Interviewing Hitler opens in Linz, Austria, in 1938: the year before the outbreak of World War Two. Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria, has just announced the Anschluss, the forced political union of Germany and his birth country. Since seizing power in 1933, he has been overseeing Germany’s rearmament and increasingly belligerent foreign policy moves.
Now, on March 12 1938, Hitler has returned to Austria as a hero, greeted by enraptured crowds lining the streets. Author Richard Evans describes the triumphant dictator soaking it all in,
standing in the cold on the balcony of the city hall, looking out at buildings festooned with swastikas and a crowd of thousands who are looking up at him and chanting in union: “One leader; one people; one state.”
This moment would have felt like a culmination for Hitler, writes Evans. The near religious fervour emanating from the mass of bodies below “seemed to confirm everything he had long believed about himself as a man of destiny”.
This moment seemed to represent “the high point of a brilliant career” for another person present that evening, too.
Standing alongside [Hitler] was a tall Englishman with slicked-back hair and long scar on his forehead, whose very presence on the balcony seemed the final proof of his position as the world’s greatest journalist.
The striking figure being described is 52-year-old George Ward Price. A star correspondent for the Daily Mail, he enjoyed unprecedented access to Hitler and other prominent Nazis throughout the 1930s. He cultivated it. He relied on it. He enjoyed it.
As outlined by Evans, a former journalist, this left Ward Price standing on very slippery ethical terrain. He shows how journalism can be compromised through access, closeness, exceptional treatment – and the flattering idea that one has been invited, so to speak, into the room.
This book about the past speaks directly to the present.
Donald Trump’s White House recently launched a web portal to spotlight what it deems media bias (or “fake news”), with an “Offender Hall of Shame”. In October, “dozens” of journalists relinquished their access passes and left the Pentagon rather than agree to restrictive new policies. And Trump has personally attacked journalists whose questions he disliked, calling them “piggy” and “ugly, inside and out”.
Review: Interviewing Hitler: How George Ward Price Became the World’s Most Famous Journalist by Richard Evans (The History Press)
This sort of behaviour has a long and troubling precedent. In the 1930s, many foreign correspondents refused to cover Germany under conditions that made honest reporting impossible. As Evans recounts, some, like William Shirer, were harassed, monitored and even threatened with expulsion for writing critically about the regime. Others burned their notes each night to prevent them falling into the hands of the Gestapo. Ward Price, notably, was not among this cohort.
‘Whatever the faults of the Nazi regime …’
Back in Austria, while the crowd waited for Hitler to appear on the balcony, Ward Price heard his own name announced over the loudspeaker. He was introduced by the master of ceremonies as a “well-known” newsman “who has always understood Germany’s great aims and has interviewed Hitler and Mussolini”.
With the public urging him on, Ward Price reluctantly stepped up to the microphone. What happens next is still contested. Evans reports that some versions of events have him commending the people of Linz, while others have him congratulating Austria on its “hour of happiness”.
Whatever his exact words, they were ones that Ward Price, as Evans observes, “quickly came to regret”. Ward Price assumed the crowd was his only audience. It wasn’t. He was being broadcast live on radio across Europe.
People quickly pounced on his choice of words. Critics asked how a journalist could appear to celebrate the illegal annexation of a sovereign nation. Was this impartial reporting, or did it hint at something closer to ideological affinity with Nazism?
The questions and accusations snowballed. Former colleagues accused him of being an “organ of international Fascism”. Parliamentarians raised concerns about his closeness to the Nazi leadership, with Winston Churchill chastising Ward Price for repeatedly “shaking the bloodstained hands” of Hitler and his cronies.
Nonplussed, Ward Price insisted he had simply tried to present “the views of the National Socialist leaders clearly and impartially”. He framed himself as acting in Britain’s best interests, not Germany’s. Evans quotes him in 1939, claiming he was trying
to contribute to an understanding between two countries capable, in cooperation, of achieving so much. Whatever the faults of the Nazi regime, such a development would have been preferable to the present drift towards war.
Ward Price maintained that position for the rest of his life. His 1957 memoir, Extra-Special Correspondent, continued the same line of argument, emphasising his supposed interest in foreign policy and international diplomacy. But this only served to place him on even shakier footing.
Ward Price acknowledged some of the criticisms levelled at him, but only obliquely. He dismissed the most serious charges with what Evans describes as a “certain glibness”.
Ward Price argued he had no obligation to address the Nazi regime’s crackdown on political and personal liberty or its systematic persecution of Jews and other minority groups. These, he reasoned, were “internal German affairs” – matters beyond his journalistic purview and not for him to comment on.
It was a rationale that revealed less about the limits of journalistic inquiry than about the limits of Ward Price’s own ethical imagination.
This is what Evans sets out to address. He is interested in understanding how the temptations of access, the perennially thorny issue of objectivity and the pressures of political proximity shape journalistic practice.
By presenting Ward Price as a cautionary tale, Evans convincingly demonstrates that these ethical dilemmas persist in our politically fractious present – and in the disinformation-ridden media landscape that accompanies it.
The dark heart of British journalism
One of the reasons Evans first became interested in journalism history was “the moral ambiguity at the heart of the profession”. Newspaper articles, he writes, “contain implicit choices that sometimes reveal as much about the character of the journalists writing them as they do about the people or events they are about”.
This leads him to essayist and cultural critic Janet Malcolm, who once wrote:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.
It’s the famous first sentence of her essay, then book, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), originally serialised in The New Yorker in 1989. It posits that journalism is built on a series of uneasy bargains. The pursuit of truth, Malcolm contends, is invariably shaped by calculation, manipulation and “lopsided” power dynamics.
Malcolm explores these tensions through the fraught relationship between reporter Joe McGinniss and Jeffrey MacDonald, the convicted murderer he was writing about: a case that exposes the fine line separating truth and lies, trust and betrayal.
Malcolm chronicles how McGinniss could only write his book by cultivating MacDonald’s trust, allowing him to assume he was sympathetic – though he had secretly come to believe MacDonald was guilty of murdering his wife and two children. McGinniss’ deception ultimately exposes how easily a reporter can slip into compromising behaviour when their presence becomes the precondition for getting the story.
Malcolm’s study sprang to mind when Evans chanced upon a secondhand copy of Extra-Special Correspondent.
Evans was already dimly aware of Ward Price and the lingering cloud of controversy that had long swirled around his coverage of the Nazi dictatorship. His curiosity piqued, Evans began to wonder what kinds of compromises Ward Price might have made to secure the unprecedented level of access he so clearly commanded.
He also wanted to know how Ward Price, “writing in the twilight of his career”, addressed the accusations that had dogged him for decades. To his surprise, Evans discovered “Ward Price had chosen to neither deny nor accept the criticism of his reporting”. He didn’t even mention it:
Whatever he may have thought in the 1930s, by the time he came to write the book in the 1950s, his attitude towards Hitler […] was aligned entirely with the accepted view of the age.
Ward Price reiterated that he had simply reported Hitler’s statements accurately, leaving British readers free to judge their merit for themselves. Reading on, it soon became clear to Evans
one of two things must be true. Either Ward Price’s critics had unfairly maligned him, perhaps driven by jealousy of his astonishing success, or his autobiography presents a deeply misleading account of how he had covered the Nazis.
Determined to get to the bottom of things, Evans began tracking Ward Price’s pre-war reporting with fresh eyes. It was, he says, the beginning of a journey that took him “deep into the dark heart of British journalism in the 1930s”.
The Daily Mail and the far-right
Ward Price was already a well known figure in British journalism by the time he began reporting on Nazi Germany. Born in 1886, he joined the Daily Mail and quickly earned a reputation as one of the paper’s most energetic foreign correspondents.
He covered the first world war from the front lines, travelled widely in the Middle East and was often dispatched to interview political leaders on behalf of the paper’s owner, Harold Harmsworth – better known by his official title, Lord Rothermere.
Rothermere had founded the Daily Mail with his brother Alfred in 1896, turning it into one of the most influential newspapers in Britain. By all accounts, Alfred was the brains behind the operation. After Alfred’s death in 1922, Rothermere assumed full control of the paper.
“With such a journalistic naïf in charge of the Mail,” Evans writes,
there was always likely to be an opening for someone with a combination of expert knowledge of international affairs, a talent for flattery, and an ability to move comfortably in high society.
It was a role Ward Price was perfectly equipped to fill. He soon became one of Rothermere’s most trusted confidantes. Indeed, “Ward Price and Rothermere were so close that it is difficult to tell whether Rothermere’s politics were shaped by Ward Price, or if it was the other way round.”
This is important because Rothermere was one of Britain’s leading promoters of authoritarian and far-right causes, Evans writes. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Rothermere used the Mail’s pages to praise Mussolini, champion Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and publish flattering pieces about Hitler’s rise. Ward Price’s access to the Nazi elite – unmatched among British journalists – fitted neatly into this editorial line.
Consider what happened six months after the Anschluss. Following Neville Chamberlain’s doomed peace mission to Germany, Ward Price spent several days with Hitler at the leader’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. When he finally left, Ward Price “came down from the mountain with the biggest story in the world”, Evans writes.
That story was Hitler’s determination to snatch the Czech Sudetenland – and, by extension, his intention to push for wider territorial expansion. Yet Evans suggests the article that eventually appeared in the Mail was not the piece Ward Price originally wrote. Further he suggests Ward Price had some unusual editorial assistance.
To support this claim, Evans turns to the diaries of Joseph Goebbels – the Nazis’ chief propagandist. Goebbels, who was present at the time, noted that Hitler was “still revising the interview by Ward Price, which has turned out very well. It was somewhat too effusive.”
What are we to make of this? Novelist John Banville, reviewing Interviewing Hitler in the Guardian, regards it as a smoking-gun moment – one he thinks Evans underplays. Whether or not we share Banville’s view, Evans treats this episode not as an aberration, but as but as part of a larger pattern.
While other foreign journalists in Germany complained bitterly about censorship, surveillance and orchestrated access to officials, Ward Price appeared unfazed. He rarely acknowledged the ways the Nazi regime controlled information, choreographed encounters or punished critical reporting. If anything, his dispatches tended to flatter the regime rather than scrutinise it.
An alarm bell ringing now
Using Ward Price’s words as a form of testimony, the conclusion Evans arrives at is as definitive as it is damning. While undoubtedly brave and possessing a genuine thirst for knowledge, Ward Price’s talent was, in the final reckoning, “put into the service of malign political forces”.
In an age of fake news and propaganda – from Moscow to Beijing to the United States – Evans suggests Ward Price’s ethically compromised career is not a relic of the past, but an alarm bell ringing in our own moment.
Power still rewards those who tell the story it prefers to hear. We need to be alive to this fact. In an age of algorithmic social media feeds and hermetically-sealed echo chambers, the ethical duties and practices once associated with journalism now fall to all of us.
I don’t mean self-appointed “researchers” trawling the digital swamp we call the internet for evidence of their prior convictions – but a core principle of rigorous, professional reporting: a willingness to follow the truth rather than the incentives of access.
What remains of our public life depends on it.
Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
