Richard Breiting

Richard Breiting (born November 24, 1882 in Dittmannsdorf ; † April 26 or 27, 1937 in Leipzig ) was a German journalist .

Live and act

Breiting was the son of a landowner. On January 1, 1903, he joined the Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten , the largest newspaper in Saxony at the time, as editor . For this he initially headed the so-called city ​​newspaper for many years .

In the years before the First World War he was a representative of the Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten in Dresden .

After the November Revolution of 1918, Berung became deputy editor-in-chief of Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten and in August 1922 editor-in-chief of the newspaper. In addition, Breiting was a lecturer at the department for business journalism and newspaper management at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management . He was a member of the German People's Party (DVP).

In the 1920s, Breiting undertook extensive trips to the Middle East, Mediterranean countries and the United States , about which he published extensive travel reports in book form.

Posthumous forgery: Hitler-Breiting interviews

In the 1960s, Edouard Calic published a number of interviews under the title Without Mask , which Breiting allegedly conducted with Adolf Hitler in 1931 and in which Hitler expresses himself in an unusually explicit way about his political ideas and plans. After the publication of these documents by numerous historians and journalists, such as B. Golo Mann , who wrote the foreword for the edition of the Hitler-Breiting Talks, Sebastian Haffner ("a historical document of the first order") and Joachim Fest , who had been praised as an important contribution to Hitler research , have been praised since the early In the 1970s, doubts about the authenticity of the alleged minutes of the conversation increased loudly. In this sense, for example, the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Hans Mommsen expressed their opinion, especially with reference to the anachronisms of content that pervaded the text (for example, in these statements allegedly made in 1931, Hitler referred to politicians and military leaders in Germany and from abroad, which in truth only moved up into leading positions years later, while he did not mention the actually decisive personalities at home and abroad in his remarks in 1931) as well as linguistic abnormalities that were characteristic of the text (e.g. the usage of vocabulary and formulations unusual for Hitler). The political scientist Uwe Backes was able to show, for example, that Hitler used the term “extremism” in the minutes, which was still extremely unusual in German in the 1930s, and that he also used it in a way that was Contradicted the ideological self-image of the National Socialists. The criticism brought against the Hitler-Breiting talks became more and more concrete over time in the accusation that the publisher Calic wrote the minutes of the talks himself or at least significantly expanded and changed the originals or had falsified texts "turned on" spread this.

Since the 1980s, the position that the Hitler-Breiting interviews are a fake has largely prevailed in specialist research.

Fonts

• Of skyscrapers, chain workers and arid cities. Impressions and observations about “God's own country” , E. Herfurth, Leipzig 1925.

literature

• Reichs Handbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft - The handbook of personalities in words and pictures . First volume, Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1930, ISBN 3-598-30664-4
• Wilhelm Kosch (Ed.): German Literature Lexicon. The 20th century. Volume 4, 2012, column 140f.
• Fr .: "Hauptschriftleiter Richard Behre †", in: Archive for Press Law: Newspaper Science. Volume 12, p. 468.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Edouard Calic: Without a mask. Hitler, Breiting. Secret talks 1931. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt 1968
2. ↑ Hitler as a seducer. Sweet horror for the bourgeoisie , in: The time of February 21, 1969 ( digitized ).
3. ↑ Hugh Trevor-Roper in: The Times of March 7, 1971 and Hans Mommsen in: Der Spiegel No. 37/1972.
4. ↑ Uwe Backes: Political Extremism in Democratic Constitutional States Elements of a Normative Framework Theory , 2013, p. 61.
5. ↑ Thomas Schirmacher: Hitler's War Religion , 2007, p. 43; Rainer Zitelmann: Adolf Hitler: a political biography , 1988, p. 8.