Ann Millin, historian and employee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, gave a lecture on the decline of freedom of the press in pre-World War II Germany at Syracuse University on Wednesday.

The lecture, “’When Our Dictator Turns Up’: German and American Journalists Respond to the Third Reich,” was the first of the Zell lecture series hosted by the School of Education. The series is intended to serve as an adjunct to the School of Education’s atrocity studies and practices of social justice minor created this semester, Lauri Zell, a School of Education Board of Visitors member, said before Millin’s lecture.

The lectures will supplement the minor by providing students more questions to explore regarding both the minor’s subject matter and current events, Zell said.

Millin presented the lecture as a story about the ways in which both German and American news reporting changed as a result of the Nazi Party’s rise to power and World War II.

She began the lecture by displaying photographs taken during Kristallnacht, a night in 1938 when Nazi’s destroyed Jewish property and killed almost 100 Jews on Nov. 9 and 10. The photos depicted burning synagogues and demolished shops.

She said that local German newspapers did not cover Kristallnacht in detail due to restrictions placed on German press organizations by the Nazi government, while American newspapers covered it extensively.

“The fact that this amazing national event, such a horrific event, did not appear on the front pages of German newspapers may seem shocking to us,” Millin said. “And the fact that it appeared on the front pages of our newspaper probably not so much, and this is because of the United States’ long, strong tradition of freedom of the press.”

She said that despite weak protections for the press in Germany’s constitution, the pre-war German press was relatively free, and Germany’s citizens read newspapers regularly.

However, as political parties in Germany became more polarized and started to spread information through propaganda, the public began to distrust Germany’s mainstream press and political parties, Millin said.

“The public began to lose faith in both the government to govern and the press to report. And truth became something that Germans found it difficult to ascertain,” she said.

That distrust paved the Nazi Party’s way to power, Millin said. She said the press lost its freedom virtually overnight once the Nazis seized power. The German press became an extension of the state and lost its ability to challenge the Nazi Party’s narrative, she said.

Millin will present a seminar for undergraduate and graduate students on topics connected to Wednesday’s lecture on Thursday.

The lecture was co-sponsored by the SU Humanities Center, The Lender Center for Social Justice, the Department of Languages, the Department of History, the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics.