Historian: AP Cooperated With Nazi Regime

Today’s Top Stories

1. A controversial BBC documentary, Children of the Gaza War, was nominated for a BAFTA Award (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts).

The video, in which reporter Lyse Doucet spent time with Gaza youngsters, left me with a loss for words because Israel’s existence was lost in BBC translation. Whenever Palestinian kids used the word Arabic word, Yahud (which means Jew), the translators translated it as Israeli.

Also nominated in the current affairs category were Jihad: A British Story (by ITV), Escape from Isis (by Channel 4), and Outbreak: The Truth About Ebola (by BBC2).

2. A German historian uncovered how the Associated Press formally cooperated with Hitler’s Nazi regime during World War II. The Guardian was the first to pick up on a German academic study by historian Harriet Scharnberg. Among her explosive findings:

a. While other Western news outlets couldn’t report from Germany, “AP was only able retain its access by entering into a mutually beneficial two-way cooperation with the Nazi regime.”

b. AP “ceded control of its output by signing up to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home”. This law required AP “to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division.

c. AP supplied American newspapers with material “directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry.”

d. The Nazis were allowed to use AP’s photo archives to produce anti-Semitic propaganda.

The Guardian writes:

Coming just before Associated Press’s 170th anniversary in May, the newly discovered information raises not just difficult questions about the role AP played in allowing Nazi Germany to conceal its true face during Hitler’s first years in power, but also about the agency’s relationship with contemporary totalitarian regimes.

 

While the AP deal enabled the west to peek into a repressive society that may otherwise have been entirely hidden from view – for which Berlin correspondent Louis P Lochner won a Pulitzer in 1939 – the arrangement also enabled the Nazis to cover up some of its crimes. Scharnberg, a historian at Halle’s Martin Luther University, argued that AP’s cooperation with the Hitler regime allowed the Nazis to “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war”. . .

 

The new findings may only have been of interest to company historians, were it not for the fact that AP’s relationship with totalitarian regimes has once again come under scrutiny. Since January 2012, when AP became the first western news agency to open a bureau in North Korea, questions have repeatedly been raised about the neutrality of its Pyongyang bureau’s output.

The phenomenon of compromising for the sake of access isn’t restricted to AP. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, CNN executive Eason Jordan penned an eye-opening mea culpa, The News We Kept to Ourselves.

UPDATE

The AP has issued a statement in response to the story claiming that it focuses on a subsidiary photo agency of the AP that operated in Berlin before and during World War II:

AP rejects the suggestion that it collaborated with the Nazi regime at any time. Rather, the AP was subjected to pressure from the Nazi regime from the period of Hitler’s coming to power in 1932 until the AP’s expulsion from Germany in 1941. AP staff resisted the pressure while doing its best to gather accurate, vital and objective news for the world in a dark and dangerous time.

 

AP news reporting in the 1930s helped to warn the world of the Nazi menace. AP’s Berlin bureau chief, Louis P. Lochner, won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Berlin about the Nazi regime. Earlier, Lochner also resisted anti-Semitic pressure to fire AP’s Jewish employees and when that failed he arranged for them to become employed by AP outside of Germany, likely saving their lives.

You can read the full statement here.

3. To learn more about the BDS movement, one intrepid Israeli went undercover to a number of Israel “Apartheid” Week events in the UK. Adi Cohen describes in great detail what she found in YNet.

The BDS movement hides behind slogans of values and justice, but its wheels are greased with extremism, encouraging a violent struggle. And, silently and quietly, even anti-Semitism. If this is the kind of discourse the BDS movement is trying to preserve on university campuses, I thought to myself while I was exiting the building into a rainy London Saturday, then – in the name of my free speech – I’ll stand up and say: We cannot let this go on.

Since it’s Israel “Apartheid” Week in the US, it’s worth re-upping our video, Is Israel an Apartheid State?

Israel and the Palestinians

• A survey picked up by The Media Line found that most Israelis feel that the current Palestinian intifada is more serious than the second intifada.

• Palestinian made up account of Jewish arson attack, police say

• Nice look at the Gaza terror tunnel threat to Israel by The Guardian‘s Harriet Sherwood.

• UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s backing down from a dispute with Morocco over his use of the word “occupation.” Can you imagine the uproar if Israel did this?

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon regrets a “misunderstanding” over his use of the word “occupation” to describe Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara, which led to Morocco expelling dozens of United Nations staff, his spokesman said on Monday.

Related reading: Why is this occupation different from all other occupations?

• Israeli and Indian defense companies signed a joint venture agreement to cooperate in the production, development and supply of $10 billion worth of air defense systems, air-to-air missiles and surveillance balloons.

• After Twitter shut down the account of Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the terror group blamed “pressure by Zionist groups.”

At the time of its closing, according to the account’s manager, the account had over 140,000 followers and reached 5 million tweet impressions in recent months.

• Bibi to meet Putin in Moscow on April 21.

• There’s an uneasy calm in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp after two Palestinians from rival factions were killed. Shops and schools in the refugee camp, located near the Lebanese city of Sidon, remain closed. More at the Daily Star (click via Google News).

Commentary/Analysis

• Columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe weighs in on presidential candidates promising to relocate the US embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Israel’s enemies don’t object to siting foreign embassies in Jerusalem because it would undermine diplomatic negotiations. They object because they deny Israel’s claim to any part of Jerusalem, even parts that have always been sovereign Israeli territory. They deny, in other words, that Israel’s very existence is a settled issue. Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem would send one message, simple but significant: Americans do not regard the survival of the Jewish state as negotiable.

• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .

– Roseanne Barr: BDS’s fascist narrative
– Sima Goel: BDS: Helping Palestinians or promoting hate?
– Dror Halevy: Israel is a blind spot for Western liberals
– Aviva Klompas: The UN’s march of folly
– Solon Solomon: Israel must write its own national security PhD
– Douglas Murray: “Excuses” for terrorists
– Smadar Perry: Why hasn’t ISIS attacked Israel?

Featured image: CC BY Jon S with additions by HonestReporting; India CC BY-NC-ND Elliott Scott; US flag CC BY-SA PS-OV-ART Patty Sue O’Hair-Vicknair;

For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.

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