Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 125cultural association) was created in 1933. Anyone who was unable to join
on the grounds of political or racial criteria was de facto banned from the
profession. Thus an estimated eighth of all radio employees lost their jobs in
1933, particularly those with managerial functions (the example of Cologne
here used as basis for projection: Diller 1980: 127). Yet even in the case of
broadcasting one cannot speak of an encompassing personnel policy of the
Nazis, or one that was methodically controlled (Münkel, in Marßolek and
Saldern 1998, Vol. 1: 125).
In each dictatorship the press was gradually centralised. In Italy the
number of newspapers had already shrunk by 75 per cent by 1934. Parallels
to the European dictatorships were also evident in imperialistic Japan, which
reduced the number of its newspapers to only one per region as of 1942;
this formed the basis for the fact that some Japanese papers now have the
highest circulation numbers in the world (Saito, in Gunaratne 2000: 563). In
Germany, press concentration accelerated with the so-called ‘Amman Decree’
of 1935, which set itself against ‘unhealthy competition’, the ‘scandal-mon-
gering press’ and religious newspapers in the name of an ideology of ethnic
community, and in a short time caused the demise of about five to six hundred
newspapers. Secret purchases through straw men promoted their concentra-
tion within the National Socialist Eher Verlag and destroyed the press diversity
that had existed in Germany for hundreds of years. After 1935 it was especially
the Catholic centrist-affiliated press that was the first to lose its independence,
and this often by means of covert buyouts. The extent to which changes of
ownership corresponded to changes in media content needs to be studied
in more depth. Not until the Second World War did the National Socialists
attempt a comprehensive suppression of the bourgeois press. Both political
and financial motives played a deciding role because it meant tremendous
gains for the NSDAP, whose newspapers like the Völkische Beobachter then
reached a circulation of 1.2 million in 1941. Towards the end of the war the
NSDAP Eher Verlag controlled over 82 per cent of the market. In total, the
German newspaper landscape had declined to a quarter of its original size:
350 party organs compared to 650 private newspapers, mainly small local ones
(Frei and Schmitz 1999: 37f.). It is striking that even in democratic countries
like the United States press concentration increased in the 1930s. What dic-
tators had enforced out of political considerations had at least partially also
become a trend, incidentally induced by financial considerations in the wake
of the worldwide economic depression.
Every dictatorship controlled the media through its propaganda minis-
tries. They prescribed media content through state-controlled news agencies,
daily press conferences and innumerable directives. For the National Socialist
regime, fifteen thousand directives have been documented for the years up
to 1939 alone and an estimated sixty thousand afterwards (Bohrmann and