De Waarheid
De Waarheid (The Truth) was a national Dutch daily newspaper with an editorial office in Amsterdam . It was the party journal of the Dutch communists .
history
Underground newspaper 1940–1945
The first edition of De Waarheid appeared on November 23, 1940, at the time of the German occupation in World War II , as an illegal underground newspaper of the Communist Party of the Netherlands . On October 7, 1944, the newspaper could appear legally for the first time in the liberated part of Limburg , but initially as a weekly newspaper. Following the complete liberation of the Netherlands, De Waarheid abandoned its underground status nationwide with the issue of May 6, 1945.
post war period
The newspaper initially had an extremely high circulation, in August 1945 it had over 340,000 copies, and for a short time it was even the highest-circulation newspaper in the Netherlands. The CPN had a good reputation in the immediate post-war period due to its active resistance, and the Soviet Union was grateful for its contribution to the liberation of the Netherlands. In addition, a young editorial team led by editor-in-chief Anthoon Johan Koejemans provided a breath of fresh air that did not make De Waarheid look like a party newspaper. But the CPN soon aligned itself in strict orthodoxy with the Soviet Union, which was also true of the newspaper. In late 1947 this marked the end of Koejeman's brief era. Shortly thereafter, De Waarheid defended, for example, the ban on all non-communist Czechoslovak journalists, as she saw it as a protection against “reactionary elements”. Nevertheless, the good reputation of the editors in the journalists' association Nederlandse Journalisten Kring (NJK) continued to have an effect for a while when Koejemans was elected treasurer there in March 1948. The newspaper now lost a lot of its reputation, the circulation began to fall dramatically and fell to a fraction over the decades.
Orientation towards Soviet communism and decline
The tight focus on the Soviet Union was now very clearly visible, so the newspaper placed seven pages with congratulatory advertisements in the edition of December 3, 1949 on the occasion of Josef Stalin's 70th birthday and published a special edition on March 6, 1953 on his death. After De Waarheid had sided with the invaders during the Hungarian uprising , she was expelled from the daily newspaper association NDP Nieuwsmedia . There was a discharge of popular anger against the party and the newspaper when a crowd tried to storm the Felix Meritis party house , which also housed the Waarheid printing works . In other respects, too, the newspaper got out of hand, for example it was the only one that did not bow to the self-censorship of the Dutch newspapers during the Greet Hofmans affair and reported on them.
After a slight upward trend in the 1970s, the circulation of the newspaper became so marginal in the second half of the 1980s that, apart from special bodies such as the Staatscourant , it now had the lowest circulation of all national newspapers in the Netherlands. This also changed deliberately placed untruths (in an interview with the NDP organ De Dagbladpers in 1980 the director of the newspaper spoke of around 68,000 subscribers) and a call from various Dutch personalities to support the paper in the edition of Vrij Nederland of March 26, 1983 nothing more. Since the late 1970s, the editors-in-chief changed in quick succession. The last edition appeared on April 27, 1990 with a circulation of less than 8,000 copies. An attempt on May 3 of that year to continue the paper in a different form with the weekly Forum was abandoned on March 5, 1991 with the appearance of the last issue.
Editors-in-chief
| Anthoon Johan Koejemans | 1945-1948 |
| Fred Schoonenberg Paul de Groot |
1948-1949 |
| Fred Schoonenberg Friedl Baruch |
1949-1953 |
| Marcus Bakker | 1953-1958 |
| Joop Wolff | 1958-1988 |
| Gijs Schreuders | 1978-1982 |
| Bart Smit | 1982-1983 |
| Constant Vecht | 1983-1986 |
| Paul Wouters | 1986-1988 |
| Frank Biesboer | 1988-1990 |
Edition development
| De Waarheid | ||||||||||
| year | 1945 | 1950 | 1955 | 1960 | 1966 | 1970 | 1975 | 1980 | 1985 | 1990 |
| Copy. | 341,550 | 113,000 | 50,000 | 29,000 | 22,000 | 20,000 | 22,000 | 26,000 | 12,000 | <8,000 |
literature
- Jan van de Plasse: Kroniek van de Nederlandse dagblad- en opiniepers. Otto Cramwinckel Uitgever, Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 90-75727-77-1 . (Dutch; earlier edition: Jan van de Plasse, Kroniek van de Nederlandse dagbladpers , Cramwinckel, Amsterdam 1999, ISBN 90-75727-25-9 )
- Huub Wijfjes: Journalistiek in Nederland 1850–2000. Beroep, cultuur en organisatie . Boom, Amsterdam 2004, ISBN 90-5352-949-7 . (Dutch)
- De Waarheid in de oorlog, een bundeling van illegale nummers uit de jaren '40 -'45 , compiled by Hansje Galesloot and others, Pegasus, Amsterdam 1980 (collection of illegal editions of the Waarheid during the German occupation of the Netherlands, with illustrations)
