Nazi Newspapers April 1945

NSDAP NEWSPAPERS - LAST DAYS OF WW2

,,OBERDONAU ZEITUNG’’
6 RARE ISSUES FROM
THE FINAL DAYS
OF WORLD WAR II

The ,,Oberdonau Zeitung’’ (Upper Danube Provincial Newspaper) had for many years of the German Third Reich been the largest and most important daily paper in the Gau or Province where Adolf Hitler was born and raised to manhood - Oberdonau.

Published in Linz, it kept the homeland informed from Burgers of Braunau am Inn to the Steyr workers in the Panzer factory at St. Valentin, to the guards at Mauthausen concentration camp. It was a big, well-edited paper.

By the end of the war the ,,Oberdonau Zeitung’’ had been reduced to a single two-sided page measuring about 12 x 16-1/2 inches. It still reported all the news it was able to gather, nearly all war news and virtually all bad news. The Nazi eagle and swastika was still centered on the masthead in the spring of 1945 and a single copy could be bought for 10 Reichspfennigs (4 US cents).

All six examples of the ,,Oberdonau Zeitung’’ that we offer for sale here are 100% original, printed on poor quality paper, but laminated between very thin layers of milar to preserve them. They are in very good condition. The issues are those for 3, 4, 5, 6, 20 and 26 April 1945 - the very end of the war.

In the issue for Tuesday 3 April the news was that Martin Bormann pledged “victory or death”, the Allies had installed a “hated Jew” as police chief of Köln (Cologne) and Nazi “Wehrwolfs” were operating in the Allied occupied areas of Germany.

On the 4th the headlines told of the American “murder-regiment” operating in and around Würzburg and told of many deaths. Theaters were still operating in Linz and the KdF was still holding meetings!

On 5 April the ,,Oberdonau Zeitung’’ reported that “The Devil is on the Loose” in Occupied Germany and a very interesting story by a SS Kriegsberichter (SS War Correspondent) tells of a schoolgirl with a Panzerfaust destroying Soviet tanks from 35 meters (30 yards). Russian soldiers were within a few miles of Wien (Vienna).

On 6 April there was news that German V2 rockets had turned Allied occupied Antwerp, Belgium into “hell”, and that the German “citizen war” was in full swing. The headline on the 20th of April (Hitler’s birthday) declared “Adolf Hitler - the Man of the Century!”, and both pages are filled with tributes to Hitler. Gauleiter Holz of Nürnberg reported sent Hitler a telegram to announce that the final battle for that city had begun.

The final issue of the ,,Oberdonau Zeitung’’ is dated 26 April 1945 and announced that American tanks were entering the Gau of Oberdonau. A large article on the front page told of the bloody last stand of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH - a Waffen-SS unit) against overwhelming Soviet Forces in the forests outside Vienna. “Terror bombing” of Linz was big news as was the murder of a policeman in a small town nearby. The only advertising was run in hopes of finding missing persons and property lost during aerial bombardments.

This is material of the rarest and most historic sort.
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