The Associated Press’s Faustian Bargain with Hitler’s Germany https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2016/04/the-associated-presss-faustian-bargain-with-hitlers-germany/

April 4, 2016 | Philip Oltermann
About the author:

In the 1930s, the Nazi government began forcing news agencies to close their offices in Germany; by the end of 1941, the Associated Press (AP) was the only one still reporting from inside the Third Reich, and it continued to do so for the rest of the war. Philip Oltermann describes how this came to be so:

The New York-based agency ceded control of its output by [agreeing] to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.”

This law required AP to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. One of the four photographers employed by the Associated Press in the 1930s, Franz Roth, was a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division, whose photographs were personally chosen by Hitler. . . .

AP also allowed the Nazi regime to use its photo archives for its virulently anti-Semitic propaganda literature. Publications illustrated with AP photographs include the bestselling SS brochure Der Untermensch (“The Sub-Human”) and the booklet The Jews in the USA, which aimed to demonstrate the decadence of Jewish Americans with a picture of New York’s mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, eating from a buffet with his hands.

Read more on Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/30/associated-press-cooperation-nazis-revealed-germany-harriet-scharnberg