Hans Schwarz van Berk

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Hans Schwarz van Berk (pseudonym: Hans Hansen ; born August 7, 1902 in Wermelskirchen ; † January 2, 1973 in Göttingen ) was a German journalist and National Socialist .

Live and act

As a young man, Schwarz van Berk began to get involved in circles of the extreme political right: in 1920 he became a member of a volunteer corps. He later joined the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten , and in 1930 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 312.753) and also became a member of the SS . In the same year he became editor-in-chief of the Stettiner Zeitung .

Around 1931 Schwarz van Berk, whom Jäckel describes as “young, dynamic [and] intelligent”, came into the vicinity of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels , when he became a star journalist in the Nazi press in the following years: 1932 he the Pommersche Zeitung , and in 1935 he took over as the successor to Károly Kampmann the post of chief editor (chief editor) of the newspaper The attack .

In 1935 a party court case was initiated against Schwarz van Berk for behavior that was harmful to the party because he had written the words "Dangerous or harmless - carry on" in the guest book of the Berlin cabaret Die Katakombe in 1934 . However, at the intervention of Goebbels, he got away with a reprimand.

In 1937, Schwarz van Berk embarked on a four-year trip around the world, which took him through India and Australia , among other places , before he had to break it off prematurely in 1939 due to the start of the Second World War .

At the beginning of December 1939, by order of Goebbels, Schwarz van Berk founded his own office, which was attached to the foreign press department. The purpose of the office was the targeted disinformation of the Allied war opponents. In his diary entry of January 6, 1942, Goebbels Schwarz described van Berk's war propaganda as follows:

“Schwarz van Berk works mostly with camouflaged articles that appear in foreign and sometimes hostile newspapers. In addition to a few negatives, which must be written to protect the face, they contain a multitude of positive elements. In this way we launched a lot of material in the foreign, partly in the anti-German, even in the English press, without it being clear there where the material came from. "

Since 1943 Schwarz van Berk was one of the most zealous representatives of the “miracle weapons” propaganda in the Nazi press, which was supposed to give the increasingly pessimistic population new hope for a German war victory. The term " V-weapon ", which emerged in 1944 , was supposedly coined by him.

Contributions by Schwarz van Berk were repeatedly published from 1940 in the weekly newspaper Das Reich .

In March or April 1945, Schwarz van Berk fled from Berlin to West Germany. After the end of the war he worked as a sales representative and in the advertising industry. Nothing is known about its denazification .

Schwarz van Berk's estate is now in the Federal Archives in Koblenz.

Fonts

  • Red Army on the Ruhr . In: Ernst Jünger (Ed.): The fight for the realm . Pp. 203-218.
  • Prussianism and National Socialism. 7 letters to a Prussian Junker . 1932.
  • The socialist selection. Korn, Breslau 1934.
  • The traitor and the murderer. 100 minutes in the face of the guide . In: The attack . The National Socialist evening newspaper . Volume 8, No. 164 . Rather jun., Berlin July 16, 1934, p. 1-2 .
  • The hour dictates . 1935.
  • Joseph Goebbels: The attack. Essays from the fight time . Ed .: Hans Schwarz van Berk. Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1935 ( archive.org ).
  • Youth and Law , 1938. (with Hans Frank and Gottfried Neeße )
  • "Fire sign Stalingrad" . In: The Empire . No. 5, January 31, 1943.
  • De uanede følger. Bombekrigens Overvindelse - og Gengældelsen , 1944.
  • The pictures are still glowing. Fates and adventures of masterpieces of art . Berlin 1969. (together with Hans Diebow under the pseudonym HH Pars)

literature

  • Willi A. Boelcke (Ed.): War Propaganda 1939-1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Stuttgart 1966, pp. 110-114.
  • Norbert Frei / Johannes Schmitz: Journalism in the Third Reich . Munich 1989; 3rd revised edition 1999, pp. 168–173.
  • Eva Züchner: The missing journalist. A German story . Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8270-0896-1 , in particular pp. 98-111.

Web links

Wikiquote: Hans Schwarz van Berk  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe Backes : Right-wing extremist ideologies in past and present , 2003, p. 58.
  2. ↑ Stefan Breuer, Ina Schmidt: The coming ones. A magazine of the Bündische Jugend (1926–1933). Wochenschau Verlag, Schwalbach / Taunus 2010, p. 415.
  3. ↑ Willi A. Boelcke (Ed.): War Propaganda 1939-1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Stuttgart 1966, p. 111
  4. ^ Hartmut Jäckel : People in Berlin. The last telephone directory of the old capital 1941 , Stuttgart 2000, p. 41.
  5. ^ Eva Züchner: The missing journalist. A German story. Berlin 2010, p. 100.
  6. ↑ quoted from: Eva Züchner: The missing journalist . P. 101.
  7. ^ Ralf Georg Reuth : Goebbels , 1990, p. 716.
personal data
SURNAME Schwarz van Berk, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hansen, Hans (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and National Socialist
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Wermelskirchen
DATE OF DEATH 2nd January 1973
Place of death Goettingen