Berliner Tageblatt - History

History

The Berliner Tageblatt was first published by Rudolf Mosse as an advertising paper on January 1, 1872, but developed into a liberal newspaper. On January 5, 1919, the office of the newspaper was briefly occupied by Freikorps soldiers in the German Revolution. By 1920, the BT had achieved a daily circulation of about 245,000.

Prior to the Nazis taking power on January 30, 1933, the newspaper was particularly critical and hostile to their program. On March 3, 1933, after the Reichstag fire, Hans Lachmann-Mosse, the publisher, dismissed editor in chief Theodor Wolff because of his criticism of the Nazi government and his Jewish ancestry. Wolff by then fled to the Tyrol in Austria by plane.

After 1933, the Nazi government took control of the newspaper (the Gleichschaltung). However, in September 1933, special permission was granted by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels to release the paper from any obligation to reprint Nazi propaganda in order to help portray an image of a free German press internationally. Due to this assurance, their respected foreign correspondent Paul Scheffer became editor on April 1, 1934. He had been the first foreign journalist to be refused a re-entry permit into the Soviet Union in 1929 for his negative reporting of the Five-Year Plan and prophesy of an impending famine in Ukraine.

For almost two years, Scheffer surrounded himself by independently-minded university graduates such as Margaret Boveri. She wrote in 1960 that Scheffer "was hated from the beginning by leading people of the Propaganda Ministry, and it was only because of his excellent foreign connections that he was not relieved of his position in the early years of the regime." Scheffer's position eventually became untenable and he resigned on December 31, 1936.

The paper was finally shut down by the Nazi authorities on January 31, 1939.