Background
Otto Dietrich was born in Essen on 31 August 1897.
Otto Dietrich was born in Essen on 31 August 1897.
After his military service as a soldier during World War I, he was awarded the Iron Cross (First Class). After this he studied at the universities of Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg, from which he graduated with a doctorate in political science in 1921.
A war volunteer on the western front during World War I. A research assistant in the Essen Chamber of Commerce, later deputy editor of the Essen Nationalzeitung, Dietrich had also been business manager, after 1928, of the Augsburger Zeitung, a German-national evening paper.
Through his marriage he established links with the representatives of Rhineland heavy industry such as Emil Kirdorf and himself became the legal adviser of a big steel trust. On 1 August 1931 Dietrich, who was a convinced Nazi, was appointed Press Chief of the NSDAP and a year later he joined the SS, rising to the rank of SS-Ober- gruppenfiihrer in 1941.
In his role as publicist and press chief, Dietrich organized the great Nazi propaganda campaigns during the elections of 1932, becoming Hitler’s constant companion as he endlessly criss-crossed Germany by car and plane. Hitler's envoy in the heavy industrial region of the Ruhr where he helped undermine Gregor Strasser's radical Nazi power-base, Dietrich also used his family connections to mediate between the NSDAP and captains of industry like Fritz Thyssen. Dietrich was an active publicist on behalf of the Nazi Party after the seizure of power and his documentary work Mit Hitler an die Macht (1933), sold over 250,000 copies.
From 1937 to 1945 Dietrich was State Secretary in Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda as well as Press Chief of the Reich Government, playing a decisive role in reorganizing the press and in disciplinary matters. The driving force behind the Editors' Law, which castrated the independence of newspaper editors as well as publishers, Dietrich cooked the German news to Hitler’s prescriptions, especially after the outbreak of World War II. To ensure the complete regimentation of editors and journalists, Dietrich issued daily directives on how to present the news from the front, which were prepared with Hitler’s approval.
On 22 February 1942 Hitler expressed his admiration for Dietrich's resourcefulness in one of his rambling table talks.
Dietrich’s unquestioning subservience to Hitler did, however, lead him to make mistakes and wildly mistaken prophecies, such as his rash statement on 9 October 1941 before German and foreign journalists. ‘The campaign in the East has been decided,’ he declared, \ . . the further development will take place as we wish it. With these last tremendous blows we have inflicted on the Soviet Union she is militarily finished. The English dream of a war on two fronts has definitely come to an end' (ist endgültig ausgeträumt). In fact Moscow was not taken and the furious Goebbels had to try and repair the damage. Dietrich nonetheless retained his position and the Fiihrer’s confidence until the end of the Third Reich. Imprisoned in 1945, he was eventually tried and sentenced in April 1949 to seven years' imprisonment for crimes against humanity. He was released from Landsberg prison on 16 August 1950 for good behaviour. He died m Düsseldorf in 1952 at the age of fifty-five.
(the work represented the Führer’s ‘peaceful struggle for ...)
1933Das Wirtschafts den ken im Dritten Reich
1936Quotes from others about the person
Dr Dietrich may be physically small, but he is exceptionally gifted at his job. ... I am proud of the fact that with his handful of men I can at once throw the rudder of the press through 180 degrees - as happened on 22 June 1941 [the day Germany invaded Russia). There is no other country which can copy us in that.’
(Hitler, 1942)