Hans Detlev Becker

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Hans Detlev Becker (born June 11, 1921 in Freiburg / Elbe ; † November 2, 2014 in Reinbek ) was a German journalist. After taking over the “Germany” section of the news magazine Der Spiegel in 1947 , he was editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1959 to 1961 and from 1962 director of the Spiegel publishing house and from 1971 also managing director of the Manager Magazin publishing house. He retired from his post in the 1980s. He is considered one of the formative personalities of the early Spiegel and “second man” behind Rudolf Augstein .

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The son of a senior customs officer graduated from the State Reform Realgymnasium in Peine and the State Goethe High School in Hanover . After graduating from high school, he studied law and political science at the University of Münster . He took part in the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 . Most recently he served as a non-commissioned officer in the radio defense of the Wehrmacht High Command .

After the end of the war, Becker briefly resumed his studies, but in 1946 he became editor of the Neue Tageblatt in Osnabrück . He received an offer from the British military government to work on the news magazine This Week , which was founded in Hanover in 1946 , but decided against it. In 1947 he moved to the successor magazine Der Spiegel in Hamburg , where he took over the management of the Germany department. In 1950 he became managing editor and worked from 1959 to 1961 as editor-in-chief. From 1962 he was director of the Spiegel publishing house and from 1971 to 1981 also managing director of manager magazin -Verlagsgesellschaft-mbH. In 1984 he gave up the post of publishing director and worked until 1986 as an "advisory partner".

Becker was the “second man” behind Rudolf Augstein at Spiegel , with whom he was close friends and with whom he also shared the pseudonym “Moritz Pfeil”. When the ownership structure of the mirror was reorganized in 1974, Becker received 4% company shares in the new Rudolf Augstein GmbH and until 1992 shares totaling 5%. He was one of the journalists who set the journalistic standards of the magazine and brought the Spiegel public attention with revelatory stories . In 1948 he reported about a house search of the Schleswig-Holstein Minister of Agriculture Erich Arp and in 1950 about the manipulation in the election of Bonn to the federal capital . Becker also played a key role in the development of the so-called “mirror jargon”, which was characterized by newly formed verbs such as “Wahlkampf”, loan translations from English such as “Weißkragen” and word compositions such as “Future Chancellor”.

Above all, it was Becker who kept the mirror in contact with the secret services such as the Gehlen organization and the Federal Intelligence Service . To this end, he maintained loose personal contact with Reinhard Gehlen, established by Hans-Heinrich Worgitzky . Prior to the Spiegel affair he had with a contact with Adolf Wicht clarify by the BND whether the article Due ready for defense of Conrad Ahlers secrecy worthy points contained. The BND's concerns were taken into account prior to publication. The discovery of protocols between Becker and Wicht near Augstein confirmed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's point of view that the BND was behind the affair. Becker was arrested and detained for 34 days.

In an interview with Spiegel editor Klaus Wiegrefe in 2007 on the employment of former National Socialists and SS officers such as Horst Mahnke and Georg Wolff as editors of the news magazine in the 1950s, Becker said no to the question of whether there were fundamental concerns at the time that former NSDAP- Hire members or SS men. If they were considered denazified, this did not matter.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Heinz Egleder: SPIEGEL co-founder Hans Detlev Becker: The man in Augstein's shadow . In: Spiegel Online , November 15, 2014.
  2. ↑ Heiko Buschke: German press, right-wing extremism and the National Socialist past in the Adenauer era . Campus, Frankfurt / M. 2003, p. 110.
  3. ↑ Bruno Jahn: Augstein, Rudolf , In: Killy Literature Lexicon . Vol. 1. A-Blu . De Gruyter, Berlin 2008, p. 256.
  4. ↑ Stefanie Waske: More liaison than control. The control of the BND by parliament and government 1955 - 1978. Dissertation at the University of Marburg , 2007; VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften / GWV Fachverlage, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-531-91390-2 , p. 69f.
  5. ↑ Denazified was denazified. Former publishing director Hans Detlev Becker, 85, about former National Socialists in SPIEGEL . Interview. From Klaus Wiegrefe. In: Der Spiegel No. 2 from January 8, 2007.
personal data
SURNAME Becker, Hans Detlev
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pfeil, Moritz (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and publishing director
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Freiburg / Elbe
DATE OF DEATH 2nd November 2014
Place of death Reinbek