dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
CAPT. SPRECHER: These instructions were transmitted daily, almost without exception and mostly by telephone from headquarters by Dr. Otto Dietrich, Reich Press Chief, in a set text, the so-called 'Daily Parole of the Reich Press Chief! Before the formulation of this text the head of the German Press Division submitted to him, Dietrich, the foremost press wishes expressed by Dr. Goebbels and by other ministries. This was the case especially with the wishes of the Foreign Office about which Dr. Dietrich always wanted to make decisions personally or through his representatives at headquarters, Helmut Sundermann and chief editor Lorenz. "The actual interpretation of the direction in detail was thus left entirely to the individual work of the various editors. Therefore, it is by no means true that the newspapers and periodicals were a monopoly of the German Press Division or that essays and leading articles had to be submitted by them to the Ministry. Even in war times this happened in exceptional cases only. The less important newspapers and periodicals which were not represented at the daily press conferences received their information in a different way-by providing them either with ready-made articles and reports, or by confidential printed instruction. The publications of all other official agencies were directed and coordinated likewise by the German Press Division. "To enable the periodicals to get acquainted with the daily political problems of newspapers and to discuss these problems in greater detail, the Informationskorreipondenz was issued especially for periodicals. Later on it was taken over by the Periodical Press Division. The German Press Division likewise was in charge of pictorial reporting insofar as it directed the employment of pictorial reporters at important events. "In this way, and conditioned upon the prevailing political situation, the entire German press was, by the German Press Division, made a permanent instrument of the Propaganda Ministry. Thereby, the entire German Press was subordinate to the political aims of the government.
CAPT. SPRECHER: This was exemplified by the timely limitation and the emphatic presentation of such press polemics as appeared to be most useful, as shown for instance in the following themes: The class struggle of the system era; the Leadership Principle and the authoritarian state; the party and interest politics of the system era; the Jewish problem; the conspiracy of world-Jewry; the Bolshevistic danger; the plutocratic democracy abroad; the race problem generally; the church; the economic misery abroad; the foreign policy; the living space (Lebensraum)." This description of Fritzsche establishes clearly and in his own words that the German Press Division was the instrument for subordinating the entire German press to the political aims of the government. We now pass to Fritzsche's first activities on behalf of the conspirators within the German Press Division. It is appropriate to read again from his affidavit, Paragraph 17, your document book Page 23. Fritzsche begins by describing a conference with Goebbels in late April or early May 1933: "At this time Dr. Goebbels suggested to me, in my capacity as the expert on news technique, the establishment and direction of a section 'News' within the Press Division of his Ministry, in order to thoroughly organize and modernize the German news agencies. In carrying out the task assigned to me by Dr. Goebbels my field covered the entire news service for the German press and the radio in accordance with the directions given by the Propaganda Ministry, excepting at first the DNB"-German News Agency. An obvious reason why the DNB was excepted from Fritzsche's field at this time is that the DNB did not come into existence until the year 1934 as we shall later see. Later on, in Paragraph 17 of the Fritzsche affidavit, the Tribunal will note the tremendous funds put at the disposal of Fritzsche in building up the Nazi news services. Altogether the German news agencies received a 10-fold increase in their budget from the Reich, an increase from 400,000 to 4 million marks.
CAPT. SPRECHER: Fritzsche himself selected and employed the chief editor for the Transocean News -Agency and also for the Europa Press. Fritzsche states that some of the "directions of the Propaganda Ministry which I had to follow were," and then skipping, ". . . increase of German news copy abroad at any cost," and then skipping again, ". . spreading of favorable news on the internal construction and peaceful intentions of the National Socialist system." About the summer of 1934 the Defendant Funk, then Reich Press Chief, achieved the fusion of the two most important domestic news' agencies, the Wolff Telegraph Agency and the Telegraph Union, and thus formed the official German news agency, ordinarily known as DNB. It has already been pointed out to the Tribunal that the Indictment is in error in alleging that Fritzsche himself was Editor-in-Chief of the DNB. Fritzsche held no position whatsoever with the DNB at any time. However, as head of the news section of the German Press Division, Fritzsche's duties gave him official jurisdiction over the DNB, which was the official domestic news agency of the German Reich after 1934. In the last part of Paragraph 17 of this affidavit, Fritzsche states that he co-ordinated the work of the various foreign news agencies "at home and within European and overseas foreign countries with one another and in relationship to DNB." The Wireless News Service was headed by Fritzsche from 1932 to 1937. After January 1933, the Wireless News Service was the official instrument of the Nazi Government in spreading news over the radio. During the same time that Fritzsche headed the Wireless News Service, he personally made radio broadcasts to the German people. These broadcasts were naturally subject to the controls of the Propaganda Ministry and reflected its purposes.
CAPT. SPRECHER: The influence of Fritzsche's broadcasts upon the German people, during this period of consolidation of control by the Nazi conspirators, is all the more important since Fritzsche was concurrently head of the Wireless News Services, which controlled for the government the spreading of all news by radio. It is by now well known to the world that the Nazi conspirators attempted to be, and often were, very adept in psychological warfare. Before each major aggression, with some few exception based on the strategy of expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the G man people psychologically for the impending Nazi madness. Th used the press after their earlier conquests as a means for further influencing foreign politics and in' maneuvering for the next following aggression. By the time of the occupation of the Sudetenland on the 1st o October 1938, Fritzsche had become deputy head of the entire German Press Division. Fritzsche states that the role of German propaganda before the Munich Agreement on the Sudetenland was directed by his immediate chief, Berndt, then head of the German Press Division. In Paragraph 27 of the Fritzsche affidavit, Page 2 of your document book, Fritzsche describes this propaganda which was directed by Berndt. Speaking of Berndt, Fritzsche states: "He exaggerated minor events very strongly, sometimes used old episodes as new-and there even came complaints from the Sudetenland itself that some of the news reported by the German press was untrustworthy. As a matter of fact, after the great foreign political success at Munich in September 1938, there arose a noticeable crisis in the confidence of the German people in the trustworthiness of its press. This was one reason for the recalling of Berndt, in December 1938 after the conclusion of the Sudeten action, and for my appointment as head of the German Press Division.
CAPT. SPRECHER: Beyond this, Berndt, by his admittedly successful but still primitive military-like orders to the German press, had lost the confidence of the German editors." Now, what happened at this time? Fritzsche was made head of the German Press Division in place of Berndt. Between December 1938 and 1942, Fritzsche, as head of the German Press Division, personally gave to the representatives of the principal German newspapers the "daily parole of the Reich Press Chief." During this history-making period he was the principal conspirator directly concerned with the manipulations of the press. The first important foreign aggression after Fritzsche became head of the German Press Division was the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia. In Paragraph 28 of the affidavit, your document book, Page 26, Fritzsche gives his account of the propaganda action surrounding the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia as follows: "The action for the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia, which took place on 15 March 1939, while I was head of the German Press Division, was not prepared for such a long period as the Sudeten action. According to my memory it was in February that I received the order from the Reich Press Chief, Dr. Dietrich, and repeated requests by the envoy Paul Schmidt of the Foreign Office, to draw the attention of the press to the aspirations of Slovakia for independence and to the continued anti-German coalition politics of the Prague Government. I did this. The daily paroles of the Reich Press Chief and the press conference minutes at that time show the wording of the pertinent instructions.
CAPT. SPRECHER: The following were the typical headlines of leading newspapers and the conspicuous leading articles of the German daily press at that time: (1) The terrorizing of Germans within the Czech territory by arrest, shooting at Germans by the state police, destruction and damaging of German homes by Czech mobs; (2) the concentration of Czech forces on the Sudeten frontier; (3) the kidnapping, deportation, and persecution of Slovakian minorities by the Czechs, (4) the Czechs must get out of Slovakia; (5) secret meetings of Red functionaries in Prague. "Some few days before the visit of Hacha, I received the instruction to publish in the press very conspicuously the incoming news on the unrest in Czechoslovakia. Such information I received only partly from the German News Agency DNB but mostly from the Press Division of the Foreign Office and some from big newspapers with their own news services. Among the newspapers offering information was, above all, the Volkischer Beobachter which, as I learned later on, received its information from the SS Standartenfuehrer Gunter D'Alquen, who was at that time at Bratislava. I had forbidden all news agencies and newspapers to issue news on unrest in Czechoslovakia until I had seen it. I wanted to avoid a repetition of the very annoying accompaniments of the Sudeten action propaganda, and I did not want to suffer a loss of prestige caused by untrue news. Thus, all news checked by me was admittedly full of tendency but not invented. Following the visit of Hacha in Berlin and after the beginning of the invasion of the German Army, which took place on 15 March 1939, the German press had enough material for describing these events.
CAPT. SPRECHER: Historically and politically the event was justified with the indication that the declaration of independence of Slovakia had required an interference and that Hacha with his signature had avoided a war And had reinstated a thousand-year-old union between Bohemia and the Reich." The propaganda campaign of the press preceding the invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939-and thus the propaganda action just preceding the precipitation of World War II-bears again the handiwork of Fritzsche and his German Press Division. In Paragraph 30 of Fritzsche's affidavit, document book Page 27, Fritzsche speaks of the conspirators' treatment of this episode as follows: "Very complicated and varying was the press and propagandistic treatment in the case of Poland. Under the influence of the German-Polish Agreement, the German press was for many years forbidden, on principle, to publish anything on the situation of the German minority in Poland. This was still the case when in the spring of 1939 the German press was asked to become somewhat more active as to the problem of Danzig. Also when the first Polish-English conversations took place and the German press was advised to use a sharper tone against Poland, the question of the German minority still remained in the background. At first during the summer this problem was picked up again and created immediately a noticeable sharpening of the situation. Each larger German newspaper had for some time quite an abundance of material on complaints and grievances of the Germans in Poland without the editors having had a chance to use this material. The German papers, from the time of the minority discussions at Geneva, still had correspondents or free collaborators in Katowice, Bydgoszcz, Posen, Torun, et cetera. Their material now came forth with a bound.
CAPT. SPRECHER: Concerning this, the leading German newspapers brought out in accordance with directions given for the so- called daily paroles the following articles, in conspicuous setting: (1) Cruelty and terror against racial Germans and the extermination of racial Germans in Poland; (2) Construction of field works by thousands of racial German men and women in Poland; (3) Poland, land of servitude and disorder; the desertion of Polish soldiers; the increased inflation in Poland; (4) provocation of frontier clashes upon direction of the Polish Government; the Polish aspirations for conquest; (5) persecution of Czechs and Ukrainians by Poland. The Polish press retorted hotly." The press campaign preceding the invasion of Yugoslavia fol lowed the conventional pattern. You will find the customary defamations, the lies, the incitement and the threats, and the usual attempt to divide and to weaken the victim. Paragraph 32 of the Fritzsche affidavit, your document book Page 28, outlines this propaganda action as follows: "During the period immediately preceding the invasion of Yugoslavia, on the 6th of April 1941, the German press emphasized by headlines and leading articles the following boldly made up announcements: (1) The systematic persecution of racial Germans in Yugoslavia including the burning down of German villages by Serbian soldiers and the confining of racial Germans in concentration camps, as well as the physical mishandling of German-speaking persons; (2) the arming of Serbian bandits by the Serbian Government; (3) the indictment of Yugoslavia by the plutocrats against Germany; (4) growing anti-Serbian feeling in Croatia; (5) the chaotic situation of the economic and social conditions in Yugoslavia." .Since Germany had a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and because these conspirators wanted the advantage of surprise, there was no special propaganda campaign immediately preceding the attack on the U.S.S.R.
CAPT. SPRECHER: Fritzsche in Paragraph 33 of his affidavit discussed the propaganda line, however, for the justification of this aggressive war to the German people: "During the night from the 21st to the 22d of June 1941, Ribbentrop called me in at about 5 o'clock in the morning for a conference in the Foreign Office at which representatives of the domestic and foreign press were present. Ribbentrop informed us that the war against the Soviet Union would start that same day and asked the German press to present the war against the Soviet Union as a preventive war for the defense of the fatherland, a war which was forced upon us by the imminent danger of an attack of the Soviet Union against Germany. The claim that this was a preventive war was later repeated by the newspapers which received their instructions from me during the usual daily parole of the Reich Press Chief. I myself have also given this presentation of the cause of the war in my regular broadcasts." Fritzsche, throughout his affidavit, constantly refers to his technical and expert assistance to the colossal apparatus of the Propaganda Ministry. In 1939 he apparently became dissatisfied with the efficiency of the existing facilitie s of the German Press Division in furnishing grist for the propaganda mill and for its intrigues.. He established a new instrument for improving the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda. In Paragraph 19 of his affidavit, Page 24 of your document book, Fritzsche describes this new propaganda instrument as follows: "About the summer of 1939 1 established within the German Press Division a section called 'Speed Service! And then skipping and quoting again: ". . . at the start it had the task of checking the correctness of news from foreign countries.
CAPT. SPRECHER: Later on, about the fall of 1939, this section also worked on the compilation of material which was put at the disposal of the entire German press: For instance, dates from the British Colonial policy, political statements of the British Prime Minister in former times, descriptions of social distress in hostile countries, et cetera. Almost all German newspapers used such material as a basis for their polemics, whereby close concentration in the fighting front of the German press was gained. The title 'Speed Service' was chosen because materials for current comments were supplied with particular speed." Throughout this entire period preceding and including the launching of aggressive war, Fritzsche made regular radio broadcasts to the German people under the following titles: "Political Newspaper Review," "Political and Radio Show," and later "Hans Fritzsche Speaks." His broadcasts naturally reflected the polemics and the control of his Ministry and thus of the Common Plan or Conspiracy. We of the Prosecution contend that Fritzsche, one of the most eminent of Goebbels' propaganda team, helped substantially to bathe the world in the blood bath of aggressive war. With the Tribunal's consent I will now pass to proof bearing on Fritzsche's incitement of atrocities and his encouragement of a ruthless occupation policy. The results of propaganda as a weapon of the Nazi conspirators reach into every aspect of this conspiracy, including the abnormal and inhuman conduct involved in the atrocities and the ruthless exploitation of occupied countries. Most of the ordinary members of the German nation would never have participated in or tolerated the atrocities committed throughout Europe if they had not been conditioned and goaded to barbarous convictions and misconceptions by the constant grinding of the Nazi propaganda machine.
CAPT. SPRECHER: Indeed, the propagandists who lent them selves to this evil mission of instigation and incitement are more guilty than the credulous and callous minions who headed the firing squads or operated the gas chambers, of which we have heard so much in this proceeding. For the very credulity and callousness of those minions was in large part due to the constant and evil propaganda of Fritzsche and his official associates. With respect to Jews, the Department of Propaganda within the Propaganda Ministry had a special branch for the "Enlightenment of the German people and of the world as to the Jewish question, fighting with propagandistic weapons against enemies of the State and hostile ideologies." This quotation is taken from a book written in 1940 by Ministerial Director Mueller, entitled The Propaganda Ministry. It is found in Document Number 2434(a)-PS, your document book Page 10, offered in evidence as Exhibit USA-722. It is another excerpt from Ministerial Director Mueller's book and I merely ask that you take judicial notice of it for that one sentence that I have read. Fritzsche took a particularly active part in this "enlightenment" concerning the Jewish question in his radio broadcasts. These broadcasts literally teemed with provocative libels against Jews, the only logical result of which was to inflame Germany to further atrocities against the helpless Jews who came within its physical power. Document Number 3064-PS contains a number of complete broadcasts by Fritzsche which were monitored by the British Broadcasting Corporation and translated by BBC officials. For the convenience of the Tribunal, I have had those excerpts upon which the Prosecution relies to show illustrative types of Fritzsche's broadcasts mimeographed and made into one document, which I offer in evidence as Exhibit USA-723. Even the Defendant Streicher, the master Jew-baiter of all time, could scarcely outdo Fritzsche in some of his slanders against the Jews.
CAPT. SPRECHER: All the excerpts in Document Number 3064-PS are from speeches by Fritzsche given on the radio between 1941 and 1945, which we have already proven was a period of intensified anti-Jewish measures. With the permission of the Tribunal, I would like to read some of these excerpts. Page 14 of our document book, Item 1, from a broadcast of 18 December 1941-it is found on Page 2122 of the translations from BBC: "The fate of Jewry in Europe has turned out to be as unpleasant as the Fuehrer predicted it would be in the event of a European war. After the extension of the war instigated by Jews, this fate may also spread to the New World, for it can hardly be assumed that the nations of this New World will pardon the Jews for the misery of which the nations of the Old World did not absolve them." From a radio broadcast of 18 Mardi 1941, found at Page 2032 of the BBC translations: "But the crown of all wrongly-applied Rooseveltian logic is the sentence: 'There never was a race and there never will be a race which can serve the rest of mankind as a master.' Here, too, we can only applaud Mr. Roosevelt. It is precisely because there exists no race which can be the master of the rest of mankind, that we Germans have taken the liberty to break the domination of Jewry and of its capital in Germany, of Jewry which believed it had inherited the crown of secret world domination." In passing, I would merely like to note that it seems to us that that is not only applause for past acts concerning persecution of Jews but an announcement that more is coming and an encouragement of what was coming. I would like to read another excerpt from the 9th of October 1941 broadcast, translated at Page 2101 of the BBC translation: "We know very well that these German victories, unparalleled in history, have not yet stopped the source of hatred which for a long time has fed the warmongers and from which this war originated. The international Jewish-Democratic-Bolshevistic campaign of incitement against Germany still finds cover in this or that fox's lair or rat hole.