Enemy of the People Quotes

“Dachau: A Chronicle,”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Soon after Gruber got off the streetcar, he glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye. Two young men jumped him, sending him sprawling to the ground. They pummeled his head with brass knuckles, smashing his glasses. Blood streamed down Gruber’s face. The two strapping young men fled into the night. “Hilfe!” Gruber shouted. A man riding by on a bicycle heard the elderly man’s plea for help. “My glasses, they are in pieces,” said Gruber to the man. The passerby found the remnants of Gruber’s steel-rimmed spectacles on the ground and did what he could to place them on Gruber’s face so he could see.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Much of it was salacious, suggesting, for example, that Hitler had had an illicit relationship with his half niece and she was desperate to end it. Hitler was furious over the Post’s reporting. He issued a statement vehemently denying that he and his half niece had quarreled or that he opposed her traveling to Vienna.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Citing “informed sources,” the newspaper reported that Hitler and Geli argued constantly over the half niece’s intention to move out of her uncle’s apartment and get engaged to a man in Vienna. According to the Post, on September 18 there was “once again a violent quarrel” between them, and the Nazi leader left the apartment. The Post said what provoked Geli to shoot herself was not known, but the newspaper insinuated a cover-up by Nazi officials. The “mysterious affair,” as the Post called it, triggered an avalanche of speculation.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“The Walther pistol, like the luxury apartment, belonged to Nazi Party leader, Adolf Hitler, uncle of the deceased. Munich police quickly ruled her death a suicide. But a scrappy newspaper called the Munich Post grew suspicious.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“THE CORPSE IN HITLER’S APARTMENT The corpse of a twenty-three-year-old brunette, her chest oozing blood, lay on the bedroom floor of an apartment on Munich’s Prinzregentenplatz. A 6.35-mm revolver was at Geli Raubal’s side when she was found dead on a mid-September day in 1931.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Another Munich-based journalist, Fritz Gerlich, made the ultimate sacrifice in his pursuit of Hitler. Editor of the newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Path), Gerlich was one of Hitler’s fiercest critics. He was arrested after Hitler came to power and murdered in the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich. “We Will Not Be Intimidated,” the Munich Post said in a front-page headline a few days before storm troopers ransacked and shut down its offices in March 1933. Whatever the Munich Post’s faults, that headline should be the rallying cry of journalists around the globe whose work is threatened by those who place accumulating and wielding authoritarian power above the defense of citizens’ rights.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Young Munich-based journalist Konrad Heiden, who worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt Newspaper), was also on the front lines, critically reporting on the Nazis in the early stages of Hitler’s political career. Heiden wrote a book titled A History of National Socialism in 1932 and fled into exile after Hitler came to power a year later, eventually ending up in the United States. In 1944, Heiden used his deep knowledge of the Nazi Party to publish Der Führer, a scathing biography of Hitler.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“It is hard not to admire the gutsiness of this little paper, which was often a lone voice—certainly one of the loudest—in defending German democracy. It invited the wrath and fury of Hitler. It provoked him. It taunted him. And although the editors were adherents of a political point of view—that of the anti-Hitler Social Democrats—they were also firm believers that the Weimar Republic’s democratic principles were worth fighting for. The editors of the Munich Post, Martin Gruber, Edmund Goldschagg, Erhard Auer, and Julius Zerfass, were certainly not the only journalists of the Weimar Republic who deserve to be singled out for their courage as Hitler plotted paths to power.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“If the Post’s editors were alive today, they would no doubt defend their style of journalism thusly: there was no greater threat to German democracy in the Weimar era than Adolf Hitler. They recognized it and set out to stop him. So much of what appeared on the pages of the Post ultimately played out after Hitler came to power. In the grand scheme of things, the editors of the Munich Post got it right.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“While the Munich Post was not the only German newspaper to go after Hitler, its presence in the birthplace of the Nazi movement—coupled with the astonishing tenacity of its staff—put it in a position to break news about these rabid anti-Semites and their power-hungry leader. Journalistic standards practiced by the Post—but also by other newspapers—would not pass muster among today’s respected practitioners of the profession. A fair number of rumors made their way onto the pages of the Munich Post. And while the paper justified its aggressive coverage of a huge story it broke in 1931—revelations that Sturmabteilung chief Ernst Röhm was a homosexual—by attacking the hypocrisy of the fanatically anti-gay Nazis, the homophobic-seeming tone of some of the Post’s reporting can be jarring to modern readers. Still, it would be a mistake to judge the Post by the standards of contemporary journalism. The times were vastly different, as were customs in newspaper reporting.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“There were also numerous newspapers owned and run by political parties, such as the Nazis’ poisonous Der Angriff (The Attack) and Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer) and the Communist Party’s Die Rote Fahne (Red Flag). Reflective of its times, the Munich Post (Münchener Post in German) did not pretend to be a neutral newspaper. It was owned by the Social Democratic Party and espoused the party’s socialist ideals. The Social Democrats’ principal newspaper, based in Berlin, was Vorwärts (Forwards). The Social Democrats had other papers as well, including the Munich Post.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Readers were drawn to publications that confirmed their own ideological leanings, not to those that challenged them. The Berlin-based Vossische Zeitung touted liberal views that appealed to intellectuals and other elites.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“The news media landscape in Germany after World War I was fragmented, chaotic, and biased. The press in the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democracy, was as divided as the populace during this time of political, economic, and social upheaval.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Freedom of the press is not to be taken for granted. The threat is real. Journalists are bullied and harassed in many countries, and even imprisoned and killed. The assassination of the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate of Istanbul is only a most recent and spectacular example of the violence and censure directed toward the press by authoritarians around the world. We have been here before. The story that follows shows how the light of truth went out in Germany and across all of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. And it shows how a handful of incredibly brave individuals at a small newspaper in Bavaria—the Munich Post—fought to keep that light alive.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“The bus passed through a large iron gate that bore the words Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Work Sets You Free.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“the newspaper’s broadside against Hitler said the Nazi movement “is less political than it is criminal” and “this cesspool must not be allowed to spread.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Why hasn’t Hitler answered the repeatedly asked questions about his money sources?”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“there was no greater threat to German democracy in the Weimar era than Adolf Hitler. They recognized it and set out to stop him. So much of what appeared on the pages of the Post ultimately played out after Hitler came to power. In the grand scheme of things, the editors of the Munich Post got it right.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“it would be a mistake to judge the Post by the standards of contemporary journalism.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“rumors made their way onto the pages of the Munich Post. And while the paper justified its aggressive coverage of a huge story it broke in 1931—revelations that Sturmabteilung chief Ernst Röhm was a homosexual”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Journalistic standards practiced by the Post—but also by other newspapers—would not pass muster among today’s respected practitioners of the profession.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“local newspapers served up news items and opinion pieces supplied by the vast media empire of Alfred Hugenberg, ultranationalist leader of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National Peoples’ Party) and an enemy of the Weimar democracy.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Readers were drawn to publications that confirmed their own ideological leanings, not to those that challenged them.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“The story that follows shows how the light of truth went out in Germany and across all of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Hitler had hypnotized large segments of the German populace with theatrical performances at rallies where he promised to make their country great again.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“The article lampooned the Nazis for exaggerating the number of people attending the congress. But it went deeper than that, eviscerating Hitler’s posturing as a defender of the working class, essentially accusing him—not Jews—of being the true enemy of the people, and skewering him for the money he was receiving from wealthy Germans”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“Of all the German newspapers that voiced criticism of the Nazis, none got under Hitler’s skin the way the Munich Post did.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“We Will Not Be Intimidated,” the Munich Post said in a front-page headline a few days before storm troopers ransacked and shut down its offices in March 1933. Whatever the Munich Post’s faults, that headline should be the rallying cry of journalists around the globe whose work is threatened by those who place accumulating and wielding authoritarian power above the defense of citizens’ rights.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler

“The press in the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democracy, was as divided as the populace during this time of political, economic, and social upheaval. Readers were drawn to publications that confirmed their own ideological leanings, not to those that challenged them.”
― Terrence Petty, Enemy of the People: The Untold Story of the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler