[5] The main founders, almost all of them belonging to the camarilla around the Prussian king Frederick William IV[6] were: The launch of the newspaper and the founding of the publishing house were carried out with military precision.

The next strains followed when the editorial board openly spoke out against the repeal of the Basic Rights of the German People as drafted by the Frankfurt Parliament and thus against the Lesser Germany solution.

Even though he regularly had articles written for the Kreuzzeitung through his press assistant Moritz Busch until 1871, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was steadily evolving into "Bismarck's house postil".

The publisher, Ferdinand Heinicke, also assumed responsibility for the content of the paper as the so-called ‘sitting editor’ who was the sole person liable in legal disputes and lawsuits.

After 1868 Bismarck used the notorious Reptile Fund – money diverted for political purposes from elsewhere in the budget or to pay bribes – in order to influence the press and implement his policies.

In June and July 1875 the journalist Franz Perrot, writing under a pseudonym, published a series of five articles in the Kreuzzeitung called "The Era of Bleichröder-Delbrück-Camphausen and the New German Economic Policy”.

The paper countered by publishing more than 100 names of declarants, nobles, members of parliament, and pastors who in letters to the newspaper expressed their approval of the publication of the research.

It emerged from documents that were uncovered that Bismarck had participated with his own funds in the founding of the Boden-Credit-Bank and had personally signed its foundation charter and articles of association, thus giving it a privileged position among German mortgage banks.

Even among Jewish associations, conflicting directions emerged, some advocating a turn towards modern society and strong assimilation, and others seeking to preserve the traditions of the faith.

In 1890 the Kreuzzeitung did not take part in the media controversy over the Vering-Salomon duel, in which the Jewish Salomon was killed by his fellow student Vering from the Albert Ludwig University, but treated the ensuing disputes objectively.

When it came to light that Hammerstein had exhausted a pension fund set up by the Kreuzzeitung, he resigned his seats in the national and state parliaments in the summer of 1895 and fled with the 200,000 marks to Greece via Tyrol and Naples.

In domestic politics, Foertsch maintained personal contacts with the imperial treasury, from which he regularly received comprehensive information about the current financial and economic state of affairs, as well as the plans of the German Reich.

The new editor-in-chief reorganized finances and subsumed the buildings and editorial offices that the newspaper had acquired in recent decades in Germany and abroad under a wholly owned subsidiary, Kreuzzeitung Real Estate Inc.

Aristocratic landowners, politicians and high-ranking civil servants in particular subscribed to the paper for an additional 1.25 marks (today around 8 euros) per week, with twice-daily postal delivery.

"Deep grief, apathy, escapism and hopelessness, as well as fears of what was to come that reached the point of panic reactions, characterized the prevailing mood of the old elites after the collapse of the empire.

Depending on the author's ideological view, the spectrum ranges from "stock Protestant", "feudal", "German national", "ultraconservative", "agrarian", "East Elbian” and "Junker conservative" to "anti-modern”.

[49] On 12 November 1918, the Kreuzzeitung ran the headline: "Germany is facing an upheaval such as history has not yet seen" and, following Aristotle's constitutional theory, described democracy as a "degenerate" form of government, saying that "only a tyranny is worse".

[51] And even Vorwärts, the party paper of the Social Democrats, apparently had no qualms about a hiring a person like Hans Leuss, who had to leave the Kreuzzeitung because of his anti-Jewish agitation.

The paper referred to the Catholic Centre politician Matthias Erzberger as a "corrupter of the country" and a "fulfillment politician" – in favor of fulfilling the obligations of the Versailles Treaty in order to show that it was impossible to do so – just as it did the Catholic Centre deputies Heinrich Brauns and Joseph Wirth, all of whom had explicitly identified with the wartime Burgfrieden policy of Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.

Journalistic support was provided by Erwein von Aretin, editor-in-chief of the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten (Munich’s Latest News) who also sat on the corporate board of the Kreuzzeitung.

[63] During Duesterberg's candidacy in the 1932 German presidential election, a steel helmet (Stahlhelm) was depicted above the Iron Cross in the newspaper's header, but this was only a means to an electoral end.

[40] Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, who was seen as the guarantor of the monarchy and the sole figure with the stature to restore it, received unlimited support from the Kreuzzeitung.

Hindenburg reluctantly agreed to the interview, took up, according to his own statements, "for the first time in his life one of those deadly world papers" and said in a defiant tone to his press chief: "But I will continue to read only the Kreuzzeitung.

As late as 12 August 1932, he rejected to good public effect Hitler's demand that "the leadership of the Reich government and all state power be conferred in full on me".

Granting Hitler's demands, the paper said, would have meant degrading the Reich president to a "puppet to be staged at ceremonial events dressed in a state robe".

In order to prevent a takeover by the Hugenberg Group, he agreed in September 1926 to form an association with Helmut Rauschenbusch, who was also a member of the Gentlemen's Club and publisher of the Deutsche Tageszeitung (German Daily Newspaper).

For the alteration to our masthead the following consideration was decisive: Our newspaper, founded in 1848 under the name 'Neue Preußische Zeitung', very soon came generally to be called in public simply the Kreuzzeitung after its emblem, the Iron Cross.

Likewise, in political respects the word Kreuzzeitung has for decades been an established term based on the Iron Cross with its inscription 'With God for King and Fatherland'.

The front page read: "As of today we have taken over the Kreuzzeitung.” Joseph Goebbels had appointed Erich Schwarzer, a staunch National Socialist, as the new editor-in-chief and integrated the Kreuzzeitung, along with other bourgeois conservative media, into the German Publishers.

Until that time the editors of the Kreuzzeitung had still provided some reports thoroughly worth reading such as those by Hans Georg von Studnitz, who during a six-month stay in India in 1937 interviewed Gandhi and Nehru, among others.