Axel Cäsar Springer (2 May 1912 – 22 September 1985) was a German publisher and founder of what is now Axel Springer SE, the largest media publishing firm in Europe. By the early 1960s his print titles dominated the West German daily press market. His Bild Zeitung became the nation's tabloid.
In the late 1960s, Springer entered into confrontation with the emergent New Left. Hostile coverage of student protests and a continuing rightward drift in editorial comment were met with boycotts and printing-press blockades, and later in 1972 with the bombing of the company offices by the Red Army Faction (the "Baader Meinhof Gang").
In the late 1970s, exposés of journalistic malpractice by the investigative reporter Günter Wallraff led to Press Council reprimands. Sometimes referred to as Germany's Rupert Murdoch, Springer, with counter suits and minor divestments, was able to ride out public criticism of his editorial ethics and market dominance.
Springer engaged in private diplomacy in Moscow in 1958 and, with greater recognition, in Jerusalem in 1966 and 1967. In addition to promotion and defence of the values of the "Western family of nations" and NATO, Springer declared "reconciliation of Jews and Germans and support for the vital rights of the State of Israel" to be a leitmotif of his company's journalism.Corporate Principles, Values and Guidelines of Axel Springer AG
Career under the Hitler regime Axel Caesar Springer was born on 2 May 1912 in Altona, a borough of Hamburg, the son of Ottilie (née Müller) and Hinrich Springer. The senior Springer owned a small printing and publishing firm, Hammerich & Lesser-Verla, and was the treasurer of the centrist or centre-left German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei).
After being apprenticed as a compositor he worked on his father’s paper, Altonaer Nachrichten. Following Hitler's assumption of untrammeled power in 1933, new press ordinances made Springer directly accountable to the Ministry of Propaganda, although as editor of the sports and business pages he may have remained relatively free of Nazi-party dictation. After paper shortages shut the daily in 1941, he stayed with the firm printing literary works until Allied air raids in 1944 destroyed both the business premises and the family home.von Arnim, Tim (2012): "Und dann werde ich das größte Zeitungshaus Europas bauen.“ Der Unternehmer Axel Springer. Campus, Frankfurt am Main, p. 275,
Notwithstanding its vilification by the Nazis, Springer was a jazz enthusiast. He played with the possibility of a career in music. His model was the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber, a star of both film and operatic stage who, having a Jewish parent, was also deprecated by the regime.
In 1933, Springer married Martha Else Meyer, whose father (like Tauber's) was Jewish. They divorced in 1938. While the divorce papers list Springer's infidelity as grounds (he would have five wives over the course of his 73 years), by 1938 it was clear that his marriage to a person classified, under the new race laws, as a "half-Jew", a Mischling, would bar him as an editor and publisher. Springer would later support both Meyer and her mother, who survived the Theresienstadt Ghetto. After the war Springer commented: "I cannot say I didn't know what was happening. In 1933 I stood on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and watched Nazi Storm Troopers beating up old Jews. I was a young man, and I couldn't do anything about it. But I never forgot it".
In 1934, Springer joined the National Socialist Motorist Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, NSKK). He later claimed that this was to secure "a Nazi-uniformed buffer" for his family "in an organization that did not make any major ideological commitments and that allowed politics to be combined with the motorsport that I loved so much.” Other NSKK members who would go on to occupy prominent positions in the post-war Federal Republic offered similar careerist explanations, among them Springer's future rival in publishing Franz Burda, Franz Josef Strauss who was to lead Bavaria's ruling Christian Social Union, and (a purportedly inactive party member) Kurt Georg Kiesinger, West Germany's third Chancellor. Contrary to their picture of a relatively "apolitical" motorist club, the NSKK was a paramilitary organisation, implicated in the regime's racist policy of exclusion and discrimination (it screened its members for Aryan traits) and in the anti-semitic pogroms of 1938.
German press lord From Hörzu to Bild and Die Welt
After the war, in 1946, Springer founded his own publishing company, Axel Springer GmbH, in Hamburg publishing the radio (and later TV) listings magazine Hörzu. Never having worn a uniform (thanks to asthma and diabetes) or been a member of the Nazi party (from which, by virtue of his marriage to Martha Meyer, he would have been excluded),Grau, Günter (2010): Lexikon zur Homosexuellenverfolgung 1933–1945: Institutionen – Kompetenzen – Betätigungsfelder. Lit-Verlag, Münster/ Berlin, p. 267. Springer was able to obtain from the British occupation authorities a license to run a newspaper. His first daily was the Hamburger Abendblatt. Competing in Hamburg with the five other dailies, Springer offered a paper he described as "geared to the underdog and the little man", and perfected a formula he launched on the national market in 1952 with Bild Zeitung.
Fed a tabloid mix of sensation, scandal, celebrity, sports and horoscopes, the Bild readership peaked in the mid-1960s at 4.5 million. It had the largest circulation of any newspaper in Western Europe or North America. Bild allowed Springer the luxury of his 1953 acquisition, the national broadsheet Die Welt, a loss maker but a rival to the newspapers of record, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
In 1956, Springer secured a 26% share in Berlin's prestigious Ullstein publishing house, which in 1952 had been restored to the Jewish family who had originally owned it. He became the majority shareholder at the end of 1959 acquiring, among other titles, the Berliner Morgenpost. Springer celebrated Ullstein as having been, in the Weimar years, the symbol of a Jewish-German liberal-democratic tradition, but at the same time his critics were to note, in line with Die Welt and Bild, a decisive rightward shift in editorial policy.
Zehrer and the approach to Moscow Springer's choice as chief editor for Die Welt was controversial. Hans Zehrer was a veteran of the Kapp Putsch of 1920, and in the last Weimar years had been the editor of the nationalist and anti-republican journal Die Tat.Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 edited by Philip Rees (1991, ), pp. 417–418. In 1946, he had been removed from the then British-controlled Die Welt after protests from Britain's Labour government and from the Social Democrats then governing Hamburg.Demant, Ebbo (1971) Hans Zehrer als politischer Publizist. Von Schleicher zu Springer, Verlag von Hase und Köhler, Mainz 1971, .
At Die Welt Springer allowed Zehrer to entertain the idea of an Austrian solution for Germany. In 1955, Austria had regained its unity and independence through a four-power agreement guaranteeing the country's non-alignment and neutrality. In January 1958, Springer travelled with Zehrer to Moscow. Before departing he told a reporter: "I know very well that there are people who consider me naïve. But I believe in reunification within five years." In addition to permanent German neutrality, Springer was proposing a nuclear-free Central Europe.von Sothen, Hans Becker (2005), Hans Zehrer als politischer Publizist nach 1945. In Frank-Lothar Kroll ed. Die kupierte Alternative. Konservatismus in Deutschland nach 1945. pp. 125–178. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin,
Nikita Khrushchev kept Springer and Zehrer waiting sixteen days for an interview. It did not go well, and cannot have been helped by Springer seeking to convince the Soviet premier of the advantages not only of German neutrality but also of West Germany's social market economy.The interview was printed and discussed in Die Welt (7 February 1958). A Russian transcript is held Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDr im Bundesarchiv "Niederschrift der vertaulichedn Unterredung N.S. Chuschtschows mit den westdeutschedn Pressevertreten A. Springer und H. Zehrer, 29.1.1958", DY30/J IV 2/202;75 The Russians, like the Americans, viewed their strategic position in Germany as indispensable. Neutrality was not an option. Springer was to describe the trip as the "central political event of my life", convincing him that there was no alternative to Konrad Adenauer's Westbindung: to discount Communist overtures and to persevere with the North Atlantic alliance. On his return he forbad any criticism of the western allies, whether it was of the British in Cyprus, the French in Algeria, or the Americans in the Taiwan Strait, because "we need them in Berlin".
Alleged American funding There are questions as to how in the lean post-war years Springer was able to finance so large and rapid an expansion. He operated without partners; even after currency reform in 1948, for a relative upstart bank credit would have been difficult to come by, and his first stock for public subscription was not issued until months before his death in 1985.
There were rumours that Springer in the early post-war years was the beneficiary of covert U.S. efforts to shape and direct public opinion in Germany. According to the American investigative journalist Murray Waas, "highly reliable sources in the U.S. intelligence community" testified to the figure of "some $7 million" funnelled through the CIA to Springer in the early 1950s. The case appears otherwise circumstantial, based on Springer's editorial support of U.S. foreign policy. There was no mistaking Springer's anti-communism; he favoured Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher's description of communists as rotlackierte Nazis ("red-painted Nazis").
Given his dalliance with neutralism, his fixed alignment with American "geopolitical interests" can be dated only from his return from Moscow in 1958. It is also possible that CIA funding is confused with support from the Government and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) programme (wound up in October 1950), to which Die Zeit and other pro-democratic and pro-Allied publishing efforts are known to have benefitted. Springer always maintained that his financial springboard was Hörzu which, attuned to the new radio and television age, was ground breaking and had no market rival.
The Spiegel affair
On 26 October 1962, the Hamburg offices of Der Spiegel were raided and closed by police. The publisher, Rudolf Augstein, along with the weekly's two editors-in-chief and a reporter were arrested. Defence minister Franz Josef Strauss levelled accusations of treason (Landesverrat) in respect to an article detailing NATO projections of "unimaginable chaos" in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike and criticising the government's lack of preparedness. In a statement he was later obliged to recant, Strauss denied that he had initiated the police action.
Although Augstein was a liberal critic, Springer offered his presses, teletypes and office space so Der Spiegel could keep on publishing. It was, however, at the cost of further access to Die Welt that columnist Sebastian Haffner took to the Süddeutsche Zeitung to pronounce on the violation of press freedom and constitutional norms..
Adenauer appears to have been sufficiently convinced of Springer's political reliability, that when in October 1963 he resigned as chancellor, he suggested (perhaps playfully) to Bild Editor-in-Chief Peter Boenisch that the publisher might be the "politician" best fitted to continue his policies.
Criticism and confrontation The SDS Anti-Springer campaign