Huttner, Markus: Britische Presse und nationalsozialistischer Kirchenkampf. Eine Untersuchung der »Times« und des »Manchester Guardian« von 1930 bis 1939, Paderborn [u. a.] 1995

Markus Huttner: Britische Presse und nationalsozialistischer Kirchenkampf. Eine Untersuchunbg der »Times« und des »Manchester Guardian« von 1930 bis 1939.

The conduct of the churches in the Third Reich has been the subject of intensive historical research for more than three decades. The question of how the contemporary foreign media received and reported on the churches and church politics under Hitler’s regime, however, has gone largely ignored. The present study by Markus Huttner demonstrates for the first time the surprisingly important role the Catholic Church Struggle played in British coverage of Germany, using the examples of the Times and the Manchester Guardian. Correspondents and commentators for both newspapers looked upon the Christian churches as pillars of resistance against the Nazi regime and its ideology and considered church politics a major field of conflict within Germany.

Thanks to an uncommonly dense trove of British and German archival materials, Huttner provides an empirically thorough, highly detailed account of the Times and Manchester Guardian’s relationshipto National Socialist Germany. Huttner analyzes the conditions in which news sources originated and reconstructs the systems of meaning that are essential to understanding journalistic representation. He deserves special praise for elucidating a previously under-researched phenomenon, the effects of Nazi information policies on the content of foreign reporting. Huttner casts a new light on such central questions as the significance of Nazi media control and news-reporting policies for the Church Struggle, the journalistic and intellectual debates about Hitler’s regime that took place in free societies abroad, and the development of British-German press relations in the era of growing Nazi influence and Appeasement policies.