Axel Springer

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.

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.

The SDS Anti-Springer campaign

The Spiegel affair ignited youth protest and brought the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), the German Socialist Student Union, onto the streets. Swift to denounce those who questioned the equity and social costs of the West German Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle"), Springer characterised the "extra-parliamentary opposition" as subversive.

In June 1967 an open letter from a large group of writers (among them Ingeborg Drewitz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass), accused the Springer Press of "incitement" in a police riot in West Berlin that saw the death of student protester Benno Ohnesorg. Rallied by Ulrike Meinhof's journal konkret, students had been protesting a visit by the Shah of Iran. Bild's response (3 June 1967) to the death was to declare that where "Students threaten: We shoot back" and "This is where fun and compromise and democratic tolerance end. We have to take a stand against SA methods". Protesters broke windows at Springer offices and tried to disrupt printing and delivery, but the trade unions kept their distance from the anti-Springer campaign, and the SDS, increasingly focussed on the War in Vietnam, conceded that the protests had failed to "mobilise the masses". After a month it called a halt.

When on 11 April 1968, the SDS leader Rudi Dutschke (who had called for the expropriation of Springer's press empire) was shot on the street in West Berlin by the young right-wing extremist Josef Bachmann, the cry again was that Bild was complicit ("Bild schoss mit!"). Serious unrest followed. Demonstrators tried to storm the Springer house in Berlin and set fire to Bild delivery vans. The Hamburg print shop was besieged to prevent the paper leaving the presses, and in Munich a demonstrator and a policeman were killed after students ransacked the Bild editorial offices. There were over a thousand arrests. "A tendentious headline in Bild", the protesters claimed, "is more violence than a stone against the head of a policeman".

Helmut Schmidt, then parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats, sought to intervene with Springer. Schmidt conceded that the publisher's success was related to new journalistic methods and formats that catered to public tastes, but charged Springer with using that position of preeminence to mix "news and suggestive commentary". He might have "fewer problems" if he restructured his publishing house on the model of private foundations or public media institutions. In the event, when finally Springer consented to meet with Schmidt in August 1968, their discussion was of the Czechoslovak crisis (Schmidt assuring Springer that it was "impossible" that the Soviets would repeat the events of Budapest 1956 and crush the Prague Spring with tanks).

On 19 May 1972, the Red Army Faction (the "Baader Meinhof Gang") bombed Springer's Hamburg offices, injuring 17 employees, two of them seriously. Springer critics regretted the escalation, but accepted the thesis of The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: How violence develops and where it can lead, Heinrich Böll's 1974 novel in which violence is framed and driven by a demagogic and unscrupulous tabloid press. "No one", Haffner argued in liberal weekly Stern, "has planted the seeds of violence more keenly than Springer journalism".