An excerpt from, "The secret deal the Associated Press made with the Nazis during WWII" By Michael S. Rosenwald, The Washington Post, May 10, 2017:
At the height of World War II, the Associated Press made secret arrangements with an SS officer to obtain pictures taken by Nazi photographers that were distributed to American newspapers — a deal authorized by senior U.S. officials.
The extraordinary arrangement, which began in 1941 and ended with Hitler’s fall, is detailed in a lengthy internal report the AP released Wednesday morning. It comes several months after Norman Domeier, a German historian, discovered a letter describing the deal in the papers of AP’s then-bureau chief.
The report includes documents recently declassified at the request of AP’s management, including letters of approval from a wartime censorship office run by an ex-AP editor who reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As part of the arrangement, AP shared pictures of U.S. war operations and Allied advances, which were reviewed by Hitler and published in Nazi publications.
An excerpt from, "Lecture: Norman Domeier, “World Domination and Genocide: The ‘Lochner Version’ of Hitler’s Speech on 22 August 1939, a Key Document of National Socialist Ideology” University of Wisconsin-Madison, July 12, 2023:
In Nuremberg, some of the former foreign correspondents in Berlin, among them Louis Lochner, must have been immensely relieved that their names did not appear in the trial, and that their confidential collusions, arrangements and deals with some of the accused ended on the gallows. Especially Louis Lochner, who had planned a secret deal between Associated Press and Nazi Germany which lasted from the US entry in the war in December 1941 until spring 1945. So this is a topic in itself. It’s also something that I discovered here from Louis Lochner’s papers in early 2017. We can also talk about that in the discussion. It is basically, short version, a secret deal to exchange news photos via the neutral capitals of Lisbon and Stockholm during the whole war. So probably around forty thousand news photos were exchanged between Nazi Germany and the United States and Great Britain. And that is the explanation why during the Second World War, all American newspapers and journals were actually full of fresh, nice Nazi photos. And the other way around, you will find in all Nazi newspapers, also in the occupied territories, fresh photos from Associated Press. We can come back to that in the discussion if you’re interested in that.
Therefore, Lochner was mastermind behind this secret deal already planned in 1940. Therefore Lochner missed a truly historic opportunity in Nuremberg. Only with his testimony, his version of the Hitler speech, could have been used as valid evidence during the hearings in Nuremberg. All of the others who had ensured the speech would eventually reach him, Admiral Canaris, General Beck, General Oster, and Hermann Maas had been murdered by the National Socialists.
Norman Domeier is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Stuttgart.
Video Title: Prof. Norman Domeier - Collaboration Between Associated Press and Nazi Germany. Source: Poland First to Fight. Date Published: December 30, 2019.
