Poison Kitchen

The Poison Kitchen was the name Adolf Hitler gave to a group of journalists of the Bavarian newspaper The Munich Post who were highly critical of Hitler and ran a series of extremely negative investigative exposés about Hitler in the 1920s and early 1930s, before Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933.^[1]

The newspaper had been founded by the Bavarian Social Democratic party, and its initial opposition to Hitler was based on ideological grounds, but quickly acquired a personal dimension both for the journalists involved and for Hitler himself. Ron Rosenbaum writes in his 1998 book about The Poison Kitchen:

"Their duel with Hitler lasted a dozen years and produced some of the sharpest, most penetrating insights into his character, his mind and method, then or since. Much of their work has been forgotten, but not much has been surpassed. And, as the name Poison Kitchen suggests, they succeeded in getting under Hitler's skin ...."^[2]

The Poison Kitchen group became one of the few early warning voices regarding the dangers posed by the rise of the Nazi party, although their warnings went largely unheeded at the time.

When Hitler finally came to power in 1933, The Munich Post offices were subject to a final ransacking by the S.A. on March 9, 1933 and all the members of the paper were imprisoned in concentration camps.^[3] The very street address was stricken from the map and remains so to this day.

The Poison Kitchen group included Martin Gruber, Erhard Auer, Edmund Goldschagg, and Julius Zerfass, and others.

References

Additional resources

• History of the Poison Kitchen
• Holocaust Chronicle Article on the Poison Kitchen
• Racism: power and the press

• Explaining Hitler : The Search for the Origins of His Evil (ISBN 0-06-095339-X)
• An Excerpt from the Above book on the Random House website