Der Spiegel's editors went to jail and brought down a defence minister
In 1962 police raided the Hamburg offices of Der Spiegel and arrested its founder on treason charges after a story questioning West Germany's military readiness. The case collapsed, the defence minister Franz Josef Strauss was forced out, and a weekly born under British occupation became a symbol of press freedom.
The magazine began as a British project. Occupation officials sponsored a weekly called Diese Woche in late 1946, then, after disagreements, handed it to a young former Wehrmacht radio operator, Rudolf Augstein. Renamed The Mirror, the first issue appeared in Hanover on 4 January 1947, co-founded by the British officer John Chaloner. Augstein edited it until his death in 2002. In 1974 he restructured the company so that employees with more than three years' service could become partners and share the profits.
Exposés defined it from the start. As early as 1950 parliament investigated its claim that bribed lawmakers had helped choose Bonn over Frankfurt as the capital. After the 1962 affair it went on to reveal the Flick party-funding scandal. Politicians on both sides loathed it; Strauss called it the Gestapo of our time, and Chancellor Willy Brandt used a much ruder word. In 2013, working with documents from Edward Snowden, it revealed that the US National Security Agency had tapped Angela Merkel's mobile phone for more than a decade.
Its reputation for rigour was once almost industrial. In 2010 its verification desk amounted to 80 full-time staff, probably the biggest such team in the world by the Columbia Journalism Review's estimate. That made the 2018 discovery all the more painful: star reporter Claas Relotius had invented people, facts and quotes in at least 14 stories, exposed only because a colleague, Juan Moreno, grew suspicious and gathered proof.
Circulation climbed from 15,000 in its first year to over a million after reunification opened up readers in the former East, and stood at about 724,000 in 2022.
Source: Der Spiegel
