ABSTRACT
AMANN, MAX (1891-1957) Nazi press baron, honorary SS general, a Reichsleiter, and president of the Reich Press Chamber from 1933 to 1945. Amann owed his career in the Nazi Party to the trust placed in him by Hitler. They had served together as non-commissioned officers in the same regiment during the First World War. Despite Amann’s lack of education, Hitler appointed him the party’s business manager in 1921 (until 1923). As director of the party’s publishing firm, Eher Verlag, from 1922 until the end of the Third Reich, Amann was responsible for publishing the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and numerous other party publications, including Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte. For his part in the Hitler Putsch Amann served one month in prison. In 1924 he was elected to the Munich city council, on which he served until 1932. After Hitler’s ascent to power Amann
became president of the Association of German Publishers and in December 1933 the president of the newly founded Reich Press Chamber. Amann had little competence as a writer, relying instead on his able assistant Rolf Rienhardt (b. 1903) to write his articles and speeches, but did have considerable business acumen and accumulated enormous personal wealth as the press tsar of the Third Reich. He played a leading role in the Gleichschaltung of the press, eventually absorbing virtually all independent German newspapers into what became the world’s largest publishing empire. Although he frequently clashed with other Nazi leaders in jurisdictional disputes, especially with Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, party culture tsar Alfred Rosenberg, and Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Amann retained Hitler’s favor. Amann handled Hitler’s royalties from Mein Kampf and paid huge fees to Hitler and other Nazi leaders for articles they published in the Nazi press. Amann was classified as a “major offender” by a denazification court and sentenced to a ten-year term in 1948.
