G. Ward Price

George Ward Price ( 1886 - August 22, 1961 in London ) was a British journalist.

Life and activity

Price was the son of Reverend H. Ward Price. After attending St. Catharine's College in Cambridge , he began his journalistic career.

Price spent most of his career in the service of the London daily Daily Mail , for which he had worked since 1909 and for which he reported from all corners of the world as a special rapporteur: for example, he accompanied the Ottoman army in its operations as a correspondent for the 1912 Balkan War Mail, while during the First World War he mainly reported on the events in the theater of war in the Middle East, particularly from the Dardanelles and Salonika Fronts. He recorded his experiences in these areas in 1917 in the book The Story of the Salonica Army . In the last phase of the war he reported on the deployment of British troops on the Italian front.

In 1924/25 Price reported from the headquarters of the famous Rifkabyle leader Abd el Krim and traveled to West and South Africa in the wake of the then Prince of Wales .

During the 1920s, Price developed into one of the most influential personalities within the Rothemere group (officially: Associated Newspapers Ltd), to which the Daily Mail belonged at the time, in which he held the rank of director.

In Germany, Price was best known through numerous interviews he conducted with Adolf Hitler in the early and mid-1930s. The party leader (before 1933) and later the dictator Hitler granted Price preferential treatment over all other foreign journalists, as the coverage of his party and regime in the Mail during those years was by far the most positive of any British newspaper of any significance. In his autobiography, Price rejected the often-voiced accusation that at least in these years - if not fundamentally - he had also been fascist-minded himself, pointing out that he was merely conveying Hitler's utterances and views to the British public and his readers as a neutral reporter have left to form their own opinion about these expressions and views and their value.

However, this is countered by decidedly panegyric descriptions of Hitler's personality, which can be found in Price's book I Know These Dictators , published in 1937 . Price also acted as a liaison between Hitler and his employer, the newspaper magnate Lord Rothemere, who provided the Nazis with covert financial donations and also supported the British Union of Fascists around Oswald Mosley , which Price consequently also put in a positive light in several newspaper articles .

Howard Griffiths accordingly came to the conclusion in his study Fellow Travelers of the Right from 1979 that Rothemere and Price had used the Daily Mail as a propagandistic tool in the service of the National Socialist cause until 1938: the newspaper would have been aware of news reporting about Germany in those years It was only done to a limited extent to focus instead on the formation of opinions about Germany instead of through reports of events and factual statements through more vague types of journalistic writing (in which unpleasant facts could be bypassed and withheld), such as opinion columns and reports on interviews that Price conducted with leading Nazi figures had to act.

After Ward had been sympathetic to the National Socialists with restrictions until the mid-1930s, after the Sudeten crisis of 1938 he turned to a sharp opponent of the Nazi regime. The German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels , to whom this turnaround was not hidden, annoyedly noted in his diary that he had little understanding for “this ragged opinion of Ward, who recently adored the Führer as God and today insults him as a hysteric”.

In 1940, in the event of a successful invasion of Great Britain, Price was placed on the special wanted list compiled by the Reich Main Security Office , a directory of persons who should automatically and primarily be arrested by special units of the SS in the event of a German occupation of the country.

During the Second World War, Price reported from France (1940), Tunisia (1942) and again France (1944).

In 1957 Price submitted his autobiography Extra-Special Correspondent .

Fonts

• The Story of the Salonica Army , 1917.
• With the Prince to West Africa , 1925.
• I Know These Dictators , 1937.
• Year of Reckoning , 1939.
• Extra-Special Correspondent , 1957.

literature

• Entry on G. Ward Price in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 36/1961 from August 28, 1961 ( digitized version )

Web links

• Newspaper article about G. Ward Price in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Death report in the Spiegel from August 30, 1961
2. ^ Institute for Contemporary History (Ed.): Goebbels-Tagebücher , Part 1 (records), Vol. 7, p. 135.