Hostile coverage of student protests and a continuing rightward drift in editorial comment were met with boycotts and printing-press blockades, and later in 1972 with the bombing of the company offices by the Red Army Faction (the "Baader Meinhof Gang").

Sometimes referred to as Germany's Rupert Murdoch,[1][2] Springer, with counter suits and minor divestments, was able to ride out public criticism of his editorial ethics and market dominance.

In addition to promotion and defence of the values of the "Western family of nations" and NATO, Springer declared "reconciliation of Jews and Germans and support for the vital rights of the State of Israel" to be a leitmotif of his company's journalism.

The senior Springer owned a small printing and publishing firm, Hammerich & Lesser-Verla, and was the treasurer of the centrist[5] or centre-left[6] German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei).

Following Hitler's assumption of untrammeled power in 1933, new press ordinances made Springer directly accountable to the Ministry of Propaganda,[8] although as editor of the sports and business pages he may have remained relatively free of Nazi-party dictation.

[7][9] After paper shortages shut the daily in 1941, he stayed with the firm printing literary works until Allied air raids in 1944 destroyed both the business premises and the family home.

While the divorce papers list Springer's infidelity as grounds (he would have five wives over the course of his 73 years), by 1938 it was clear that his marriage to a person classified, under the new race laws, as a "half-Jew", a Mischling, would bar him as an editor and publisher.

He later claimed that this was to secure "a Nazi-uniformed buffer" for his family "in an organization that did not make any major ideological commitments and that allowed politics to be combined with the motorsport that I loved so much.”[16] Other NSKK members who would go on to occupy prominent positions in the post-war Federal Republic offered similar careerist explanations, among them Springer's future rival in publishing Franz Burda, Franz Josef Strauss who was to lead Bavaria's ruling Christian Social Union, and (a purportedly inactive party member)[17] Kurt Georg Kiesinger, West Germany's third Chancellor.

[18] Contrary to their picture of a relatively "apolitical" motorist club, the NSKK was a paramilitary organisation,[19] implicated in the regime's racist policy of exclusion and discrimination (it screened its members for Aryan traits) and in the anti-semitic pogroms of 1938.

Never having worn a uniform (thanks to asthma and diabetes) or been a member of the Nazi party (from which, by virtue of his marriage to Martha Meyer, he would have been excluded),[20] Springer was able to obtain from the British occupation authorities a license to run a newspaper.

Competing in Hamburg with the five other dailies, Springer offered a paper he described as "geared to the underdog and the little man", and perfected a formula he launched on the national market in 1952 with Bild Zeitung.

[22] Springer celebrated Ullstein as having been, in the Weimar years, the symbol of a Jewish-German liberal-democratic tradition, but at the same time his critics were to note, in line with Die Welt and Bild, a decisive rightward shift in editorial policy.

Springer was to describe the trip as the "central political event of my life", convincing him that there was no alternative to Konrad Adenauer's Westbindung: to discount Communist overtures and to persevere with the North Atlantic alliance.

[34][35] According to the American investigative journalist Murray Waas "highly reliable sources in the U.S. intelligence community" testified to the figure of "some $7 million" funnelled through the CIA to Springer in the early 1950s.

It is possible that CIA funding is confused with support from the Government and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) programme (wound up in October 1950) which Die Zeit, among other pro-democratic, pro-Allied publishing efforts, are known to have benefitted.

Defence minister Franz Josef Strauss levelled accusations of treason (Landesverrat) in respect to an article detailing NATO projections of "unimaginable chaos" in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike and criticising the government's lack of preparedness.

[40][41] Adenauer appears to have been sufficiently convinced of Springer's political reliability, that when in October 1963 he resigned as chancellor, he suggested (perhaps playfully) to Bild Editor-in-Chief Peter Boenisch that the publisher might be the "politician" best fitted to continue his policies.

[42] The Spiegel affair ignited youth protest and brought the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), the German Socialist Student Union, onto the streets.

Swift to denounce those who questioned the equity and social costs of the West German Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle"), Springer characterised the "extra-parliamentary opposition" as subversive.

[43] In June 1967 an open letter from a large group of writers (among them Ingeborg Drewitz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass), accused the Springer Press of "incitement" in a police riot in West Berlin that saw the death of student protester Benno Ohnesorg.

The Hamburg print shop was besieged to prevent the paper leaving the presses, and in Munich a demonstrator and a policeman were killed after students ransacked the Bild editorial offices.

Schmidt conceded that the publisher's success was related to new journalistic methods and formats that catered to public tastes, but charged Springer with using that position of preeminence to mix "news and suggestive commentary".

[51] In 1968, a government commission concluded that the degree of control Springer had achieved over the publishing industry in West Germany (40% of newspapers and about 20% of magazines) threatened the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press.

[53] A critical test of his ability to manage and deflect concern over media concentration might have come only with the introduction of commercial television, and that was delayed in West Germany until 1984, the year before he died.

But noting that "the people in the other part of Germany were no more guilty than those of us over here", he insisted that they deserved "same kind of chance" at rehabilitation that democratic and market freedoms had allowed their compatriots in the west.

When the Wall went up in Berlin in 1961, Springer built his 22-storey headquarters flush up against it in the centre of the city, so that every day it might look over, and be seen from, what his writers regularly referred to as the Soviet Occupation Zone (German: Sowjetische Besatzungszone or SBZ).

Over the course of two years from 1968 to 1970, GDR state television aired a lavishly-produced 10-hour miniseries, Ich – Axel Cäsar Springer, depicting the media magnate as the puppet of a secretive, post-war Nazi cabal.

[59] From August 1971 Günter Prinz, Boenisch's successor at Bild, restored the paper's circulation by returning to a less politically charged "mix of sex, facts und fiction".

Writing himself in Die Welt, Springer expressed outrage that a democratically elected German government should license a Communist regime in its annexation of a quarter of the country.

[14] Next to post-war Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, it has been said that "no German played a more significant role in the effort to repair his country's burdened relationship with the Jews, and to ensure its support for their state, than Axel Springer.