The totalitarian regimes used in the 20th century different tools to coerce people and the media of social communication under their control. Besides of juridical and organizational means they created a system to influence the press according to the rules of the ideology. This became a central element of propaganda and manipulation. The intent of the paper is to describe primarily the kind of press instructions under the Nazi government in Germany. These press instructions have, contrary to the official order, handed down and meanwhile edited, at least for the pre-war years 1933-1939. On total more than 15.000 of such instructions are documented.

My intention is to outline how the editing of the instructions was organized, how it worked and how they can be analysed. Of course it is not possible to go through the whole corpus, but examples will be given and a schema for a broader content analysis will be discussed. In addition to that a short look will be given to the other totalitarian system that was established in Germany after World War II under communist control. Again a system of press instructions was practised. In accordance to the general idea of the conference, a preliminary comparison between the two systems will be made.