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12/6/2018 Silas Palmer Fellow Researches A Forgotten Foreign Correspondent And Journalistic Ethics In The Third Reich | Hoover

Reich | Hoover Institution

Silas Palmer Fellow Researches A Forgotten Foreign Correspondent And


Journalistic Ethics In The Third Reich
Tuesday, November 6, 2018

By Benjamin Goldstein
Journalists write the first draft of history, so the saying goes. Even beyond their newspaper articles and
reports, the shelves of journalism history at modern university libraries are dotted with the grandiosely
titled memoirs of journalists of the 20th century. Sometimes these journalists even write the second draft
of history; William Shirer, a foreign correspondent for Hearst Newspapers and CBS, made his name with
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Yet those journalists who failed to write their memoirs or books, end up
relegated as authors of the first drafts and as mere footnotes in the subsequent drafts of history.

Karl H. von Wiegand (1874-1961), the globe-trotting chief foreign correspondent of Hearst Newspapers
from the late 1910s to 1961, whose unfinished and unpublished memoirs lie with the rest of his personal
papers kept in the Hoover Institution Archives, exemplifies the fickleness of contemporary fame for
journalists. Dubbed “the dean of foreign correspondents” in his Time Magazine obituary, von Wiegand
was a (now largely forgotten) major player on the early and mid-20th century Europe and world stages, Karl H. von Wiegand (Left) after interview
reporting on nearly every major global geopolitical flashpoint between 1910 and 1961, including both with Hitler in 1933 Source: Wisconsin
World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the Abyssinian crisis. He maintained close personal and magazine of history: Volume 41, number 4,
professional associations with Hitler, Mussolini, and other fascist figures during the inter-war period. Von summer, 1958
Wiegand was the first major U.S. correspondent to interview Hitler, in 1921, and the last, in an interview
requested, organized and prepared by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry in 1940. The heightened access that his exclusive interviews and reports betrayed,
combined with his isolationist newspaper magnate boss William Randolph Hearst’s alleged fascist sympathies, raise serious questions on mid-20th
century journalistic ethics in Nazi Germany and the nature of the journalist as a political actor and mediator.

Von Wiegand’s personal papers, namely letters, telegrams, newspaper dispatches and unpublished
manuscripts, discuss his associations (and the associations of other Hearst colleagues) with Hitler and
other fascist figures. They also grapple with the issues of reporting on such figures and their politics. Von
Wiegand and his colleagues, often struggled to balance the varied demands of editors and bosses back
home with the logistical and political reality of reporting in the (often politically dangerous) field of inter-
war Germany. In correspondence with Hearst officials, von Wiegand complained about their demands for
interviewing politicians made either inaccessible by politics or the Hearst Newspapers’ previous
reporting. Meeting strict deadlines for wire dispatches (while having communication-related expense cut)
became difficult with increasing censorship and deliberate governmental withholding of sensitive
information. Requests to avoid (or, occasionally, to focus on) “atrocity stories” of anti-Semitic violence
proved problematic for journalists trying to balance a moral compass, their professional reputation in
Germany, and the demands from Hearst officials back home.

Von Wiegand discusses with a Hearst official Under these pressures, Von Wiegand, and his colleagues,
William Randolph Hearst’s policy towards
ultimately reacted with a mix of rejection, negotiation and
reporting Jewish persecution stories. Source:
Karl H. von Wiegand papers, Hoover
accommodation to the third Reich, wielding the journalists
Institution Archives pen accordingly. However, within the Hearst press
generally and especially regarding von Wiegand, I have
preliminarily charted a rough shift from rejection in the
formative years of the third Reich to a mix of negotiation and accommodation towards the end of the
1930s. Von Wiegand’s papers also allowed me to trace how the personal isolationist and nationalist
ideologies of both von Wiegand and William Randolph Hearst aligned with shifting geopolitics to produce
this conciliatory approach to Nazi Germany. This approach manifested in von Wiegnad’s journalistic work,
but more interestingly in his pseudo-political machinations in the European field. These machinations
culminated in von Wiegand’s interview with Hitler amidst the summer 1940 invasion of France; the
interview, in which a personable, reasonable Hitler proclaimed “America to the Americans, Europe to the
Europeans”, was (briefly) widely circulated in European diplomatic circles as Hitler’s olive branch to the
Allies. Von Wiegand’s papers, as well as digitized archival diplomatic material, make clear that the
interview was designed for this expressed purpose, and that von Wiegand knew and (implicitly, if not
A letter von Wiegand sent to his assistant
explicitly) agreed to those conditions. The interview represented the pinnacle of the convergence of von
where he describes his interview with Hitler
Wiegand and Hearst’s nationalist isolationism, their journalistic power and the geopolitical interests of the
third Reich.
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12/6/2018 Silas Palmer Fellow Researches A Forgotten Foreign Correspondent And Journalistic Ethics In The Third Reich | Hoover Institution
This ongoing research will mix biography of the curious and adventurous figure of Karl H. von Wiegand on June 11, 1940 Source: Karl H. von Wiegand
with an analysis of the landscape of the political activities and ethics of foreign correspondents in the Papers, Hoover Institution Archives
th
early-mid 20 century. I would like to thank Sarah Patton and Elena Danielson for their wonderful help in
working with the von Wiegand collection. I would also like to thank the European Institute at Columbia University and Professor Victoria Phillips for
providing the guidance and resources to begin this research.

Ben Goldstein
Undergraduate at Columbia University

Ben Goldstein is an undergraduate student majoring in history at Columbia University, currently studying abroad at
Oxford University, St. Edmund Hall. He began his research on the history of journalistic ethics in Nazi Germany through
the Cold War Archives Research Fellowship, a program run by the European Institute at Columbia University.

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