Why controlling the media was important to the Nazis

This piece is not going to look at what the Nazi’s did with regard to controlling the press and radio, but it’s going to explain why they moved to control the media as it existed in the 1930s: the press and radio.

The thing with the media is that they not only disseminate news but they can direct public opinion. So, news needs to be ‘good news’ and needs to be spread as widely as possible, the same with outright propaganda, whilst bad news has to be prevented from getting out. It’s as simple as that.

When the Nazis gained power, there were over 4,700 daily and weekly newspapers (80% locally owned) with a total circulation of 25 million. In addition to these figures though, was the fact that for every paper bought there was usually another person at home reading it as well. Whilst more read papers and illustrated magazines through reading rooms in libraries (Hitler himself read the newspapers that were available in the reading room of the Men’s Home where he had a room for three years when he lived as a struggling artist in Vienna) as well as reading circles which rented magazines to which one million Germans were subscribed in 1938.

Having pointed out the way papers can direct public opinion, and the fact that Hitler used reading rooms to access papers during his time in Vienna, there is no better illustration of the power of the media. For it’s how, by reading the anti-Semitic views of the Vienna papers as well as the cheap anti-Semitic pamphlets that were readily available on the streets, that Hitler came, at least in part, to develop his own anti-Semitic views.

The Nazis, from the outset, had their own paper: the Voelkischer Beobachter. It was purchased by the party at the end of 1920 and Hitler became the sole owner in 1921. Its circulation was small at the beginning, only about 8,000, but still it influenced its readers, and it grew to 25,000 in 1923, to 120,000 in 1931 and 1.7m by 1944.

But the array of other papers and what they printed had to be controlled, or else the papers closed down. If not, how could the Nazis accentuate the positives of what they were doing; and what’s worse, criticism of Nazi policies could grow.

And it was the same with new means of mass communication: the radio. Radio was a very important means of receiving news in the 1930s, you could liken it to the television and the internet today. Helped by the cheap radios that the Nazis produced, known as ‘The People’s Receiver’, the number of radios in German homes shot up from around 4,5 million in 1932 to over 16 million ten years later so that 70% of households had a radio (more than in America). As with the newspapers this meant a much higher number had access to them. Indeed the Nazis placed them in factories and offices as well as public spaces.