Deutsche Zentral Zeitung

History

The large number of Germans living in the Soviet Union supported many publications in the German language in the 1930s. With the growing pressures of a growing police state, a number of German-language publications closed, leaving fewer than two dozen. The Deutsche Zentral Zeitung (DZZ) was founded in 1925. It was published in Moscow from 1926 to mid-1939 and was the Communist Party organ, "equivalent to Pravda". It published speeches by Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov and other top Soviet officials, government pronouncements and German translations of important articles from Pravda, the newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. Articles detailed the accomplishments of the Soviet Union in agriculture and industry, advancements in technology and aviation. There were also early reports about Nazi concentration camps, such as the articles written by Willi Bredel on September 10, 1934 and October 27, 1934 about his own experiences as a prisoner in Fuhlsbüttel and by Werner Hirsch, also in October 1934, of his confinement at several camps. In December 1935, the DZZ published reports from the Rote Hilfe about Sachsenburg concentration camp, with specific information about names and numbers, including how many prisoners there were in different categories.

The staff was composed of political exiles from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. Many German political exiles wrote articles for the DZZ, including Herbert Wehner, who wrote under his cadre name of "Kurt Funk"; and Hans Knodt, the temporary editor of the Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Germany. Journalist Gustav Regler wrote articles as a special correspondent from Spain. Other writers included German workers who emigrated to the Soviet Union for work, rather than political reasons and non-Germans, such as William L. Patterson, who wrote an article about Paul Robeson in 1936. There were also reviews, such as the one by Hugo Huppert of a Bertolt Brecht novel on June 29, 1936.

The purges

As the Great Purge heated up, on August 9, 1936, the DZZ followed the Soviet press in its drumbeat against "enemy infiltrators". While the show trials were taking place, the DZZ published pages of transcripts of the proceedings, however there were no reports of the outcomes of the trials though many hundreds of German-speakers were arrested, imprisoned and executed. The DZZ itself, because of its non-Russian and international staff, largely intellectual, artistic and often politically active, became a particular target of the Great Purge, although other German-language publications and the press in general were targets. The NKVD arrested a number of the editorial staff in February 1938, returning several times to arrest others, finally having more than 40 members of the staff in custody, leaving an insufficient number of people—seven—who could write and translate into German. There was a new editor-in-chief, Karl Hoffmann, who, as a defensive measure, made the editorial staff live at the DZZ offices and were not allowed to leave. Hoffmann himself nonetheless came under threat from the NKVD. At that point, the DZZ and other publications were printed by Izvestia, but the system was precarious. Censors oversaw publication, but sometimes refused to meet their deadline, putting the editor and staff at risk of arrest in the event of publication, or causing the newspaper to miss its printing schedule and be issued late. More staff were hired, but they were inadequate to the task, possessing only moderate German skills, unable to write and unschooled in journalism. The DZZ ceased publication in summer 1939.

Julia Annenkova, who was close to Stalin, was editor in chief from 1934 to June 1937. Annenkova was arrested in connection with the anti-Comintern bloc. Others connected with the DZZ who were arrested in the Great Purge include Wehner, Maria Osten, Mikhail Koltsov, Ernst Ottwalt, Hermann, Richter, Stürmann, Franz Falk, an editor and Karl Filippovich Kurshner, an editor-in-chief, and Knodt, who was arrested in December 1940, and perished in a gulag.

After the DZZ stopped publishing, nothing replaced it until 1957, when Neues Leben (New Life) appeared. Many German libraries have microfilm copies of the DZZ, either in part or in whole.

Sample article

A clipping from September 22, 1926 (see image) gives an example of the nature and tone of DZZ articles. The article is titled, "Lecache in Kiev". It reads, "The French journalist Lecache, who, as is known, has come to the Soviet Union to gather material to defend Schwartzbard, the murderer of Petliura, is currently traveling in the Ukraine and visiting the locales in which Petliura once "kept house". In Kiev, he obtained the best possibility to convince himself of the boundless brutality of the Petliurian bandits: in a dining hall for the poorest Jewish populace, he was surrounded by orphans, whose parents were slain by the bandits. Thus, Lecache was finally able to ascertain that Petliura actually had organized pogroms."