<i>Münchener Post</i>

The Münchener Post had been a Bavarian Social Democratic newspaper since August 1, 1881. In 1920, the Bavarian party chair Erhard Auer took over its management. Under State Premier von Kahr, the Münchener Post was the only important newspaper in Munich that opposed the government. According to the Münchener Post, Kahr was the prisoner of the most horrendous German nationalism and was moving toward unconstitutional resistance to the Reich. It called the so-called ‘Feme’ murders a consequence of protected propaganda on the part of the authorities.

Very early on, it reported about the activities of the Nazi Party. Hitler therefore called the newspaper the “Münchener Pest”. Both sides filed lawsuits against each other. The editorial building was the target of several violent attacks, also on the evening before the Hitler putsch on November 9, 1923. As State Commissioner General, Kahr had already banned the newspaper for an indefinite period on October 29, 1923 because it questioned Bavaria’s loyalty to the Reich and accused him of antisemitic politics.

In 1925, attacks of the paper on the Publisher of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten and the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, Paul Nikolaus Cossman, led to the attention-grabbing ‘stab-in-the-back trial’ with prominent witnesses. Editor Martin Gruber accused Cossman of falsifying history, because he made the alleged subversive activities of Social Democracy responsible for the defeat of 1918. Sentenced to defamation, Gruber was made to pay an unusually high monetary fine, whereby the justification for the judgment revealed the court’s sympathy for Cossman's point of view.

The newspaper continued to fight National Socialism; for example, in 1931 with the attention-grabbing revelations of Ernst Röhm’s homosexual affairs. On the day when the Commissar of the Reich von Epp was appointed, March 9, 1933, the Storm Battalion (SA) raided the editorial rooms and largely destroyed the machines in the printing plant. The publishing house's assets were seized and the newspaper banned. The editors were put in prison for a week. The circulation, which was 60,000 in 1920 had dropped to 15,000 by 1933. The Regional Leader (Gauleiter) Adolf Wagner seized the machines that were still usable for his regional newspaper, the Sonntag-Morgen-Post.