Alfred Hugenberg, the media baron who thought he could steer Hitler
By the 1920s Alfred Hugenberg owned more of Germany's press than anyone, plus a controlling stake in the film giant Ufa. He used that reach to help bring Hitler to power in 1933, expecting to manage him. Within five months he had been pushed out of the cabinet and stripped of influence.
Born in Hanover on 19 June 1865, he was the son of a royal official who sat in the Prussian Landtag as a National Liberal. As a boy he wrote poetry, which his father discouraged in favour of a bureaucrat's training. He studied law at three universities and economics at Strassburg, taking a doctorate there in 1891 with a thesis on internal colonization in northwest Germany. It praised the independent farmer as an entrepreneur and a barrier against the Social Democrats.
That same year, aged 26, he co-founded the group that became the Pan-German League. After stints in the Prussian civil service and private business he joined Krupp, chairing its board of directors from 1909 to 1918. In the war he favoured eastward expansion and afterwards blamed defeat on Jews and socialists.
His media empire began in 1916 with the Scherl publishing house, then grew through the Telegraphen-Union news agency, many newspapers and, in 1927, control of Ufa. It rivalled the liberal Ullstein and Mosse houses. Sitting for the German National People's Party from 1919, he supplied most of its money, took the chair after its heavy losses in 1928 and demanded near-dictatorial powers, which split the party as industrialists walked out.
Cooperation with the Nazis, against the Young Plan in 1929 and in the Harzburg Front of 1931, helped them far more than his own party. By early 1933 he saw the danger yet still became Minister of Economics and of Food and Agriculture. His bid to act as economic dictator failed; he left on the day his party voted to dissolve and gradually lost his media holdings to the regime. Interned by the British in 1946, he was classed as exonerated in 1951 and died on 12 March that year.
Source: Alfred Hugenberg
