Das Reich [The Empire] was a weekly newspaper intended primarily for the internal German market. By the late 1930's, the Propaganda Ministry had recognized that there was a large segment of the German population which the controlled German press was not reaching. The Ministry's answer was to create a new newspaper with greater diversity and drawing upon the best journalists and thinkers in the country. It selected its contributors for their literary and journalistic excellence rather than for the purity of their National Socialist politics. As an example of its liberal outlook, it hired the political caricaturist Erich Ohser, who, before the Nazi's came to power in 1933, lampooned them in the Social Democratic paper Vorwaerts. Ohser was not permitted to do this in Das Reich, but the paper's willingness to hire Ohser indicates the image it took pains to project.
This recognition by the Propaganda Ministry that its press was not reaching a substantial segment of the population and launching a new paper to correct the problem is reminiscent of the commissioning of NPR and PBS in the United States after the Vietnam War.
At the inauguration of Das Reich the Propaganda Ministry official responsible for the Press, Max Amann, wrote:
This paper should not be one among many newspapers and periodicals, but rather it should be the leading great German political weekly newspaper that will effectively represent the German Reich equally well at home and abroad.
Max Amann, in an open letter to prominent National Socialists, June 30, 1940.
Its first issue appeared at the end of May 1940.
In December 1942, its editor stepped down because of increasing criticism from the ideological purists and thereafter the content of the paper fell more in line with the rest of the National Socialist press.
Its contributors included Theodor Heuss, Erich Ohser, Karl Korn, Manfred Hausmann, Max Planck (Nobel Prized winning physicist), Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, Werner Hoefer, Benno von Wiese (Germanist), Ernst Schnabel (historian), Wolfgang Koeppen (reviews), H.E. Koehler (political caricatures), and Joseph Goebbels, who frequently contributed its lead article. Many of these people continued their careers in West Germany after the war. Theodor Heuss became the president of West Germany in 1949 and held that office until 1959.
The paper's maximum circulation was 1.4 million. It ceased publication in April 1945.