The Press: Hitler's Paper Yoke

In 1920 an obscure, brown-shirted band of fanatics who called themselves the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—Nazis for short—bought their first newspaper. It did not seem much of a buy. The Volkischer Beo-bachter (People's Observer), was a slender Munich biweekly with barely 7,000 subscribers and not a pfennig in the till. Its new publisher, one Adolf Hitler, made it a daily and rang up a blustering new masthead slogan: "Combat Organ of the National Socialist Movement of Germany."

From this tiny seed, sown a full 13 years before Hitler's accession, sprang the most perverted, rapacious...

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