On December 21, 1924, the New York Times arguably made the worst prediction in the history of modern journalism: “His behavior during imprisonment convinced authorities that…[he] was no longer to be feared,” the report stated. “It is believed he will retire to private life and return to Austria, the country of his birth.” The “he” of the article was Adolf Hitler and, needless to say, he didn’t return to private life or, for any real amount of time, to Austria. The man that the Times article reported as being both “sadder” and “wiser” than when he was first imprisoned went on to construct one of humanity’s darkest regimes, ignited a war that killed tens of millions of people, and engineered the world’s first program of mechanized genocide, making him the last person a reader of the Times should think “was no longer to be feared.”
The Times had been covering Hitler for more than two years by the time of the paper’s disastrously wrong prediction about the future dictator’s post-prison retirement. In those two years, Hitler had managed to raise a small army and had breathed an anti-Semitic fire into the hearts of people in Bavaria, where he first catapulted himself to power, as well as in many other parts of Germany. Two years before his release from prison, on November 20, 1922, the Times reported that Hitler had already organized a fanatical group of extremists, called National Socialists, which had begun “smouldering beneath the surface.” But by the time of that November 1922 article, the Times reporter wrote that the movement had “eaten its way through, and a conflagration of course is not only possible but certain if this now free flame of fanatical patriotism finds sufficient popular combustible material to feed on.”
Fifteen years later, on August 31, 1939, Hitler put into action one of the most flagrant scams in the history of the modern world. In order to give Germany a reason and a right to begin its war of European conquest, he and a number of Gestapo propagandists and henchmen (including Heinrich Müller, who would be made head of the Gestapo a month later) concocted a scheme to make it seem as if neighboring Poland had attacked Germany. With a bit of crude but bold propaganda, the Second World War began.
The New York Times bought the Nazi dupe without flinching. Underneath its famous banner, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” the paper reported that, according to “Chancellor Hitler,” Germany had been attacked. Already in the second paragraph of the Times’s front-page article, the reporter, Otto Tolischus, went on to reprint verbatim Hitler’s infamous war speech to the Reichstag, which the Führer used to justify to the world, as much as to the German people, his invasion of Poland.3
Between the pages, the Times went into detail, reporting that Polish attacks had been carried out against Germany at a German radio station in Gleiwitz—and other points along the border. The report was written in the Times’s characteristically deliberating and objective tone and presented the “facts” of the events that would lead to humanity’s most horrifying war.
“At 8 P.M., according to the semi-official news agency,” the Times report stated, “a group of Polish insurrectionists forced an entrance into the Gleiwitz radio station [in Germany], overpowering the watchmen and beating and generally mishandling the attendants. The Gleiwitz station was relaying a Breslau station’s program, which was broken off by the Poles.”
The problem, however, was that the times, places, names, and the events themselves, as they were reported by the Times, were all Nazi fabrications. With the publication of Nazi propaganda on the pages of the most trusted newspaper of the world’s greatest democracy, the Führer and his top propagandists got more than they could have hoped for from “Operation Himmler.”
