To
the ce left: Hite»
Ger, Mitler Eeioors break down the turnpike
Order in 1939. With the invasion
nleashed World War Il.

Bottom left: Heinrich Lubke, former builder of nazi
concentration camps and now President of the German

lit

aladtan

rg a eSotientation. Panorama,
. Dilted “3 Jan, 3, comments,
et, Eee the heads of

,° POlls,” years later comes

reader definitely does not want one
thing: To think. This has become the
guideline of my newspapers.”

Of the total edition of all national

i, Ba Deu y ‘
Bit thie” the ae Seen dailies, 89.1 percent come from Spring-
a} Wh Way, “The young G SS er. 83.6 percent of total edition of
and, i love their te peat Sunday papers, 69 percent of all papers
Been Come of aang and in Hamburg, largest city in West Ger-
Y no Ident of the West 7 einrich many and 67 percent of all papers In
cis, oe eans eg vernan West Berlin. The largest daily, Bild
Be but an, not 2 Ne Zeitung belongs to Springer. It is read

§
st humi, 2Pse, is “the time
Ulletin ae tO" Of our Father-

by at least 12 million in West Germans.
In the largest cities, it is bought by 75
percent of all households.

Offi, Of the p

e ress and Infor- :

July 19, 16° Federal Republic Bild-Zeitung contains no serious poli-

One has 66) ‘ tical news or information. Instead, be-
Xi 9 hind a background of crime and sex,

3 So se
0 See :
4 ereie Banizat nN the flowering of

Axel Springer thinks for his readers,

Ons j
this One of og! German and conveys his thoughts to them as
ee a orcs one eu icagns their own. Should a situation warrant
at Pe fol W. «Teaching ee it, Springer does not hesitate to invent
A Germa’® & him doesn’t “news”. During the West German gov-

Pl be wat who Voice of his blood.

ernment crisis at the end of 1966, to

thi ; ;
dhe ange» "MKS like a Jew “alarm” his readers about the “serious-
( ha hing Plenty f ness” of the situation, Bild-Zeitung
ot “ houses, + Or publicists and came out with this story on Nov. 7,

j :
bss Schogi tion”
fr), Negi,’ 'S th
p! Ty 1a of

i!

ee sveual he) : :
1 Scigg Weation” See to it that this
Niverg, reads, and plenty

Ola ‘ it
Sticn Y pr 3
1” sanction “SS0rS t0 give

a ene citizen, start-
Ntnued b

: - n y the
on "© press MmMunication partic-
lo . Axey . Here :

; On » the newspaper
the ge is g mee takes a Aah
: : On n e , = ;
b & Mtagblaie Fs Credo, stated

’

© me the end 8 mburg, July 5,
he G

th
erman newspaper

1966:

“SED (the ruling party in the GDR)
radically rehearsed national emergency.
Reservists forced to leave place of work
to join-their units. Cars requisitioned
on the streets.” Nothing of that kind
ever happened, not on the given date,
not before, not after.

Bild-Zeitung calls for the “strong
man” to save the country. On Nov. 18,
the paper demands an end to the pro-
paganda of German war guilt. On Nov.
2), on neo-nazis in the Bavarian Pro-

vincial Parliament, Bild tells its readers,
“they are not a national catastrophe”.
On the same day the paper writes, “We
must stand up for our national inter-
ests clearer and more effectively than
till now.” Again on the same day, “We
need emergency laws to protect us
against the enemies from within and
without.” The strong man has been
found in the person of Kiesinger. On
Dec. 10, 1966, Bild Zeitung interprets
the new prime minister's intention, by
ihis banner headline, “I shail rule with
an iron hand.”

The Swiss paper Zuericher Woche on
Aug: 19, said of Springer, “Axel Spring-
er sells the Cold War . . . inciting na-
tional emotions . . . demanding and
propagating unrealistic and irresponsi-
ble policies and reaching 40 percent of
the reading public in West Germany
and 70 percent in West Berlin.”

Another mass medium of “enlighten-
ment” are the war story magazines,
sold in millions of copies. This is their
motto, “It will be our task in the future
too, not to allow to fade into forgetful-
ness the unique achievement of the
German soldier.” And: “For those who
saw action in the frontline, war is in
the first place adventure.”

Another pernicious influence are the
movies. From the end of the war to
1963, 994 war movies were shown, of
which only 9 were anti-war movies.
War films alone account for one-third
of total movie attendance. In 1965-66,
of 362 movies shown, 246 were adven-
ture, gangster, sex or war films. Cen-

Federol Republic, at the border of the German Demo-

cratic Republic.

sorship is strict on any film of social
criticism, but ‘‘generous”’, wrote the
liberal West German daily Frankfurter
Rundschau of Feb. 11, 1965 “the cen-
sorship can be—nazi films, once out-
lawed, have long since been rehabili-
tated.”

The film “Africo Addio” was not
released by the censors in Britain,
for its scandalous bias against the Afri-
can Negro and for its brutality. In West
Germany this film received the official
certificate of “valuable” and the tax
reduction that goes with it.

Not everyone is infected by the
Chauvinist poison. But what a majority
of honest citizens in West Germany
does, is described by the playwright
and novelist Peter Weiss thus:

“And if there, where roast pigeons
fly, everything teems with efficiency
and progress, all I can see is people
slumbering in the mush. There they lie,
smacking and snoring and cud-chewing
in their sleep. And when a voice calls
out: brothers and sisters, everything is
in best order, you will continue to be
led to your happiness, drunk with
sleepiness they murmur: hurray, turn
on the other side, and continue in their
slumber.

“This big, sleeping body,.which I find
on my visits to West Germany, and of
which I can only hear the snoring and
notice signs of dreams of saturation,
shows nothing of the changes which
should have been expected after the
catastrophe this country has gone
through.”

April 28, 1967—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 7