The term "
Lügenpresse" has been used intermittently since the 19th century in political
polemics in Germany, by a wide range of groups and movements in a variety of debates and conflicts. Isolated uses can be traced back as far as the
Vormärz period. The term gained traction in the
March 1848 Revolution when Catholic circles employed it to attack the rising, hostile liberal press. In the
Franco-German War (1870–1871) and particularly
World War I (1914–1918) German intellectuals and journalists used the term to denounce what they believed was enemy war
propaganda. The made its mission the fight against the "lying press" which it considered to be the "strongest weapon of the enemy". After the war, German-speaking Marxists such as
Karl Radek and
Alexander Parvus vilified "the
bourgeois lying press" as part of their class struggle rhetoric. The
Nazis adopted the term in their propaganda against the Jewish, communist, and later the foreign press. In 1922
Adolf Hitler used the accusation of the "lying press" for the Marxist press. In the
Mein Kampf chapter on war propaganda, he described what he saw as the extraordinary effect of enemy propaganda in the
First World War. He criticized German propaganda as ineffective and called for 'better' propaganda, which, allegedly like that of the English, French or Americans, was to be oriented towards psychological effectiveness. Accusations of "lying" against domestic journalism can be found in his speeches, for example against the "social democratic press", Jewish liberals, etc. Hermann Göring used the expression on 23 March 1933 in his speech during the debate on the
Enabling Act of 1933 in the
Reichstag. In the same speech he denied attacks on Jewish shops and desecrations of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. In December 1937, Manfred Pechau summarized parts of his dissertation ("National Socialism and German Language", Greifswald 1935) in the National Socialist monthly and listed synonyms for what he called "Jewish-Marxist lying press", including "Jewish journals". The party's official educational and speaker information material, published in 1938 by the Reich Propaganda Management of the
NSDAP, includes comments on the anti-Semitic November pogroms in 1938 by foreign media as reactions of the "propaganda and lying press" which allegedly represented a new field of slander against the Reich. In several speeches by
Joseph Goebbels from the first half of 1939, "
Lügenpresse" is used to characterize the media abroad, especially in the future World War II opponents, the United States, France, and Great Britain. At this point in time, the German domestic press had been "synchronized" (controlled) and a critical domestic press that the National Socialists referred to as the "
Lügenpresse" no longer existed. The Nazi propaganda reacted to the false report of Max Schmeling's death with an attack on the "foreign lying press". There were also variations in this terminology; the Völkischer Beobachter, for example, referred to the "emigrant and international lying press" to deny reports about the poor health of the imprisoned
Carl von Ossietzky, and in 1932, it rejected criticism of Rosenberg using the formula "Marxist lying press". In 1942,
Baldur von Schirach described the French journalist
Geneviève Tabouis, who published reports on the expansion plans of National Socialism, as "the embodiment of this nifty lying press that was available to anyone who knew how to pay"; in the same context he claimed that "90 percent of all Paris newspapers" were under "Jewish influence" and that the newspaper editorial offices were staffed by "over 70 percent" Jews. The expression was also used in speeches at carnival events that were used to bolster the party. After the National Socialist
Condor Legion bombed the city of
Guernica during the
Spanish Civil War and this led to appalled reactions in the world,
General Franco's propaganda accused the "Jewish lying press" of disinformation, claiming that this was a press maneuver by the Bolsheviks; this happened in harmony with the Nazi propaganda. In 1948, Walter Hagemann analyzed how the Nazi press used the accusation of the "lying press" against the foreign press. He observed that readers should be made aware of how vigilant and reliable German journalism and politics are on this point. The rejection of the Allied "horror reports" as products of the "Jewish journal" was part of this Nazi strategy. Some
Holocaust deniers use the accusatory phrase to dismiss German war crimes. For example, the Remer dispatch in the 1990s alleged that criminal proceedings against the Holocaust denier
Jürgen Graf to be the "pressure of the lying press" and Jewish actors. During the
protests of 1968, left-wing students disparaged the liberal-conservative
Axel Springer publishing house, notably its flagship daily
Bild, as a "lying press". ==21st century usage==