Berlin - The head of Israel’s primary Holocaust survivors advocacy association blasted the Associated Press on Wednesday over reports that the wire service had collaborated with Nazi Germany’s propaganda apparatus in the years leading up the the Second World War.
“The evidence that an American news agency fully cooperated with Nazi Germany – in order to be able to report from there – effectively serving the Nazi propaganda machine, is devastating and reprehensible,” Colette Avital, chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, told The Jerusalem Post.
“This explains the flow of slanted and partial information printed in the American news media during the war,” the former diplomat and legislator said, calling the AP’s current reporting into question.
“If AP was willing to ‘pay the price’ then, one can justifiably wonder at the accuracy and objectivity of its reporting in subsequent years.”
The Guardian on Wednesday cited archival material unearthed by a German historian who asserted that the wire service had provided US newspapers with news items produced and culled by the Nazi propaganda ministry.
AP was the only western news agency allowed to operate in Germany during Adolf Hitler’s era. The agency continued its operations in Germany until the US entered World War II in 1941.
Harriet Scharnberg, a historian at Halle’s Martin-Luther-University, explained in an article published in the academic journal Studies in Contemporary History, that AP was allowed to continue operating in Germany while other agencies were shut down because it agreed to cooperate with the Nazi regime.
The American agency agreed to abide by the “Editor’s Law,” refraining from publishing news items “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home,” according to Scharnberg. It also hired reporters who worked for the Nazi propaganda division in order to adhere to the law.
The paper also claims that AP allowed the Nazis to use its photo archives in producing its anti-Semitic propaganda materials.
Scharnberg claims that, through its cooperation, the Associated Press enabled the Nazis to “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war.”
She describes as evidence the Nazi invasion of Lviv, Ukraine, in which German forces carried out revenge pogroms against Jews in order to avenge mass killings of soldiers by Soviet forces. AP distributed to the American press pictures, selected at Hitler’s request, solely showing the Soviet troops’ victims.
“Instead of printing pictures of the days-long Lviv pogroms with its thousands of Jewish victims, the American press was only supplied with photographs showing the victims of the Soviet police and ‘brute’ Red Army war criminals,” Scharnberg told the Guardian.
“To that extent it is fair to say that these pictures played their part in disguising the true character of the war led by the Germans”, said the historian. “Which events were made visible and which remained invisible in AP’s supply of pictures followed German interests and the German narrative of the war.”
“More than 70 years after the end of the Holocaust, we are still learning about this appalling period in history,” said Karen Pollock, chief executive of Britain’s Holocaust Educational Trust .
“The opening of these important historical archives will help to shed light on the post-Holocaust issues faced by survivors, as well as allowing us to read what was likely to be the first written account many survivors gave of their experiences - no doubt they will prove to be essential academic and educational resources.”
In response, AP rejected the claims that it had deliberately collaborated with the Nazis, but said it was reviewing the documents.
“An accurate characterization is that the AP and other foreign news organizations were subjected to intense pressure from the Nazi regime from the year of Hitler’s coming to power in 1932 until the AP’s expulsion from Germany in 1941. AP management resisted the pressure while working to gather accurate, vital and objective news in a dark and dangerous time,” the agency told the Guardian.
The AP and other western outlets have come under criticism in pro-Israel circles following a 2014 essay by former journalist Matti Friedman accusing many in the media of noncritical coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict presenting “nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government.”
Friedman recalled having himself deleted information from stories in response to Hamas threats against one of his colleagues in the Gaza Strip.
At the time, the AP responded harshly to Friedman’s tell-all account and especially to his contention that its editors suppressed a story on an offered West Bank pullout by then-prime minister Ehud Olmert. AP said its former employee’s accusations were “demonstrably false, as AP ran stories about it in the weeks after it was supposedly made.”
However, soon after, Mark Lavie, another former AP reporter, came forward, writing on his blog that he was the author of the piece in question and that “AP suppressed a world-changing story for no acceptable reason,” and that “it fit a pattern, described by Matti, of accepting the Palestinian narrative as truth and branding the Israelis as oppressors.”
Speaking before a panel in Jerusalem earlier this year, AP bureau chief Josef Federman asserted that Israel’s increasingly hostile condemnations of the foreign press are beginning to cross a line.
Such complaints “have begun to border on incitement against the foreign media,” Federman asserted, referencing criticism of coverage of recent terrorist attacks around the country, including the Government Press Office’s threat to revoke CBS’s press credentials over a controversial headline.
