Germany has started to reprint national socialism newspapers???

[Leon]

Germany has started to reprint news papers of the National socialist era (deutsche zeitungen national socialism)

Why?

So we can read how things were at the time, may be great to see that life was fairly normal at the time...
however could this be read as they would like them to get used to what is coming?

Have the German's not heard of google???

[NeverMind]

What do you mean by "reprinting" them?
Can you give a link?

As a journalist (temporarily off-duty) I am very interested in such things, but could not possibly comment without seeing this thing in the proper context.

(Well, except about Google: it is not to be considered a proper source of any knowledge at all, and certainly cannot substitute a library. Maybe in the future, but certainly not now.)

[Tibouchine]

Hi Leon,

as I have not heard about those reprints yet I did a little-google research. Here's what I've found:

It's a project called "Newspaper witnesses" that has started in January 2009.

A British publisher reprinted old Nazi newspapers from the years 1933-1945.
In the first edition of the "Newspaper Witnesses" (€ 3.90) you got a reprint of the papers
"Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung" (German General Newspaper), "Der Kämpfer" (The Fighter)
and "Der Angriff" (The Attack). It contained also German News published by exiled people who had
a different perspecitve on Nazi-Germany.

The project is for education purposes and is supported by quite a few reknowned historians and by
the association of history teachers.

The british publishing house now plans a new edition and announced it with a press release.

http://zeitungszeugen.de/pressemitteilung-vom-4-januar-2012/

This is the homepage http://www.zeitungszeugen.de/home/

The British publisher has similar projects in 9 different European countries.

Here are two articles that discuss the first edition 2009 in German.

http://einestages.spiegel.de/external/ShowTop ...

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3968815,00.html

The latter talks about a discussion whether the historical newspapers are food for Neo Nazis,
but they came to the conclusion that there is no immediate danger from "Newspaper Witnesses".

In my opinion this is very propable. NeoNazis have other sources for their absurd ideas. The average
person in Germany is not interested in this stuff. In Germany we have the phrase, that "nothing is
as old as the newspaper of yesterday". This applies all the more for almost 80 years old newspapers.

[Leon]

It's being advertised on national TV in Germany...
as soon as I find this will post a link

[NeverMind]

OK, thanks, Leon.

And yes, I suspected it was probably what Tibouchine is reporting.
That is a perfectly normal and very, very useful practice.
It makes old newspapers accessible to the wider public - always and unambiguously a good thing - and at the same time it protects the newspapers physically from the effects of repeated handling.