Süddeutsche Zeitung

The Süddeutsche Zeitung was one of the first daily newspapers approved by the Allies after World War II and was first published on 6 October 1945.

The newspaper is published by Süddeutsche Verlag in Munich. It is majority owned by investment holdings and a small part by the original publishing family, the Friedmann family.

The editors-in-chief are Wolfgang Krach and Judith Wittwer. The chairman of the editorial board is Thomas Schaub.

History

20th century

On 6 October 1945, five months after the end of World War II in Germany, the SZ was the first newspaper to receive a license from the U.S. military administration of Bavaria. The first issue was published the same evening, reportedly printed from the same presses that had printed Mein Kampf.

Bernard B. McMahon, commander of the US intelligence control system, had previously been looking for a long time for non-Nazi ("untainted") licensees for a new German daily newspaper. He found them in the publishers August Schwingenstein, Edmund Goldschagg, and Franz Josef Schöningh. Each had pre-Nazi journalism experience, Goldschagg had been arrested by the Gestapo, and Schwingenstein had been a member of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold. The founders announced that Süddeutsche Zeitung would be "a mouthpiece for all Germans who are united in their love of freedom, in their hatred of the totalitarian state, in their abhorrence of everything that is National Socialist".

The most important competitor is the more conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)., founded in 1949.

21st century

Declines in advertising in the early 2000s were so severe that the paper was on the brink of bankruptcy in October 2002. The Süddeutsche survived through a 150 million euro investment by a new shareholder, a regional newspaper chain called Südwestdeutsche Medien. Over three years, the newspaper underwent a reduction in its staff, from 425 to 307, the closing of a regional edition in Düsseldorf, and the scrapping of a section devoted to news from Berlin.

In spring 2004, SZ launched the Süddeutsche Bibliothek. Each week, one of 50 famous novels of the 20th century was made available in hardcover at certain newsstands and in book shops. Later a series of 50 influential movies on DVD followed. In late 2004, the daily also launched a popular science magazine, SZ Wissen. In late 2005, a series of children's books continued this branch of special editions.

In early 2015, the newspaper received a 2.6-terabyte dataset from an anonymous source. The dataset contained confidential information of a law firm offering the management of offshore companies. The newspaper in conjunction with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reviewed the data from the Panama Papers for over a year before publishing stories from it on 3 April 2016.

In late 2017, the newspaper released snippets from a 1.4-terabyte dataset to be known as the "Paradise Papers" containing about 13.4 million documents, throwing light on the financial offshore jurisdictions, whose workings are unveiled, including Bermuda, the headquarters of the main company involved, Appleby, corporate services provider Estera, corporate registries in the Caribbean and Singapore-based international trust and corporate services provider, Asiaciti Trust. It contains the names of more than 120,000 people and companies. The newspaper called in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to oversee the investigation. BBC Panorama and The Guardian were among the nearly 100 media groups investigating the papers. The leaked data covers seven decades, from 1950 to 2016.

In May 2018, the German Press Council opened an inquiry to determine whether a Süddeutsche Zeitung cartoon which depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was antisemitic; readers had complained that the image "reminded them of the anti-Semitic language of Nazi times". Süddeutsche Zeitung ended its decades-long collaboration with the cartoonist and apologized to readers, calling the cartoon a mistake.

In August 2025, Süddeutsche Zeitung published an article questioning the authenticity of photographs of starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.