THE GERMAN PRESS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22928, 5 January 1938, Page 10

THE GERMAN PRESS

Control of the German Press, it is reported, is to be transferred from Dr. Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, to Dr. Otto Dietrich, but even if foreign correspondents are allowed more scope, there is not the remotes!; likelihood that any measure of freedom will be restored to German newspapers. Since the rise' of Nazi power, Dr. Dietrich, himself a journalist, has been closely associated with press control. In two recent books he is described as the Nazi Press chief, or the Press director, his chief function apparently having been to write party publicity. One offshoot of his department is the Press Policies Office. He is a member of the Central Directorate of the Nazi Party, which Professor Stephen H. Roberts, of Sydney, in "The House that Hitler Built," calls the key to the whole organisation, which remains in essentials what it was four years ago except that it is even more cumbrous and complicated. Dietrich and Goebbels have worked hand in glove. When the Emergency Decree of February, 1933, was issued in the brief period between Hitler's accession to power and the general elections, the Frankfurter Zeitung stated that the newspaper regulations constituted a deprivation of liberty unheard of in German history. Other newspapers also protested, but not a word of criticism has since been printed in a newspaper. In that time over one-third of the newspapers of Germany have been put out of existence, the bulk of tljem having been non-pai'ty in politics, but the number of official Nazi journals has trebled. One newspaper was banned because a stock exchange report had some facts indicating that there had been a fall of German loans; another was given a new staff from an opposition paper because a portrait it published of Hitler gave his features "a distorted expression suggesting vulgarity." The last thing to expect in any dictatorship country is an unshackled Press.