Interviewing Hitler opens in Linz, Austria, in 1938: the year before the outbreak of World War Two. Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria, has just announced the Anschluss, the forced political union of Germany and his birth country. Since seizing power in 1933, he has been overseeing Germany’s rearmament and increasingly belligerent foreign policy moves.

Now, on March 12 1938, Hitler has returned to Austria as a hero, greeted by enraptured crowds lining the streets. Author Richard Evans describes the triumphant dictator soaking it all in,

standing in the cold on the balcony of the city hall, looking out at buildings festooned with swastikas and a crowd of thousands who are looking up at him and chanting in union: “One leader; one people; one state.”

This moment would have felt like a culmination for Hitler, writes Evans. The near religious fervour emanating from the mass of bodies below “seemed to confirm everything he had long believed about himself as a man of destiny”.

This moment seemed to represent “the high point of a brilliant career” for another person present that evening, too.

Standing alongside [Hitler] was a tall Englishman with slicked-back hair and long scar on his forehead, whose very presence on the balcony seemed the final proof of his position as the world’s greatest journalist.

The striking figure being described is 52-year-old George Ward Price. A star correspondent for the Daily Mail, he enjoyed unprecedented access to Hitler and other prominent Nazis throughout the 1930s. He cultivated it. He relied on it. He enjoyed it.

As outlined by Evans, a former journalist, this left Ward Price standing on very slippery ethical terrain. He shows how journalism can be compromised through access, closeness, exceptional treatment – and the flattering idea that one has been invited, so to speak, into the room.

This book about the past speaks directly to the present.

Donald Trump’s White House recently launched a web portal to spotlight what it deems media bias (or “fake news”), with an “Offender Hall of Shame”. In October, “dozens” of journalists relinquished their access passes and left the Pentagon rather than agree to restrictive new policies. And Trump has personally attacked journalists whose questions he disliked, calling them “piggy” and “ugly, inside and out”.

Review: Interviewing Hitler: How George Ward Price Became the World’s Most Famous Journalist by Richard Evans (The History Press)

This sort of behaviour has a long and troubling precedent. In the 1930s, many foreign correspondents refused to cover Germany under conditions that made honest reporting impossible. As Evans recounts, some, like William Shirer, were harassed, monitored and even threatened with expulsion for writing critically about the regime. Others burned their notes each night to prevent them falling into the hands of the Gestapo. Ward Price, notably, was not among this cohort.

Back in Austria, while the crowd waited for Hitler to appear on the balcony, Ward Price heard his own name announced over the loudspeaker. He was introduced by the master of ceremonies as a “well-known” newsman “who has always understood Germany’s great aims and has interviewed Hitler and Mussolini”.

With the public urging him on, Ward Price reluctantly........

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