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Draft:Hugenberg Konzern

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The Hugenberg Konzern was a national-conservative media group in Germany from 1916 to 1943 and was based in Berlin. The group comprised advertising and news agencies, press services, press publishers and film companies.[1] Alfred Hugenberg, co-founder of the Alldeutscher Verband and from 1928 chairman of the German National People's Party (DNVP), systematically built up the Hugenberg Group as chairman of the board of directors of Friedrich Krupp AG (1909-1918) from 1916 with the takeover of Scherl-Verlag.

In 1919, twelve DNVP members founded the Wirtschaftsvereinigung zur Förderung der geistigen Wiederaufbaukräfte (Economic Association for the Promotion of Intellectual Reconstruction) as the umbrella organization of the Hugenberg Group, which provided the Group with significant funding. As a result of the media concentration gained, the extremely nationalistic and anti-democratic propaganda spread by the Hugenberg Group reached large sections of the German population. The Hugenberg media empire is therefore regarded as a stooge for the National Socialists and thus for Hitler.

During the 1930s, the NSDAP bought several parts of the Hugenberg Group. In the Nazi state, the National Socialists gradually took control of the group, starting with the Telegraphen-Union in 1933. Universum Film AG (UFA) was nationalized in 1937 and Scherl-Verlag was transferred to party publishing houses in 1943.