Leader of the Banned
Beach Fanatic
Opinion | How Hitler Pioneered ‘Fake News’
He reserved particular fury for newspapers, demanding that they be replaced by propaganda organs that spoke to German emotions. Not long afterward, the army helped Hitler and his party (by then known as the NSDAP, short for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or the “Nazis”) acquire a newspaper to spread their message.
Hitler’s form of politics gained mass support when the Great Depression brought to Germany a new series of global shocks. One of the consequences of that economic crisis (as of the one of 2008) was the collapse of independent newspapers, an institution Hitler always denounced as a Jewish “enemy of the people.” As the voices of journalists were weakened, the propagandists delivered the coup de grâce. By then, Hitler and the Nazis had found the simple slogan they repeated again and again to discredit reporters: “Lügenpresse.” Today the extreme right in Germany has revived this term, which in English is “fake news.”