despotic madman and a feisty little newspaper run by socialists began playing itself out a century ago. But Hitler’s battles with the Münchener Post are relevant to our own perilous times. The newspaper’s fearlessness is a symbol of how a free press can challenge authoritarianism.
At rallies before his adoring followers, Donald Trump often points at non-MAGA journalists at the event and taunts them with his favorite epithet: “the fake news.”
Like Trump, Hitler had his own pet insults for journalists who exposed his lies. The “lying press” was one of them, which, incidentally, Trump has also used against journalists.
But Hitler had an especially visceral hatred for the Münchener Post, and had specially chosen names for the paper. The “Poison Kitchen” was one of them. Another was the “Munich Pestilence.”
No other newspaper in the Weimar Republic got under Hitler’s skin the way the Münchener Post did, partly because the Post and the Nazi Party both inhabited Munich. But there was much more to it than that. Unlike other German newspapers, the journalists at the Münchener Post never took their eyes off Hitler. And it got personal.
After Hitler’s half-niece Geli Raubal was found dead of a gunshot wound in Hitler’s luxury Munich apartment in September 1931, the Post quoted what it called “informed sources” as suggesting something very sinister had occurred. Hitler and 23-year-old Geli argued constantly over her intention to move out of her uncle’s apartment and get engaged to a man in Vienna, the Post reported. The Post said what provoked Geli to shoot herself was not known, but the newspaper insinuated a cover-up by Nazi officials. The “mysterious affair,” as the Post called it, triggered an avalanche of speculation. Much of it was salacious, suggesting, for example, that Hitler had had an illicit relationship with his half-niece and she was desperate to end it. There were even rumors that Hitler may have murdered her.
Hitler exacted retribution against his real and perceived enemies. Assassinations and beatings were among the methods. Two of the Post’s top editors were assaulted by Nazi thugs in the early 1930s.
Hitler, like Trump, also used the courts to intimidate those who dared to stand against him.
The Post’s editors and Max Hirschberg, their lawyer, were regular fixtures in Munich courts, as were Hitler’s lawsuit-filing attorneys. The Post was constantly raising questions about how Hitler was able to afford his luxurious Munich lifestyle, and in 1929 suggested that Hitler was taking bribes from Mussolini for not laying claim to Italy’s South Tyrol region. Hitler was in the courtroom for that trial. During testimony the leader of the Nazi Party doodled drawings of men in medieval armor. When he spoke to the court, he called the Post’s allegations “a dirty slur.” The Post lost the case and was ordered to pay a fine. This was not unusual in a judicial system increasingly sympathetic to the Nazis.
In 1932 the Post obtained a hit list of people who were to be assassinated if Hitler came to power. The newspaper printed the list on its front page, and the Nazis filed a libel lawsuit. During the trial, Hirschberg presented rigorous documentation showing that Hitler and his henchmen had organized political murders and that the Nazi leader was hell-bent on overthrowing democracy. It didn’t matter. The judge sided with Nazi leaders who said the hit list was a fake.
Later that year the Post lost another libel lawsuit, this one brought by two top Nazi officials — Paul Schulz and Franz Xaver Schwarz. The case concerned a Post article, one based on information leaked by malcontents inside Nazi headquarters, about a secret cell to assassinate SA chief Ernst Röhm and several fellow homosexual SA comrades. The judge ruled in favor of Schulz and Schwarz, saying there was insufficient evidence they were conspirators in the murder scheme.
Among the hundreds of anti-Hitler articles published by the Post through the years was a 1931 piece with the headline “Jews In The Third Reich,” which described “guidelines” drafted by Nazy party leaders that would strip Jews of their rights as German citizens if Hitler came to power. As a “final solution” of how to deal with German Jews, the Post said, “it is proposed to use Jews in Germany for labor and reclaiming German moorlands … with the SS watching over them.” Death camps were not mentioned in the secret plan. Nonetheless, the “guidelines” published by the Post offer a chilling preview of what was to come.
After coming to power, Hitler acted quickly to kill the free press. He raided and violently shut down more than 200 newspapers owned by the Social Democrats and by the Communist Party, seizing the presses and anything of value, sending journalists to concentration camps or into poverty by turning them into pariahs, and installing Nazi lackeys to run the remaining newspapers.
Donald Trump is using a panoply of means to try to silence his critics in the press: filing defamation lawsuits against ABC News, CBS News, and The Des Moines Register, and threatening others, seeking to cut funding for PBS and NPR, advocating the dismantling of long-standing protections for journalists from libel lawsuits, and giving preferential treatment to sycophantic outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, One America News, Breitbart News, Real America’s Voice and The Gateway Pundit, as well as MAGA podcasters strewn across the nation.
So why didn’t Germans heed the warnings of the Münchener Post?
Even though it repeatedly broke real news about Hitler, the Post was not considered a mainstream newspaper. Owned and operated by the Social Democratic Party, the Post was often dismissed as a socialist mouthpiece. But other forces were also at play. As political instability, economic chaos, and street violence rocked the Weimar Republic, Germans chose to hand their destiny over to a despot.
One of the editors of the Münchener Post, Julius Zerfass, spent six months inside the Dachau concentration camp. A year after the demise of the Third Reich, Zerfass wrote in an essay that Germans had allowed themselves to be seduced by Hitler because, until the Weimar Republic, they had no experience with democracy. “The lamb chose the wolf to be its herdsman,” Zerfass wrote.
Unlike the Weimar Republic, American democracy has endured for nearly a quarter of a millennium and remains one of the most prosperous nations in world history. If we allow our precious freedoms to erode or to be chipped away, historians will not be saying it’s because we lack experience in democracy.
