Ruhr newspaper
The Ruhr Zeitung was after the Second World War, the biggest German-language newspaper in the (first American-occupied) Ruhr . It initially appeared twice a week with a circulation of around 1.5 million copies.
history
The Ruhr Zeitung was the first newspaper that was published by the American army command four days after the capitulation, namely on May 12, 1945, as a "German-language occupation newspaper" in the Ruhr area. The printing house was on Sachsenstrasse in Essen ; It was previously called Reismann-Grone-Haus and had served Nazi propaganda as a publishing house and printer for the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung , which was then synchronized .
Hans Habe , an emigrant who had returned as a US officer and responsible for rebuilding the German newspaper system, said he chose the Essen location because of its role as the “most important city in the German industrial center”, but also “because Göring's personal organ here, the National newspaper that was published “.
A month later, after the Americans had ceded their sovereignty over North Rhine-Westphalia to the British Army, the license conditions that had been given to Hans Habe and Stefan Heym also changed . Instead of this American licensing policy based purely on personal trust, the British relied entirely on equal, party-based awarding. The editorial office was relocated to Dortmund, and the publication of the newspaper was transferred on April 16, 1946 to the publisher Dietrich Oppenberg , who had previously founded the Rhein-Echo published in Düsseldorf . In the meantime, the circulation had dropped to 750,000 copies because there were now a number of licensed new publications on the newspaper market.
With the merger of the Rheinische Zeitung , the Ruhr Zeitung and the takeover of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (also a British army newspaper that appeared in Düsseldorf), Oppenberg finally succeeded in continuing as the Neue Rhein Zeitung (Cologne, Düsseldorf, Niederrhein) and Neue Ruhr Zeitung (Ruhr area, Wuppertal, Solingen).
literature
- Elisabeth Matz: The newspapers of the US Army for the German population (1944-1946) . Münster: Verlag CJ Fahle, 1969
- Hans Habe: Im Jahre Null , Heyne Verlag: München 1981, esp. P. 62 f .; ISBN 3-453-00719-0 .
- Hero child: Dietrich Oppenberg. For his seventieth birthday , Essen 1987 (Festschrift of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Verlagsgesellschaft).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans Habe: In the year zero. A contribution to the history of the German press. Kurt Desch publishing house, Munich 1966, p. 62.