Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #189 Update on German Corporate Control of American Publishing

Lis­ten: Side 1 | Side 2

As indi­cat­ed by the title, this pro­gram sup­ple­ments Mr. Emory’s pre­vi­ous work on the con­trol of the Amer­i­can pub­lish­ing busi­ness by Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions. He con­sid­ers this body of work to be as impor­tant as any­thing he has done in the 20+ years that he has been on the air.

Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the cur­rent dom­i­nant posi­tion of the Ber­tels­mann firm in the Amer­i­can music busi­ness, the broad­cast sets forth Ber­tels­man­n’s merg­ing of its Lit­er­ary Guild book-of-the-month club with the Book of the Month Club owned by Time-Warn­er Inc. This fur­ther solid­i­fies Ber­tels­man­n’s con­trol of the Amer­i­can book busi­ness.

Next, the pro­gram details the role of Ber­tels­man­n’s Stern mag­a­zine in dis­sem­i­nat­ing the dis­in­for­ma­tion that Reich­sleit­er Mar­tin Bor­mann died in the clos­ing stages of World War II. (Bor­mann was Hitler’s most impor­tant aide and the Fuehrer of what Mr. Emory calls the Under­ground Reich.)

Bor­man­n’s piv­otal (albeit under­ground) role in the post­war world is well doc­u­ment­ed and beyond intel­li­gent debate. For­mer Gestapo chief Hein­rich Muller (direc­tor of secu­ri­ty for the Bor­mann group) arranged for the plant­i­ng of two corpses resem­bling Bor­mann to be plant­ed in the ruins of Berlin short­ly before the Red Army took the city. (An SS man employed by the Bor­mann group alert­ed Stern to the pres­ence of the corpses.) The pro­gram then reviews the pro-Nazi views and activ­i­ties of Dirk Baven­damm, Ber­tels­man­n’s offi­cial in-house his­to­ri­an. Baven­damm secured forged diaries and sketch­es attrib­uted to Hitler (which paint­ed a rel­a­tive­ly pos­i­tive pic­ture of the Fuehrer).

These forg­eries were pub­lished by the Ger­man mag­a­zine Stern, a Ber­tels­mann prop­er­ty. Baven­damm has writ­ten two books which blamed Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt for World War II and claimed that Hitler was blame­less for the war. His works also claim that Hitler’s actions toward the Jews were mere­ly a reac­tion to Roo­sevelt s plot­ting against Ger­many. (The most recent of these titles was pub­lished in 1993, and re-released in 1998. Despite this, Ber­tels­mann hired Baven­damm as its house his­to­ri­an in 1984, the year after he wrote the first of his books blam­ing the war on Roo­sevelt.) Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Baven­damm’s his­to­ry of Ber­tels­mann false­ly claimed that the com­pa­ny had been at log­ger­heads with Hitler.

As dis­cussed in FTR-90, there are indi­ca­tions that the Under­ground Reich intends to con­trol the Amer­i­can opin­ion form­ing media, in order to grad­u­al­ly change the world’s opin­ion of Hitler (prepara­to­ry to res­ur­rect­ing the Reich, some­time in the next cen­tu­ry.) Baven­damm’s efforts sug­gest very strong­ly that peo­ple should not be com­pla­cent about that pos­si­bil­i­ty.

Next, the broad­cast high­lights the expe­ri­ence of doc­u­men­tary film mak­er Errol Mor­ris, who pro­duced a film about Holo­caust denier Fred Leuchter. When Mor­ris first screened the film to a group of Har­vard stu­dents, many of them believed Leuchter. Again, this sug­gests that the sce­nario pre­sent­ed in FTR-90 should not be too read­i­ly dis­missed.

The sec­ond half of the pro­gram begins with a joint Microsoft and Barnes & Noble.Com ven­ture access­ing entire books online. (Barnes & Noble.Com is 50% owned by Ber­tels­mann, adding to Ber­tels­man­n’s con­trol of Amer­i­can pub­lish­ing.)

The broad­cast then turns to AOL’s recent pur­chase of Time-Warn­er Inc. AOL’s Euro­pean ven­ture is joint­ly under­tak­en with Ber­tels­mann. This enter­prise, along with Ber­tels­man­n’s above-men­tioned merg­er with Time-Warn­er’s Book-of-the-Month Club gives Ber­tels­mann con­sid­er­able influ­ence in AOL’s new­ly-formed media giant.

Fol­low­ing the analy­sis of Ber­tels­man­n’s influ­ence in the AOL-Time Warn­er enti­ty, the pro­gram reviews the SS back­ground of com­pa­ny patron Hein­rich Mohn.

After review­ing Hein­rich’s son Rein­hard’s World War II back­ground in an elite Luft­waffe divi­sion (the Her­rmann Goer­ing divi­sion), the pro­gram reviews the Third Reich’s cor­po­ratist strat­e­gy for con­quest and the SS uti­liza­tion of cor­po­ra­tions as vehi­cles for con­quest. (The SS “cor­po­ratism” was the foun­da­tion for the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion.)

The pro­gram next fea­tures a look at a libel suit filed in the Unit­ed King­dom by Holo­caust revi­sion­ist David Irv­ing. This suit is indica­tive of a grow­ing trend toward eras­ing his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry of the Third Reich. (Record­ed on 1/2/2000 & 1/16/2000.)

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