This magazine glorifies the SS. Its owners area growing force here
(And they even defend it)
A PRIVATELY-OWNED German conglomerate that has risen to become one of the largest UK media companies insists it will carry on publishing a magazine that glorifies perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Bauer Media Group has ignored the concerns of an anti-Nazi group, which has called on the German government to ban the magazine from the country’s shelves.
Der Landser, which has been scru- tinised on several occasions by a German media watchdog, has featured reverential descriptions of Second World War Waffen-SS officers known to have taken part in war crimes.
According to Third Reich expert Stefan Klemp, the magazine treats one of the SS officers, Gen Hermann Fegelein, as a “hero”. Fegelein has been blamed for the deaths of 40,000 Soviet Jews.
The magazine, described by German newspaper Der Spiegel as “the professional body for the glorification of the Wehrmacht”, also commemorates Nazis who received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, an award which recognised outstanding military leadership.
It is published by Pabel-Moewig, which is owned by the Hamburg-based Bauer Media Group (BMG). Bauer Media, the company’s British arm, became one of the UK’s largest publishing groups when it bought Emap Consumer Media and Emap Radio in 2008.
BMG ’s recent purchase of Absolute Radio in a deal believed to be worth nearly £22m consoli- dates its leading position in the UK media market . Its stable includes Heat, Grazia and Bella, as well as a string of radio stations, including Kiss and Magic. Bauer Media boasts of reaching “19 million Britons each week”.
Until last year, BMG published the far-right
magazine Zuerst!, whose publisher, Dieter Munier, has been involved in the German neo-Nazi movement for 40 years. BMG sold the magazine in May 2012 after a public outcry.
This secretive, private firm has leapt from being Germany’s largest publisher to a world leader, employing 11,000 with a turnover of £2.5bn from 570 magazines, 300 digital services and 50 TV and radio stations across 16 countries.
Alex Brummer, City Editor of the Daily Mail, said: “A 21st century media group ought to be aware of the dark history of antisemitism and persecution enacted by the SS… As the son of a family which came out of the Shoah, I feel particularly offended by this.
“The Germans have done pretty well in terms of coming to terms with their history, but there are still great gaps. There are still big corporations which have failed to come terms with it.”
A spokesperson for BMG claimed that Der Landser had been repeatedly reviewed by a government body tasked with protecting minors against harmful media, and that “these reviews have not as yet resulted in any objections.
“Bauer Media also voluntarily submits the issues of the magazine to examination from a press law perspective. The company attaches great importance to ensuring that the magazine neither trivialises nor glorifies Nazi crimes.”
Simon Wiesenthal Centre founder Rabbi Marvin Hier said that the publication is “glorifying members of killer squads,” and claimed that “no German politician is unaware of the existence of this magazine, and they pretend that it’s OK.” The Wiesenthal Centre is lobbying the German government to close Der Landser.
The German Ministry of the Interior said they were taking Rabbi Hier’s complaint “seriously”, and would investigate his allegations.
A spokesperson for the ministry indicated that the magazine came close to breaking German law, stating that “Germany’s Youth Protection Act … criminalises content that extremely glorifies the war,” followed by a definition of Der Landser as “a weekly series of fictional war adventure stories that glorify the Second World War.”
The spokesperson also noted that since the early 1960s, “at least ten volumes of Landser” have been put on a list of publications not to be sold or distributed to minors.