Frankfurter Zeitung

1939 Oct 1 - 31 complete

+ extras

53.5 cm x 38 cm

Beautifully bound

 

 

The Frankfurter Zeitung was a German-language newspaper that appeared from 1856 to 1943. It emerged from a market letter that was published in Frankfurt. In Nazi Germany, it was considered the only mass publication not completely controlled by the Propagandaministerium under Joseph Goebbels.

 

During the Nazi's early time in power, the paper was initially protected by Hiter and Joseph Goebbels primarily for its convenient public relations appeal abroad, and retained more editorial independence than the rest of the press in the Third Reich. However, within a few years IG Farben gave up on the newspaper; inexorably, it had become compromised by the increasing oversight of the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda and was quickly losing its journalistic reputation abroad. The company's directors realized it no longer needed to influence domestic public opinion, "since there was effectively no public opinion left in Germany".

 

The paper was quietly sold and subsumed by a subsidiary of the Nazi publishing organ, Eher Verlag, in 1938. In late 1941, the paper was faced with scandal when Richard Sorge, the longtime Tokyo correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung and a Nazi party member, was arrested by the Japanese police under charges of espionage for the Soviet Union. Sorge was revealed to be the top Soviet spy in Japan, his allegiance to Nazism just a mere disguise for his real beliefs, and was executed in 1944. Faced with declining readership throughout the Second World War, it was closed down entirely in August 1943.