The Associated Press cooperated with Hitler\’s Nazi regime, historian claims

 

According to the report, AP provided US newspapers with news items produced and culled by the Nazi propaganda ministry.

 

AP was the only western news agency allowed to operate in Germany during Adolf Hitler\’s era. The agency continued its operations in Germany until the US entered World War II in 1941.

 

 

Harriet Scharnberg,  a historian at Halle’s Martin-Luther-University, explained in an article published in the academic journal Studies in Contemporary History, that AP was allowed to continue operating in Germany while other agencies were shut down because it agreed to cooperate with the Nazi regime.

 

The American agency agreed to  abide by the "Editor\’s Law," refraining from publishing news items “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home,” according to Scharnberg. It also hired reporters who worked for the Nazi propaganda division in order to adhere to the law.

 

The paper also claims that AP allowed the Nazis to use its photo archives in producing its anti-Semitic propaganda materials.

 

Scharnberg claims that, through its cooperation, the Associated Press enabled the Nazis to “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war.”

 

She describes as evidence the Nazi invasion of Lviv, Ukraine, in which German forces carried out revenge pogroms against Jews in order to avenge mass killings of soldiers by Soviet forces. AP distributed to the American press pictures, selected at Hitler\’s request, solely showing the Soviet troops\’ victims.

 

“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”, said the historian. “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.”

 

In response, AP rejected the claims that it had deliberately collaborated with the Nazis, but said it was reviewing the documents.

 

"An accurate characterization is that the AP and other foreign news organizations 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,” the agency told the Guardian.