(Times of Israel) J.P. O'Malley - In January 1934, Lord Harold Rothermere, the owner of Britain's Daily Mail, filed a story from Munich praising Adolf Hitler, at a time when Jews were being ousted from public life in Germany and the Nazi party had already established a large network of concentration camps across the country. Rothermere assured his readers that these stories were wildly exaggerated. The Nazis needed to control the "alien elements and Israelites of international attachments who were insinuating themselves into the German state," as Rothermere wrote in July 1934. Historian Kathryn S. Olmsted's new book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, profiles Rothermere and five other powerful media moguls in the Anglophile world who took a pro-Nazi editorial line. Also possessing Nazi sympathies were Lord Max Beaverbrook, owner of Britain's Daily Express, Sunday Express, and Evening Standard; Robert McCormick, who owned the Chicago Tribune; William Randolph Hearst, who owned more than two dozen newspapers; and Joseph and Cissy Patterson, who ran the New York Daily News and the Washington-Times Herald. The newspapers owned by these six reached 65 million readers in Britain and the U.S. William Randolph Hearst paid Hitler and other top Nazis an average of $1,500 per article - $20,000 in today's money. Olmsted's book is the first to document how British and American press lords worked together to delay and undermine the Anglo-American alliance against Hitler.
2022-08-18 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive