Volkischer Beobachter (The National Observer), a Collection of Nazi-German newspapers, the Munich edition, 1935-1945 | Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

This is a selected Collection of the publication named Voelkischer Beobachter (The National Observer), an official press organ of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). It is the Munich edition of Voelkischer Beobachter.

Our repository has incomplete issues of the period between 1935 and 1945. The more completed is the period between 1943 and 1945.

Voelkischer Beobachter (the National Observer) was the newspaper of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party) from 1920. It first appeared weekly, then daily from 8 February 1923. For twenty-five years it formed part of the official public face of the Nazi party

The "fighting paper of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany" (Kampfblatt der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung Großdeutschlands) had its origin in the Münchner Beobachter ("Munich Observer"), which in 1918 was acquired by the Thule Society and in August 1919 was renamed Völkischer Beobachter. The NSDAP purchased it in December 1920 on the initiative of Chase Bauduin and Dietrich Eckart, who became the first editors. In 1921, Adolf Hitler acquired all shares in the company, making him the sole owner of the publication.

This Collection is part of the Anton Karl Papers (RG-59). The Anton Karl Papers is a number of not necessarily related collections, except for the same Creator, namely him and his family. The collection of one the main Nazi periodicals, Voelkischer Beobachter, poses significant historical interest and owing to this criterion is also presented as the record group of its own.

Völkischer Beobachter, (German: “the National Observer”), daily newspaper published by the Nazi Party in Germany from the 1920s until the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. The paper was originally founded in 1887 as a four-page Munich weekly, the Münchner Beobachter. It had become a daily anti-Semitic gossip sheet with a circulation of about 7,000 when it was bought by Adolph Hitler in 1923 to serve as the propaganda organ of his National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In 1941 its circulation had passed 1.1 million.

Publication of the Völkischer Beobachter was suspended three times in the early 1920s by the Weimar Republic authorities because of anti-Semitic articles and attacks on government policies and officials. After the third suspension it resumed publication as a weekly in 1925 and became a daily again a month later. Hitler had made Alfred Rosenberg its editor, and the latter continued the anti-Semitic thrust of the paper while making it a forum for Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The Völkischer Beobachter launched Berlin and South German editions in 1930, and in 1933 the paper opened a new editorial and printing headquarters in Berlin. A Vienna edition began to appear following Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Foreign correspondents and diplomats from the rest of the world followed it for indications of Nazi policy shifts and propaganda objectives, making allowances for its usual exaggeration and hyperbole.