Walther Heide

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Walther Alexander Heide , seldom also written Walter Heide , (* April 23, 1894 in Iserlohn ; † missing since 1945) was a German newspaper scientist and civil servant.

Live and act

Youth, Education and World War I (1894 to 1920)

Heide was a son of the elementary school director and social politician Heinrich Heide and his wife Wilhelmine Knoche. After attending grammar school, from which he graduated from high school, Heide studied history , German , philosophy and economics in Berlin , Marburg and Münster . He later took part in the First World War, in which he was promoted to first lieutenant and decorated with high honors. After the war, from which he returned home seriously wounded, he completed a traineeship at the Dortmund City Library. 1920 doctorate he at Aloys champion in Muenster with a thesis on social policy issues of Dortmund from the period up to the middle of the 17th century to Dr. phil . In the same year he married the factory owner's daughter Margarethe Busch (1882–1963) in Münster. The marriage resulted in two sons and two daughters.

Weimar Republic (1920 to 1933)

After completing his studies, Heide became head of a correspondence for foreign policy. From 1921 to 1922 he was the editor-in-chief of the press service of the Volksbund “Save the honor” in Bremen . In addition, he came out through some pamphlets on political issues of the day. In particular, he turned against the French occupation of the Ruhr area. Politically, Heide belonged to the German People's Party (DVP), with whose chairman Gustav Stresemann he was personally friends.

In 1923 Heide joined the United Press Department of the Reich Government and the Foreign Office . From this he was initially employed in the Hanover regional department of the Reich Central Office for Homeland Service . In 1927 he first became head of the Hanover branch of the Heimatdienst, before moving to the Berlin press department in the same year, which at the time was organisationally (but not spatially) housed in the Foreign Office. In the press department, he became deputy head of the department for internal and foreign policy. In 1929 he was promoted to the upper government council. In June 1932, Heide was appointed as the successor to Hermann Katzenberger as head of Section I (domestic section) in the press department. After the impeachment of the Prussian state government by the Reich government of Papen in the course of the so-called Prussian strike , the press office in the Prussian State Ministry was also incorporated into the domestic department and thus under Heide's control. Heide's important collaborators in the domestic department included the liberal journalist Werner Stephan and the conservative intelligence agent Herbert von Bose . According to Haacke, Heide tried in vain to shield Reich President Paul von Hindenburg from growing Nazi influences.

Also according to Haacke, Heide was appointed Deputy Reich Press Chief in 1932. In contrast, other sources indicate that he was appointed to this office in 1933, after the Hitler government took office. In any case, it is certain that Heide was appointed lecturer in the Legation Council a few days before the appointment of the Hitler cabinet in January 1933.

Period of National Socialism (1933 to 1945)

After the National Socialists came to power , Heide served as Walter Funk's deputy press chief until he left the press department on May 31, 1933 . In this capacity he was a representative of the Reich government on the administrative boards of the newspaper science institutes in Berlin and Heidelberg. When the press department of the Reich Government was removed from its previous division in the Foreign Office by the National Socialists in the spring of 1933 and incorporated into the newly created Propaganda Ministry as Department IV (Press) , Heide took over the organization of this administrative transfer.

In the summer of 1933 Heide was released from his ministry activities for "special tasks in the field of the press". Instead, he took over the full-time organization of newspaper science. He was also appointed "curator" of the foreign press. In this context, he was given the management of the so-called foreign press office. This was a company founded by the Reich government, which carried out foreign media-related tasks, the direct fulfillment of which by the Reich authorities did not seem necessary for political reasons. In practice, the foreign press office supplied the German-language press abroad with articles and news and at the same time brought together information from abroad for Reich authorities. On the one hand, this office also accommodated journalists who were unpopular with the regime, and on the other hand, it ultimately served to prepare for the aggressive foreign policy of the Hitler government. After the war, the foreign press office headed by Heide - who otherwise figured mostly as a conservative Nazi skeptic in literature - was critically judged as an instrument of the National Socialist policy of conquest that, in the case of Czechoslovakia, for example, it was a "disguised office of the Propaganda Ministry [ …] [For years] carried out secret missions in Czechoslovakia and carried out investigative work through the other camouflaged offices he directed.

On June 22, 1933, Heide was also elected President of this body at the first meeting of the Association for Newspaper Science (DZV), which he himself had founded and organized. In this capacity he was in fact concerned with the alignment of organized newspaper research.

In May 1933, the National Socialists awarded Heide an honorary professorship for newspaper studies at the Technical University of Berlin . According to Siegert, however, this was more about awarding the title than establishing an ongoing scientific operation. It was not until May 1942 that the Institute for Newspaper Studies, initiated in 1939, was founded at the University of Vienna at Heide's instigation . He was also a member of the Presidential Council of the Reich Press Chamber and since 1935 a member of the Reich Culture Senate. On December 1, 1937, Heide joined the NSDAP.

After the conquest of Berlin by the Red Army in April / May 1945, Heide was arrested by the Soviet military police near Berlin in September (NDB) or on November 29 (Hachmeister) 1945. He has been missing since then. On November 22, 1957, he was officially declared dead by the Berlin-Tiergarten District Court .

Heides role in the development of newspaper science

Heide first appeared as a lecturer in the winter semester of 1923/1924 when he was giving lectures on press issues at the Technical University of Hanover . At this time he began to deal increasingly with propaganda and in particular with the newspaper medium , which he identified as a central instrument for achieving victory in domestic and international disputes: He saw it as a decisive component of the Allied victory over the German Reich in World War I. the superiority of the propaganda of the Western Powers over that of the Reich - especially the Northcliffe press - which had succeeded in quickly winning world opinion in favor of the Allies and against the cause of the Central Powers. He interprets the French occupation of the Ruhr area in a similar way, in which the superiority of the French opinion-forming apparatus over the German was responsible for France's victory in this conflict for the sympathies in the United States, which are decisive for the occupation and reparations policy.

Following his ideas consistently, Heide was one of the founders of newspaper studies as an independent scientific discipline in the 1920s, alongside Josef März . In order to promote her discipline, Heide and his friend Karl d'Ester founded the journal Zeitungswissenschaft in 1926 , which was the first specialist body to dedicate itself to international newspaper research. The organ was published as a monthly for almost twenty years, until 1944. Guided by the credo “We come from the newspaper, we stay with the newspaper” - and probably also motivated by the concern about losing his rank as a prominent figure in his research branch - Heide vigorously opposed the expansion of newspaper science in the following twenty years to a subject area “Publication Studies”.

Under the pressure of the totalitarian regime of the Nazi era, Heide did, according to Haacke's assessment, a lot of good for his subject: for example, there was a professorship in Munich , a lectureship in Freiburg im Breisgau and the aforementioned institute in Vienna, created in 1939 and realized in 1942 thanks to his initiative. He is said to have used his office as president of the Newspaper Association to protect the next generation from fanatics. As an example of Heide's moral courage , Haacke cites the incident that he had the handbook of newspaper science, which he was responsible for as editor, abort in the middle of the publication of the article “Communist Press” as having become scientifically hopeless when the preliminary censorship by the Reich Security Main Office and the Propaganda Ministry gave him and his coworkers became unbearable as nudity.

Fonts

  • Social conditions and social policy up to the middle of the 17th century , s. l. 1920 (dissertation)
  • Germany's "violations" of international law in the judgment of hostile and neutral voices ... (= Vol. 6 of pamphlets of the anchor), Berlin 1922.
  • Up again! A guide for the German people , 1922. (Editor)
  • International condemnation of the Versailles Treaty , 1923.
  • French Ruhr propaganda , Bielefeld 1923.
  • Research reports on the history of the press , Leipzig 1924.
  • Newspaper science. Monthly for international newspaper research , 19th year, 1926–1944.
  • Newspaper collections and collection points in Germany. A content and library overview , Berlin 1928.
  • Diplomacy and press. Lecture , Cologne 1930.
  • The oldest printed newspaper , Mainz 1931.
  • Handbook of German-language newspapers abroad , 2nd volume, Essen 1935. (2nd edition 1940) (editor, together with A. Gildemeister)
  • How did I study newspaper science? , Essen 1938. (3rd edition 1943)
  • Where did the oldest printed newspaper appear? , Essen 1940.
  • Guide to studying newspaper science , 1943.
  • The future of German newspaper science , s. l. 1941.
  • The significance of Silesia for the development of German press and news policy. Lecture on the 200th anniversary of the “Schlesische Zeitung” on January 3, 1942 , Breslau 1942.
  • Youth and the press. Communist press , 1943.
  • How do I study newspaper science? Essen, 1943.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In 1957 Heide was officially declared dead (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik: Publizistik , vol. 46, 2001, p. 47.)
  2. ^ Karl d'Ester / Wilhelm Klutentreter: Contributions to newspaper science , 1952, p. 37.
  3. ↑ Siegert: Media Economics in Communication Studies , 2002, p. 118.
  4. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six , 1998, p. 97.
personal data
SURNAME Heath, Walther
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heath, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German newspaper scholar and civil servant
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Iserlohn
DATE OF DEATH 20th century