AP statement on historical article

In February 2015, historian Harriet Scharnberg sought information from The Associated Press as part of her research and AP shared with her a large amount of material from its Corporate Archives, including oral histories done by World War II era employees. Her recently published report, based also on other source material outside AP, describes both individuals and their activities before and during the war that were unknown to AP. As a result, AP has been reviewing documents and other files in and beyond AP Corporate Archives, in the U.S. and Europe, to further our understanding of the period. AP rejects the suggestion that it collaborated with the Nazi regime at any time. Rather, the AP was subjected to pressure from the Nazi regime from the period of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 until the AP’s expulsion from Germany in 1941. AP staff resisted the pressure while doing its best to gather accurate, vital and objective news for the world in a dark and dangerous time. AP news reporting in the 1930s helped to warn the world of the Nazi menace. AP’s Berlin bureau chief, Louis P. Lochner, won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Berlin about the Nazi regime. Earlier, Lochner also resisted anti-Semitic pressure to fire AP’s Jewish employees and when that failed he arranged for them to become employed by AP outside of Germany, likely saving their lives. Lochner himself was interned in Germany for five months after the United States entered the war and was later released in a prisoner exchange. He then spent the next year publicly speaking out against fascism in lectures and in his book, “What about Germany.” Another American AP correspondent, Joe Morton, was executed by the Nazis at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1945 after having been captured when accompanying an OSS mission in 1944. After Lochner’s expulsion, the remnants of the AP bureau, including its physical premises and AP’s photographic archives, effectively were under full Nazi control and possession. The historical research of Ms. Scharnberg concerns a German photo agency subsidiary of AP Britain that was created in 1931, two years before the Nazis came to power. As of 1935, this subsidiary operation became subject to the Nazi press-control law but continued to gather photo images inside Germany and later inside countries occupied by Germany. U.S. newspapers were supplied with some of these images through the German subsidiary. Those that came from Nazi government, government-controlled or government–censored sources were labeled as such in their captions or photo credits sent to U.S. members and other customers of the AP, who used their own editorial judgment about whether to publish the images. Images of that time from Germany had legitimate news value as editors and the public needed to learn more about the Nazis. The AP did not engage in direct publication and until Ms. Scharnberg’s research had no knowledge of any accusation that material may have been directly produced and selected by Nazi propaganda ministries. If it had been, we believe that the captions and photo credits would have made that clear. It is important to note that after Dec. 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the United States and expelled all foreign news organizations, AP lost control over its subsidiary and therefore the use of its photos. It was left to the former German staff, who stayed on at great risk, to protect the physical archive from outright seizure by the Nazi regime. Founded in 1846, AP was and is a not-for-profit cooperative. The acquisition of images from inside Germany was part of its general mission of gathering news for AP members and clients, and not for financial gain.