Military newspaper
A military newspaper is understood to be a newspaper that is published by military authorities or soldiers and is aimed either at its own or opposing soldiers or at the opposing civilian population.
Newspaper type
The publication of newspapers is an activity traditionally carried out not only by civil authorities and private publishers, but also by the military. The occasions and target groups for which such newspapers are published are relatively diverse: Military newspapers appear in both war and peacetime, they are intended to inform and propagandistically influence their own soldiers, enemy troops and the opposing civilian population .
The newspapers are usually produced by specially commissioned special military agencies. But especially in the months of positional wars of the First World War , they were also produced by the military base ("Schützengrabenzeitung").
Systematization
The naming of these newspapers is inconsistent. On the one hand, the designation does not differentiate between the different functions; on the other hand, there are different designations for the same type of newspaper. The German newspapers produced for their own troops were called “field newspapers”, “war newspapers”, “soldier newspapers” and, during World War II, also “ front newspapers ”. “Soldier's newspapers” are also used in the literature to refer to all sheets produced for soldiers, regardless of the fact that the function and task of these sheets differ greatly in times of war and times of peace.
In a systematic way, the following are counted among the military newspapers as a whole:
- Field or war newspapers produced by military services for their own units or by soldiers of their own accord for their comrades (trench newspapers);
- Camp newspapers or prisoner-of-war newspapers published for enemy soldiers prisoners of war;
- Newspapers published during a military operation as a propaganda newspaper for the opposing troops or the hostile civilian population;
- In addition, regular daily newspapers that printed special jubilation editions at the beginning of the war were referred to as 'war newspapers', just as, especially in later years of the war, for economic reasons, emergency newspapers of reduced size and / or size were referred to as war newspapers.
Schematically, the different functions and names of the military newspapers can be sorted as follows:
| target group | common names | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| War phase / foreign deployment | Home use | ||
| Own troops | War, front , soldiers, army or field newspaper, field camp magazine and trench newspaper | Soldiers newspaper | |
| Opponent. troops | Camp newspaper , (military) propaganda newspaper | - | |
| Opponent. Civilian population | Propaganda newspaper , occupation newspaper , army groups - Armeegruppen- or Front newspaper | - | |
| General military public | Military. Trade journals |
Field newspaper
Field newspapers are published for soldiers who are at war (or today also on foreign deployments). The aim of these newspapers is to inform the soldiers, who mostly do not have access to their usual newspapers during the war, about the political and military situation. At the same time, these newspapers serve to guide opinion, for example to maintain combat strength and counteract enemy propaganda .
The first field newspapers to be produced for their own troops were the Argus du département et de l'armée du Nord and Le Postillon des armées , published by the French revolutionary armies from 1782 to 1794 . The Geprüfte Tagschrift of the entire combined armies appeared in German in 1794 and the Bremen newspaper from the camp in 1813 .
In the German-speaking world, the field newspapers experienced their heyday in the First World War after an initial high point in the Wars of Liberation from 1813 to 1815, with probably more than 115 titles. During the Second World War, more than 40 of these newspapers, which were also known as front newspapers at that time, appeared.
After 1945, German military agencies (the Army Command , Koblenz, which at the time led the missions abroad) first published field newspapers and camp magazines again in January 1997. First was initially for in Bosnia and Herzegovina stationed SFOR Troops "The Boar" on the Croatian Adriatic coast Bundeswehr soldiers used the IFOR designed after the Mine Clearing " Keiler was named". In 1998 the field newspaper Maz & More (m & m) for the German part of KFOR followed in Macedonia and later in Kosovo . Unofficially, m & m, like "Der Keiler", was also made for the German-speaking Swiss , Austrian and Italian troops in Bosnia and the Prizren area. The chief editors and editors of the respective editorial teams consisted mostly of reservists or print journalists who also worked in the civilian profession. The Keiler reached a circulation of up to 3,000 copies and appeared in 1997 and 2002 temporarily in two languages, German and French for the Franco-German brigade and German and Italian for the German-Italian SFOR contingent. 2008, d. H. With the withdrawal of most of the German troops (now EUFOR ) from Bosnia-Herzegovina and the subsequent closure of the field camps in Mostar (Herzegovina) and later in Rajlovac (Sarajevo / Bosnia), The Boar was discontinued.
In January 2011, Maz & More, the last official field newspaper, was discontinued. To this day there is no longer an official field newspaper. The German soldiers stationed in Afghanistan ( ISAF ) do not have their own field newspaper.
Trench newspaper
Unofficial field newspapers have also been produced by the soldiers themselves since the First World War. The propaganda part was mostly missing here and the newspapers had more entertaining and humorous content. An example of this can be the received beer newspaper from the crew of the U-boat U 2540 , which was published for the commissioning of the boat and for the initial assembly of the crew. The sheets, which were initially mostly produced with the most primitive means in the immediate vicinity of the front, had the function of compensating for the psychological stress of the war. They were intended for a small readership. After the censors took notice of the papers, the military developed them into regular field papers.
Camp newspaper
Camp newspapers only came into being with the modern war and the large number of prisoners of war arising in this context. In particular after the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Allies, there were a large number of German-language camp newspapers, around 1946 and 1947 the camp newspaper of Camp 127 in Chateauroux , France , the camp newspaper in Colmar and in 1947 the camp newspaper des Dépôt 105 in Strasbourg . Corresponding titles are only sparsely documented on the German side, e.g. for 1941 the camp newspapers Klic (Der Ruf) for Russian or Nova doba (New Time) for Ukrainian prisoners of war. In the German “Oflag 64” (short for officers' camp 64 ) in Szubin , Poland , the American officers imprisoned there published the camp newspaper ITEM between 1943 and 1945 , which, in addition to cultural and satirical articles , mainly reported on sports activities in the camp.
Occupation newspaper
see also main article: Army Group Press
Military journal
Military journals inform an interested public about "the latest facilities and regulations in the armies and troop corps of all states and the new phenomena in the military world". These include papers such as the Allgemeine Militärzeitung , the Austrian Military Journal or the Military Weekly .
Web links
- digitized field newspapers from the First World War
literature
- Markus Pöhlmann (ed.): German military journals in the 20th century. Published on behalf of the Military History Research Office . BoD - Books on Demand, 2012.
See also
swell
- ↑ Archive of the camp newspaper ITEM the German Oflag 64
- ↑ General military newspaper No. 1/1826.