Münchener Post

The Münchener Post (Engl. Munich Post) was a newspaper published in Munich, Germany notable for its decade-long campaign against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party before their accession to power. It was shut down by Hitler in March 1933 immediately after he became the Reich Chancellor.

Münchener Post closely followed Hitler and his party, exposing their crimes, internal intrigues, and scandals. Hitler considered the paper, which he called "the poison kitchen", one of his most vexing public adversaries, and it was the target of several libel actions taken by the Nazi Party. The Post wrote from a populist perspective, viewing Hitler and his party as a dangerous band of gangsters rather than as ideological enemies, or as a bona fide political movement at all. The coverage was notable for being the first to publish information on the so-called "Final Solution" - this information was published in December 1931, more than ten years before the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference. Included in its reportage was its chilling prediction of the Final Solution (Endlösung), saying it had uncovered a "secret plan" to solve the Jewish question. It listed restrictions that would later become the Nuremberg Laws, and a final solution “to use the Jews in Germany for slave labor...”

In 1933, as part of the Nazi elimination of media opposition they ordered the closure of a number of news outlets across Germany with all Socialist newspapers' buildings were taken over by the government. Writers and editors at the Münchener Post were arrested and imprisoned and its premises turned over to an SA squad who destroyed its offices and printing presses and burned its files.

Very little had ever been written about the Münchener Post until 1998 when American journalist Ron Rosenbaum published his book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. Rosenbaum considers "the running battle between Hitler and the courageous reporters and editors of the Post...one of the great unreported dramas in the history of journalism", and challenges contemporary journalists to do justice to the "men who brought so much honor to the profession with their courage and investigative zeal" (Rosenbaum 37, 58).

External links

• University of California, Santa Barbara Article "The Munich Post: its undiscovered effects on Hitler" by Sara Twogood
• (German) Article in the Historisches Lexikon Bayern