BERTELSMANN, one of the world’s largest media groups, deliberately misled researchers in an attempt to conceal its Nazi past, according to a report released yesterday by independent historians.

The German-based publishing empire, which had claimed to have had an honourable war and a record of friction with the Nazi regime, in fact made its fortune producing morale-boosting pocketbooks such as Bombers and Machine Guns Over Poland for consumption by frontline German soldiers. Nowadays it publishes the likes of Danielle Steele, John Grisham and Robert Harris — author of the best-selling Fatherland.

“I would like to express our sincere regret for the inaccuracies the commission has uncovered in our previous corporate history of the World War Two era, as well as our wartime activities,” Günter Thielen, Bertelsmann’s chairman, said.

In fact, the revelation could not have come at a more embarrassing time for the company — the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the annual showcase for international publishers and agents, which is traditionally dominated by Bertelsmann.

The American publishers Random House, Ballantine, Doubleday, Knopf and Bantam Dell all belong to the Bertelsmann empire, which owns or has controlling stakes in hundreds of magazines, newspapers, book clubs, television stations, software and music companies around the world.

Memories are still fresh of how American writers, especially those of Jewish origin, opposed the German company’s takeover of such a large chunk of New York publishing. The company sought to reassure writers swuch as Philip Roth that its wartime record was impeccable. In 1998 Thomas Middelhof, then the chief executive, told a New York audience that Bertelsmann was “one of the few non-Jewish media companies closed down by the Nazi regime”. The printing works was closed in 1944, he said, because of the company’s subversive activities. “Bertelsmann’s continuing existence was a threat to the Nazi attempt to control freedom of expression,” he claimed.

Independent historians have now exposed this version of history as self-serving legend. The guiding spirit of the company before the war was Heinrich Mohn, a “sponsoring member” of the SS — that is, he made financial contributions to Hitler’s crack troops — and a member of the Nazi Flying Club who made sure that his children, including his still-influential son Reinhard, joined the Hitler Youth.

Bertelsmann, established in 1835, was originally a publisher of prayerbooks, but Mohn, who considered himself to be a conservative Protestant, shifted the focus away from theological texts to war propaganda after the Nazis took power in 1933.

Some of his religious books fell foul of the Nazi censors and some of his war books were regarded as “too bloodthirsty” for the tastes of frontline soldiers, but there was no serious confrontation with the Nazi regime. The printing works was closed down because of irregularities about how Bertelsmann had built up its big stocks of paper. The closure had nothing to do with any act of resistance, the independent historians led by Saul Friedländer, a Holocaust scholar, said.

On the contrary, the publishing house flourished with Nazi help. About 19 million copies of war thrillers rolled off Bertelsmann’s presses. The historical commission found that only a small number — about 50 out of 12,000 titles — were “massively anti-Jewish”. Many other books, however, were tainted with the anti- Semitic mood of the time.

One book, entitled Dr Martin Luther’s Little Catechism For The Man in Brown gives guidance to Nazi Brownshirts. Another, Between The Vistula and The Volga, depicts a massacre by Jews of innocent Ukrainian children. The musical score for the Horst Wessel Song, effectively the Nazi anthem, was a useful earner. So was the Christmas Book for the Hitler Youth.

Professor Friedländer said that he would rank Heinrich Mohn as a man with an eye for a profit rather than as a rabid anti-Semite. There is evidence, the researchers say, that he helped a few Jewish or half-Jewish employees. It was nonetheless compulsory for apprentices to join the Hitler Youth or the Nazi-run League of German Girls.

The publishing house almost certainly made use of forced labourers from the Vilnius ghetto when it set up printing works in the Baltic states; conclusive evidence, however, has not yet been found. In Germany, the company used Dutch labourers, but the historians can find no evidence of ill-treatment.

Even so, the record is patchy for a company that has prided itself on its ethical behaviour.

Bertelsmann’s supposedly anti-Nazi war record allowed it to gain a profitable publishing licence from the British authorities soon after the war, and it has flourished over the subsequent half-century.

The company’s official history, printed in 1985, portrays it as a hive of resistance. That legend would have stayed intact had it not been for Hersch Fischler, a determined Austrian Jewish researcher, who almost single-handedly forced the company to come clean about its past. His revelations forced the company to engage the independent historians. Over the past three years they trawled 50 separate archives to collate the information that was published yesterday in an 800-page report (www.uhkommission.de). The company archive is also to be opened to the public.

Munich: A court stopped the German sales yesterday of A Moral Reckoning, a book by the US historian Daniel Goldhagen criticising the Catholic Church’s Nazi-era activities. The court granted an injunction after church officials in the city complained about a photo purporting to show a Munich cardinal at a Nazi event.

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