Münchener Post

The newspaper had been founded by the Bavarian Social Democratic Party, and its initial opposition to Hitler was based on ideological grounds, but quickly acquired a personal dimension both for the journalists involved and for Hitler himself.

In 1933, as part of the Nazi elimination of media opposition, they ordered the closure of certain news outlets across Germany. All Socialist newspapers' buildings were taken over by the government. Writers and editors at the Münchener Post were arrested and imprisoned and its premises turned over to an S.A. squad who destroyed its offices and printing presses and burned its files.

The Poison Kitchen ("Giftküche") was the name Adolf Hitler gave to a group of journalists of the newspaper who were highly critical of him and ran a series of extremely negative investigative exposés about Hitler in the 1920s and early 1930s, before Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933.[1]

Münchener Post closely followed Hitler and his party, exposing their crimes, internal intrigues, and scandals. Hitler considered the paper, which he called "the poison kitchen", one of his most vexing public adversaries, and it was the target of several libel actions taken by the Nazi Party. The Post wrote from a populist perspective, viewing Hitler and his party as a dangerous band of gangsters rather than as ideological enemies, or as a bona fide political movement at all.

Ron Rosenbaum writes in his 1998 book about The Poison Kitchen:

"Their duel with Hitler lasted a dozen years and produced some of the sharpest, most penetrating insights into his character, his mind and method, then or since. Much of their work has been forgotten, but not much has been surpassed. And, as the name Poison Kitchen suggests, they succeeded in getting under Hitler's skin."[2]

The Poison Kitchen group became one of the few early warning voices regarding the dangers posed by the rise of the Nazi Party, although their warnings went largely unheeded at the time.

When Hitler finally came to power in 1933, 'the offices of Münchener Post were subject to a final ransacking by the S.A. on 9 March 1933 and all of the staff members were imprisoned in concentration camps.[3]

The Poison Kitchen group included Martin Gruber, Erhard Auer, Edmund Goldschagg, and Julius Zerfaß, and others. Goldschagg later co-founded the Süddeutsche Zeitung.[4]

Very little had ever been written about the Münchener Post until 1998 when American journalist Ron Rosenbaum published his book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. Rosenbaum considers "the running battle between Hitler and the courageous reporters and editors of the Post...one of the great unreported dramas in the history of journalism", and challenges contemporary journalists to do justice to the "men who brought so much honor to the profession with their courage and investigative zeal" (Rosenbaum 37, 58).

In 2018, National Geographic produced a documentary entitled Schlagzeilen gegen Hitler (English: Headlines against Hitler), documenting the struggle of the newspaper against Hitler and the Nazi Party.[4]

• Silvia Bittencourt (2013). A Cozinha Venenosa - Um Jornal contra Hitler. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora Três Estrelas. ISBN 978-85-65339-15-5.

• History of the Poison Kitchen
• "Racism: power and the press". Archived from the original on 20 September 2007. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
• Explaining Hitler : The Search for the Origins of His Evil (ISBN 0-06-095339-X)

• University of California, Santa Barbara Article "The Munich Post: its undiscovered effects on Hitler" by Sara Twogood
• Article in the Historisches Lexikon Bayern (in German)
• Holocaust Chronicle Article on the Poison Kitchen