AP controversially kept photojournalists in Nazi Germany. But is that the whole picture?

When the Associated Press sought to cover Germany in the 1930s, the bold step it took during the Weimar Republic became controversial under the Third Reich.

Germany was front-page news, and the US-based news syndicate was interested enough to create a German subsidiary company to provide photos. This subsidiary, called the AP GmbH, was registered in Germany, with German employees. Its photographers visually documented key stories within and outside Germany, from Kristallnacht to the Spanish Civil War. AP GmbH photos went to American and German clients — proving lucrative for the AP. Yet ethical concerns materialized when Hitler took power.

When antisemitic legislation resulted in the AP GmbH’s Jewish employees losing their jobs, the AP did not publicly protest. It maintained the American reporters in its Berlin bureau and the German photographers in the AP GmbH. Only Hitler’s declaration of war on the US in 1941 shuttered the AP’s Berlin bureau.

Now, a new book explores what happens when a self-styled impartial news organization finds itself operating within a dictatorship and the moral compromises it might make in doing so. “Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany” by Larry Heinzerling and Randy Herschaft, with a foreword by Ann Cooper, was published by Columbia University Press last year, and holds added resonance as reporters cover the Israel-Hamas war and Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“There’s a lot of nuance in everything that happened,” Cooper said in a joint Zoom interview with Herschaft and The Times of Israel. “Randy and Larry produced a really in-depth and nuanced look at all the challenges [the AP] faced … and how it dealt with all the challenges.”

Poignantly, 41-year AP veteran Heinzerling died several years before publication, in 2021. His widow, Cooper, once headed the Committee to Protect Journalists and is a professor emerita at the Columbia Journalism School. She completed the book with Herschaft, himself a longtime AP journalist. In 2000, he was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team that documented an American military atrocity from the Korean War.

In 2016, the AP decided to investigate its conduct before and during World War II following charges of ethical misconduct by German historian Harriet Scharnberg. The agency launched its own probe under its vice president and editor at large for standards, John Daniszewski, who entrusted Heinzerling and Herschaft to co-lead the initiative. They compiled a report in 2017 and then broadened it into a book.

The era they studied is poignant for both collaborators. Heinzerling’s late father, Lynn Heinzerling, had been a “newshawk” or reporter in the AP Berlin bureau. Herschaft lost a relative in the Holocaust — Jerusalem-born Solomon Sachs, who disappeared at Auschwitz. Herschaft, who comes from a Conservative Jewish Brooklyn family, has done extensive reporting related to the Holocaust and Nazi war criminals who escaped to the US.

As the book explains, in the 1930s, the AP represented 1,200-plus newspapers that shared resources to cover stories, with a geographically diverse total readership numbering tens of millions of Americans.

Then-general manager Kent Cooper wanted more. He recognized that major international stories were unfolding in Germany and spotted opportunities for expanded coverage through photography. Thus, the 1931 creation of the AP Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, or GmbH, meaning “limited liability company.”

“[It] enabled the AP to make photographs available to photography subscribers around the world,” Herschaft said. “It was a cash cow, a money maker, helping to subsidize AP news operations not only in Berlin but in Europe. The biggest story was, of course, Germany. Pictures were an important element of that.”

The new regime

In 1933, the German state changed from Weimar to the Third Reich. The new regime quickly butted heads with the AP.

“[The AP GmbH] was a German-registered corporation, therefore more subject to Nazi controls than the bureau where the foreign correspondents worked,” Ann Cooper said. “Because it was German-registered, it was forced to obey things like the Editor’s Law [of 1934, which said] only Aryans could work in media, they could not be married to a Jewish citizen, so the employees of the GmbH were much more subject to pressure from the Nazi government. Threats to them were very real.”

The AP ultimately complied with the Editor’s Law, although it quietly worked to mitigate the effects.

“It did let go of Jewish employees,” Cooper said. “But it helped those employees get out of Germany. All of those who were dismissed survived the Holocaust. In some cases, they were helped by the AP to get to the US — or at least out of the immediate danger they were in, in Germany. It’s a more complex story.”

Photography is the throughline for other controversies involving the AP and Nazi Germany.

Some AP photos were repurposed in antisemitic Nazi propaganda. The agency retained AP GmbH photographers even upon the outbreak of WWII, when they were compelled to do double duty by the Reich as uniformed propagandists for the German military. The book documents the case of Franz Roth, a soldier-photographer in the Waffen-SS who took pictures of Soviet POWs on the Eastern Front. Some were circulated through the AP to its members.

After the US joined the conflict, the AP greenlit a secret photo-exchange arrangement with a German agency, the Büro Laux. Its namesake, Helmut Laux, was the official photographer for the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. An April 1943 Büro Laux image, showing Hitler and Mussolini shaking hands, is reproduced in the book.

“The news value of photos was in great demand,” Herschaft said. “As we say in the book, [Kent Cooper] prioritized business over moral and ethical issues… he gave the green light to the photo exchange.”

This was no brief relationship but a sustained partnership channeled through neutral Portugal, involving an estimated 10,000 photos over the last three years of the war — the subject of a postwar US military investigation.

“In the end, that’s the most questionable activity of the AP throughout this whole period,” Cooper said.

There was courage in the narrative, too. Louis Lochner, the AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bureau chief in Berlin, agonized over the plight of German Jews. Although Lochner’s patriotism was questioned in the same postwar investigation that probed the Büro Laux, in wartime, he smuggled out an offer from the anti-Hitler resistance to connect with the Roosevelt administration.

“Louis Lochner was a pacifist,” Herschaft said. “He took it upon himself to be an intermediary between Germans and Americans.”

When the authors explored to what extent the AP covered the Holocaust, they found that — contrary to the perception of an American press that ignored or downplayed the Shoah — the agency had been something of a pioneer. AP reporter Eddy Gilmore was embedded within the Red Army when it visited the site of the Babyn Yar massacre in Ukraine. Colleague Dan De Luce, also embedded within the Russian military, was there when it liberated Majdanek.

“In the summer of 1944, the AP reported on the first eyewitness reports and horrifying black and white photographs of Nazi gas chambers and crematoriums used for mass murder of Jews first from Soviet media and shortly after an AP reporter produced a vivid firsthand account of Majdanek’s death camp,” Herschaft said. “It was a powerful revelation and published more than seven months before the Allied liberations of the camps at Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, which for many Americans are remembered when the world first viewed the full horror of the Holocaust.”

“Many months before the Allies liberated camps in the West — Buchenwald, Dachau — that information [by De Luce] ran in many newspapers,” Ann Cooper said. “Not everybody ran it. Not everybody ran it on page one. The information was there. To say it was ignored by the American press overlooks this.”

Ongoing conflicts and controversies

The book was released amid two ongoing conflicts that have underscored the importance of media access to breaking news: The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip that followed the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror onslaught on Israel.

“I think a big theme in the book is the importance of being there on the ground, being able to see and report independently or evenly in situations,” Cooper said. “AP reporters went on trips escorted by the Nazi military or by the Red Army … Being there, being able to see, is just so important.”

With Russia-Ukraine, she said, “We see plenty of reporting from the Ukrainian side. Reporting from the Russian side is far, far more difficult.” Regarding the Israel-Hamas war, she noted, “I think we hear many complaints from journalists — not just the AP, all of the news organizations — trying to cover the war that they have almost no access to Gaza and what is happening there.”

The Defense Ministry says it offers journalists escorted tours into Gaza, citing security concerns for prohibiting free access into the Strip. An Israeli High Court ruling last year upholding the ministry’s stance cited concerns that allowing foreign journalists to move around Gaza independently could endanger troops or lead to their positions being compromised.

Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the AP’s apparent willingness to work with perpetrators of atrocities to gain unparalleled access to earth-shaking news events continues to engender controversy.

In February 2024, a number of survivors of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the families of victims sued the AP in a US federal court in Florida, accusing the agency of being complicit in the invasion by working with freelancers embedded with terrorists, including Hassan Eslaiah, whom Israel has accused of being a member of Hamas.

After the lawsuit was filed, AP called the case “baseless” and said that none of its freelancers had foreknowledge of the attack.

Filings in the lawsuit released this month, however, showed that AP staff had been informed of Eslaiah’s Hamas ties in 2018 and worried about his reliability.

“He effectively participated in the October 7 attack, although he may not have pulled any triggers, and the Associated Press all along has been suggesting that this is somebody who just happened to be there,” said Etan Mark, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs. “The Associated Press knew before October 7th that this guy was likely a terrorist, but nonetheless continued to pay him.”

The AP downplayed the messages in a statement to The Times of Israel and said claims that the documents showed staff were aware of Eslaiah’s Hamas support, and that AP staff doubted his independence and reliability, were a “mischaracterization.”

Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany by Larry Heinzerling and Randy Herschaft

Luke Tress contributed to this report.

This article contains affiliate links. If you use these links to make a purchase, The Times of Israel may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.