‘From Our Own Correspondent’ The British press and Nazi Germany, 1933-1939

Abstract

The reporting of atrocity and the atrocious behaviour of states towards their own populations is not a phenomenon of the 21st Century. In the 1930s a major state in central Europe exhibited such behaviour. In considering the case of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939, the British press were faced with an unusual prospect. Here was a modern state descending into elements of barbarism in dealing with dissent and racial and religious difference. This thesis will examine the responses of the British press to the rise of Nazism in Germany, from the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor at the beginning of 1933 to the onset of war in 1939. The study will examine the extent to which the British press reported and understood the nature of the dictatorship by examining the internal situation in Germany. The central theme of the study is the reaction of the press to the Nazi rejection of liberal and democratic values. This thesis concentrates on British press reactions to the destruction of democracy, the Nazification of the German state, and the brutal treatment of ‘enemies’ and ‘outsiders’. The thesis will study the clues, signs, and markers that could have informed the British people, and by extension the British government, about the aims, goals, and ambitions of Hitler’s dictatorship. In doing so, the thesis will examine what people in Britain could have known about the internal situation in Nazi Germany by reading British newspapers. This is important because it provides insight into what people in Britain could have known about the nature of the Nazi dictatorship on the eve of war in 1939.