Franz Eher Nachfolger Verlag GmbH publishing house

On December 17, 1920, the National Socialist German Workers Party took over the Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH. Its primary task at the time was publication of the Völkischer Beobachter (Nazi party newspaper). The money for the acquisition came from a fund of the ‘Reichwehr,’ which was controlled by the then-leader of the ‘Freikorps’ Franz Ritter von Epp; from Dietrich Eckarts Vetter Simon, a businessman; from the Augsburg manufacturer Gottfried Grandel; and Friedrich Krohn, a dentist who resided in Starnberg. Dietrich Eckart provided security with his assets. On August 4, 1921, Max Amann became director of the company, which at that time was in dire financial straits. To remedy that situation, he added a book publishing house in 1923.

In contrast to the Völkischer Beobachter, the book publishing house was not banned after the failed Hitler Putsch on November 8-9, 1923. Hitler’s two-volume work My Struggle developed into a best-seller (1925/27). 241,000 copies had been sold by 1933.
After 1933, Amann expanded the Eher Verlag into the largest publishing house in Europe. In 1933-34, Hitler took the newspapers‘ distressed publishing houses out of the hands of the Regional Leaders (Gauleiter) and put them under Amann's control. The left press was destroyed by force in 1933; the Catholic press silenced in part starting in 1935, in part assimilated by the Eher group.
Many non-confessional newspapers such as the famous Frankfurter Zeitung and the large Berlin publishers Ullstein and Mosse also fell prey to the Eher Verlag. In September 1937, 54% of German newspapers were the property of the party publishing house or dependent on it.

In Bavaria, in addition to the largest newspapers in Munich and Augsburg, it controlled numerous other publishing houses via the corresponding Regional Leaders. On the eve of the war, it was almost exclusively small city newspapers that were still privately owned. In February 1943, with the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, it acquired a large newspaper and book publisher, to which Langen-Müller in Munich also belonged. In 1944, Amann purchased the last significant private newspaper company, the Berliner Scherl Group, controlled by Alfred Hugenberg.

After the collapse in May 1945, the assets were transferred to the Bavarian state, which received the order from the Allies to sell them. The publishing house was deleted from the commercial register in 1952.