Newshawks in Berlin

Newshawks in Berlin reveals how the Associated Press covered Nazi Germany from its earliest days through the aftermath of World War II.

Larry Heinzerling (1945–2021) was a reporter, foreign correspondent, and news executive during a forty-one-year career at the Associated Press. He worked in foreign bureaus in Nigeria, South Africa, and Germany and served as director of AP World Services and deputy international editor.

Randy Herschaft has been for the past three decades an investigative journalist with the Associated Press. The recipient of a George Polk and an Overseas Press Club Award, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize–winning AP team that, nearly fifty years later, uncovered a massacre of civilians by U.S. troops during the Korean War.

Ann Cooper is professor emerita at the Columbia Journalism School. She is the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists and was a foreign correspondent for NPR, including serving as Moscow bureau chief from 1987 to 1991.

A gripping, enraging account.

[Newshawks] richly mines AP’s vast archives and other sources to provide a fascinating inside account of a journalistic era that’s completely different from now but poses many of the same questions.

A fascinating portrait of how the news agency functioned under the influence of a dictatorship while still informing as wide an audience as possible.

Andrew Nagorski, author of Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power:
Faced with the task of investigating the controversial record of the AP’s Berlin bureau in the Nazi era, the authors resisted any rush to judgment. Instead, they let the often-ambiguous evidence speak for itself. The result is a meticulously researched account that exemplifies the virtues of old-fashioned journalistic fairness.

Steven Casey, author of The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan:
Well researched and cogently argued, Newshawks in Berlin provides a compelling account of the challenges and compromises the Associated Press had to make when covering the Third Reich.

Richard Breitman, author of The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany from Within:
Newshawks in Berlin reveals how the Associated Press operated in Nazi Germany, and how Nazi officials infused propaganda into some of AP’s news coverage. Filled with surprises and rich in detail, a well-written, inside account of the tension between ethics and professional opportunism. Very relevant to totalitarian regimes today.

Elizabeth Becker, author of You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War:
This honest, rare, and disturbing history shows how a respected American news organization could become compromised by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda machine. With a deep appreciation for wartime Germany and journalism’s conflicting demands, Newshawks in Berlin reads like an unforgettable warning from another era to our own age of dictators and "fake news."

Steve Coll, author of The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq:
Newshawks in Berlin is a powerful historical investigation that unpacks the ethical choices and hard realities of eyewitness reporting under a dictatorship. In writing that is nuanced and sophisticated, and yet as clear and readable as an AP dispatch, Heinzerling and Herschaft enlarge our understanding of American news in the Nazi era while providing vital lessons for journalists today.