Page 48 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

CONCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION 21

including informative articles from the foreign press, were allowed.
However, members of German political parties and the German press had
to refrain from all statements and from the publication or reproduction of
articles which contributed towards the spreading of nationalistic, pan-
Germanic, militarist, fascist or anti-democratic ideas. While the area of
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conflict between the Soviet and the western zones of occupation on the
one hand gave political parties the welcome opportunity to transmit
political messages and programmes, on the other hand by mainly licensing
non-party newspapers and clearly distinguishing between information and
commentary, the American military authorities limited the development of
party organs and the communist press in particular faced controls and
restrictions. Despite various directives stating that ‘every authorised
political party should have the right freely to state its views and to present
its candidates to the electorate, and [...] no curtailment of nor hindrance to
the exercise of that right [is tolerated]’, the Commander-in-Chief in the
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American zone, General Lucius D. Clay, issued orders to ‘combat
communism in any form’. Nonetheless, the majority of the German
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press in the American zone of occupation refused to take part in this anti-
communist campaign. Thus very few anti-communist articles appeared in
the licensed German press at that time. After many licensees publicly
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denounced the American counter-propaganda as a return to the
Gleichschaltung of the press, i.e. the systematic elimination and consolidation
of the press, the Information Control Division, headed by Colonel
Gordon E. Textor, reacted with the revocation of licences; often the
communist press was explicitly forbidden and had its property
confiscated. Following a so-called ‘carrot-and-stick approach’, renouncing
communism and resigning from the Communist Party spared the licensee.
For instance, while one of the two communist editors of the Frankfurter
Rundschau, Emil Carlebach, had his licence withdrawn, the other, Arno
Rudert, was kept in place after complying with the requests of the US
military authorities. While also sympathisers of a socialist agenda, such as
another editor of the Frankfurter Rundschau, Wilhelm Karl Gerst,
occasionally faced the revocation of licence, mainly the communist press
and those opposed to anti-communist propaganda were persecuted. By
June 1947, only four out of the 92 licensees in the American sovereign
territory were members of the KPD; by November 1947 merely one
member of the Communist Party, Rudolf Agricola, was in possession of a
licence, namely the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung in Heidelberg. Similarly, the
statistics of the then chairman of the Bavarian organisation of professional
journalists, Walther de Bouché, list only one member of the KPD to
possess a licence to edit a newspaper in June 1947; 23 licensees were
associated with the SPD, 15 were members of or associated to the CSU,