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Jewish Dominance of German Press, Anti-semites’ Charge, is Baseless Legend, Figures Show

January 22, 1926
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(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mail Service)

The assertion by anti-Semitic propagandists that the German press is dominated by Jewish journalists is dealt with by Dr. Richard Lewinsohn in the “Schild,” the organ of the German Jewish ex-service men.

“Jewish journalists and Jewish newspaper proprietors occupy a prominent position, but when we look more closely into the matter we see that while the big Jewish newspaper undertakings, like the Mosse and Ullstein concerns, conduct their activity in the full public light, there is a many-branched non-Jewish and even anti-Jewish secret press organization through which the largest part of the German press is being fed directly or indirectly. This is the so-called Hugenberg concern, headed by the German National Deputy Alfred Hugenberg, formerly chairman of the Krupp board of directors,” Mr. Lewinsohn writes.

“This concern runs a number of metropolitan and provincial newspapers. Its most important undertaking is the Telegraph Union (T. U.), a press agency supplying about 1,200 German newspapers and is larger than the official Wolf Telegraph Bureau. This secret press organization, which exercises the greatest influence on German public opinion, is entirely free of Jews and Jewish influence,” he states.

“According to the Institute of Newspaper Research of the Munich University there are in Germany 3,152 newspapers, 838 of these (27.1%) belong to the parties of the Right, and 330 (10.8%) to the parties of the Left, while 1,984 (62%) are official publications, technical papers, non-party organs, etc. Those papers which, according to the anti-Semitic argument, constitute the Jewish Press are thus seen to form no more than one-tenth part of the German Press.

“But even this small group of Democratic, Social Democratic and Communist papers is not actually a Jewish press, for only a small minority of these papers are really owned and run by Jews. There is, therefore, nothing at all in the legend of the domination of the German press by ‘Jewish international finance.’ Contrary to the policy of the non-Jewish industrial capital which has for the past few years obtained a hold over an important section of the German press, the banks under Jewish direction are almost entirely uninterested in the political press,” he declares.

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