German overseas service

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The German Overseas Service GmbH (DUED) was a German news agency that dealt with the mediation of economic news and propaganda abroad, especially overseas.

Company history

The German Overseas Service, whose headquarters were in Berlin, was founded in February 1914 as the Syndikat Deutscher Overseasienst. The reason for founding the company was the dissatisfaction of the Foreign Office and the economy with what they considered to be unfavorable cartel agreements, including with the Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau (WTB). This perception prompted the press office of the Federal Foreign Office and circles of industry (especially the coal and steel industry), trade, shipping and banking to set up a powerful news agency that was not bound by international agreements and that was supposed to provide news from and about Germany abroad.

The Syndikat Deutscher Übersee Dienst was formed through the merger of the smaller news offices Weltkorrespondenz GmbH, Kabelkorrespondenz GmbH, Allgemeine Korrespondenz, Transocean GmbH and Deutsche Kabelgramm GmbH. The new company was financed by around three hundred companies that raised 1 million Reichsmarks annually, as well as a secret fund of the Foreign Office, which contributed 250,000 Reichsmarks annually.

From the beginning, the overseas service was effectively under the control of heavy industry and especially of Alfred Hugenberg , then chairman of the Krupp Group's supervisory board .

After the outbreak of the First World War, the overseas service began with the publication of the monthly The Great War in Pictures , a periodical that was distributed to neutral countries for the purpose of war propaganda. The magazine, which had a circulation of 50,000 copies and a volume of forty pages, mainly contained pictures that were intended to illustrate “the just cause” for which the German Reich allegedly fought in the war and which - to be distributed in as many countries as possible to enable - were provided with multilingual captions.

In May 1915 the subsidiary Transocean GmbH was launched, a foreign news agency based on wireless telegraphy.

In September 1916 the company was split into the agencies Transocean (TO) and Deutscher Überseedienst (DÜD). The background to this was a conflict of interests between the government and business circles within the leadership of the overseas service, which was settled through a division of tasks: While the Transocean was set up as a message policy instrument of the Foreign Office, the overseas service - now without financial support from the Reich - primarily served the foreign trade interests of the industry, which it promoted through reporting and foreign propaganda in economic affairs.

The capital of Überseedienst GmbH was 1.9 million Reichsmarks in 1916. In 1917 it was increased to 5 million Reichsmarks. Since this year at the latest, the Hugenberg Group has dominated the company without having a clearly verifiable majority. The chairman of the supervisory board was taken over by Max Rötger , a trusted man of Hugenberg and former chairman of the board of directors of Krupp.

On the mediation of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbachs , whose company was represented by Auslands GmbH and thus also by the German News Office, Wilhelm Widenmann was appointed managing director of the DÜD in February 1917. At the same time, Ludwig Klitzsch, previously the publishing director of JJ Weber-Verlag, joined the company as a further managing director. In 1920, Hugenberg made Klitzsch general director of Scherl Verlag and Widenmann general director of DÜD. In 1923 at the latest, but possibly even earlier, the DÜD was fully integrated into the Hugenberg Group . After the dissolution of the Auslands GmbH in 1927, the Ostdeutsche Privatbank probably took over the majority share in the overseas service.

The overseas service was incorporated into the German News Office (DNB) in the 1930s .

Area of ​​responsibility

The statutes of the DÜD defined the purpose of the company as: "The maintenance and organization of intelligence services between Germany and other countries, namely the overseas territories."

In practice, the company's activities were divided into two areas of responsibility: supplying German customers with news material from abroad and reporting from Germany for foreign customers, which the company understood to mean foreign propaganda. For the latter purpose, the five-language Continental Correspondenz was published, which was aimed particularly at South American customers. In addition, the DÜD had picture and news rooms, especially in Turkey . In addition, through associated companies, the company also dealt with the publication of export magazines (foreign publisher) and with photo advertising (Deutsche Lichtbildgesellschaft).

In Germany, the DÜD distributed the twice-weekly correspondence overseas service and economic intelligence service . While the overseas service was supposed to convey “foreign moods and news from business, politics and culture”, the economic news service appeared in separate industry, country and special numbers. While the industry numbers collected news material about different types of goods, the special numbers dealt with individual economic problems and the country numbers with the respective economic development of an individual country.

The Continental correspondence, the overseas service and the economic intelligence service were mainly delivered to authorities and business people.

The news material that the overseas service had collected outside of its official area of ​​responsibility in political circles from confidants such as Alexander Ringleb and Herbert von Bose was ultimately intended for a very small group of selected people .

Publications

Periodicals

  • The Great War in Pictures , monthly (1914 to 1918).
  • Overseas service , twice a week.
  • Economic intelligence service , twice a week.

Manuals

  • Political-Statistical Manual of the Soviet Union , Berlin 1926.

literature

  • Heidrun Holzbach: The "Hugenberg System". The organization of bourgeois collection policy before the rise of the NSDAP (= Studies on Contemporary History. Vol. 18). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-421-01986-X (also: Munich, University, dissertation, 1978/79).
  • Ulrike Oppelt: Film and Propaganda in the First World War. Propaganda as media reality in topical and documentary films (= contributions to the history of communication. Vol. 10). Steiner, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-515-08029-5 (also: Berlin, Free University, dissertation, 2001).