The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

by Richard J. Evans

These incidents did not go unnoticed abroad. Foreign newspaper correspondents in Berlin reported seeing Jews with blood streaming down their faces lying in the streets of Berlin after having been beaten senseless. Critical reports began to appear in the British, French and American press.102 On 26 March the conservative Foreign Minister von Neurath told the American journalist Louis P. Lochner that this ‘atrocity propaganda’, which he described as reminiscent of Belgian myths about atrocities committed by German troops in 1914, was most likely part of a concerted campaign of misinformation against the German government; revolutions were bound to be accompanied by ‘certain excesses’. Unlike Neurath, Hitler himself described the stories openly as ‘Jewish atrocity smears’.