Berliner Tageblatt

The Berliner Tageblatt or BT was a German language newspaper published in Berlin from 1872 to 1939. Along with the Frankfurter Zeitung, it became one of the most important liberal German newspapers of its time.

The Berliner Tageblatt was first published by Rudolf Mosse as an advertising paper on 1 January 1872, but developed into a liberal newspaper. On 5 January 1919 the office of the newspaper was briefly occupied by Freikorps soldiers in the German Revolution. By 1920, the BT had achieved a daily circulation of about 245,000.

Prior to the Nazis taking power on 30 January 1933, the newspaper was particularly critical and hostile to their program. On 3 March 1933, after the Reichstag fire, Hans Lachmann-Mosse, the publisher, dismissed editor in chief Theodor Wolff because of his criticism of the Nazi government and his Jewish ancestry. Wolff by then fled to the Tyrol in Austria by plane.

After 1933, the Nazi government took control of the newspaper (the Gleichschaltung). However, in September 1933, special permission was granted by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels to release the paper from any obligation to reprint Nazi propaganda in order to help portray an image of a free German press internationally. Due to this assurance, their respected foreign correspondent Paul Scheffer became editor on 1 April 1934. He had been the first foreign journalist to be refused a re-entry permit into the Soviet Union in 1929 for his critical reporting on the Five-Year Plan and prophecy of famine in Ukraine.

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