Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany

by Rell DeVine

Overview

Allegedly the only man capable of holding the Führer's intense gaze, Rothay Reynolds was a leading foreign correspondent between the wars and ran the Daily Mail's bureau in Berlin throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The enigmatic former clergyman was one of the first journalists to interview Adolf Hitler, meeting the future Führer days before the Munich Putsch.

While the awful realities of the Third Reich were becoming apparent on the ground in Germany, in Britain the Daily Mail continued to support the Nazi regime. Reynolds's time as a foreign correspondent in Nazi Germany provides some startling insights into the muzzling of the international press prior to the Second World War, as journalists walked uneasy tightropes between their employers' politics and their own journalistic integrity. As war approached, the stakes - and the threats from the Gestapo - rose dramatically.

Reporting on Hitler reveals the gripping story of Rothay Reynolds and the intrepid foreign correspondents who reported on some of the twentieth century's most momentous events in the face of sinister propaganda, brazen censorship and the threat of expulsion - or worse - if they didn't toe the Nazis' line. It uncovers the bravery of the forgotten heroes from a golden age of British journalism, who risked everything to tell the world the truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785902130
Publisher:	Biteback Publishing, Ltd.
Publication date:	02/02/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	366,830
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Will Wainewright is a British journalist based in London. He has been published in the Times and Guardian newspapers and spent more than five years as a financial journalist in London and New York. Between 2014 and 2016, he reported on European hedge funds for Bloomberg News. Before that, he worked for trade magazine HFMWeek, following the money trail from Geneva to the Cayman Islands and working for sixteen months in America. He was born in Winchester and read History and Politics at the University of York.

Table of Contents

Photograph permissions ix
A Note on Newspapers xi
Cast of Correspondents xiii
Prologue: Death of a Correspondent xv

I. The Restive Curate 1
II. Land of the Tsars 15
III. War and MI7 27
IV. Weimar Germany 45
V. ‘A Mesmeric Stare’ 57
VI. Rise of the Nazis 71
VII. Hitler Takes Over 91
VIII. Nights at the Taverne 109
IX. ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ 129
X. A Contested Vote 145
XI. Rhineland 157
XII. ‘The Best Correspondent Here Left This Evening’ 173
XIII. Appeasement Builds 189
XIV. Anschluss 201
XV. ‘Quarrel in a Far-Away Country’ 217
XVI. Broken Glass 233
XVII. When Freedom Shrieked 249
XVIII. A Final Assignment 259

Epilogue 271
Acknowledgements 281
A Short Newspaper Guide 285
List of Cited Works 289
Endnotes 293
Index 321