The Captive Press in the Third Reich

Oron Hale's work details how the Nazi Party acquired control over a vast, decentralized, and multi-faceted system of newspapers and magazines in Germany in between 1920 and the third reich's fall. This is, perhaps, a fairly narrow topic, but Hale's book is a complete account of this aspect of Nazi history. His research is excellent, utilizing interviews, published accounts, statistics rescued from war-torn Germany, and notes of denazification trials for many of the people mentioned in the book. I bought this book hoping to learn a little about the propaganda system of the Nazis. Certainly, gaining control over the print industry was part of this system, but it is not all of it. Hale's account does not delve much into other forms of Nazi propaganda, nor does it spend much attention on the content of the propagandistic work contained within the Nazi papers. There are two crucial points in this book: that while the Nazi Party officially approved some newspapers as party organs, the Party did not own these papers. Since the papers were owned by party supporters, they were in effect under Nazi control. This established a bit of a smokescreen in that the public may not have recognized that a supposedly independent newspaper may have been inextricably linked with the Party. The other major point was that when the Nazi's acquired other papers, it was usually not out of a need to gain additional avenues for their propaganda, but rather to eliminate competing points of view. So this book is not without its lessons for contemporary times. Most importantly is the idea that a political faction with control over the media can help its cause not so much by using the media to propogate its point of view, but by confining that media so that no alternative political view is represented. I do not reccomend this book for the casual reader; but it is a fine resource for scholars of Nazi Germany, propaganda, or mass media.