According to a new and completely unsurprising academic study, the Associated Press published “material directly from Joseph Goebbels’s infamous propaganda machine” leading up to and during WWII, including anti-Soviet propaganda used to cover up some of worst crimes committed by Nazi Germany.

German historian Harriet Scharnberg discovered that “instead of printing pictures of the days-long Lviv pogroms with its thousands of Jewish victims, the American press was only supplied with photographs showing the victims of the Soviet police and ‘brute’ Red Army war criminals.”

According to Scharnberg:

To that extent it is fair to say that these pictures played their part in disguising the true character of the war led by the Germans… which events were made visible and which remained invisible in AP’s supply of pictures followed German interests and the German narrative of the war.

According to an AP spokesperson who is not very good at his job, the fabled wire service “rejects any notion that it deliberately ‘collaborated’ with the Nazi regime”, and insists that the news organization was “subjected to intense pressure from the Nazi regime”.

Stop acting like you’re such a special snowflake, AP: Lots of other holy American institutions collaborated with the Nazis. Embrace your “colorful history”.

A few of our favorite Nazi collaborators include: Coca-Cola, Ford, Kodak, Chase bank, IBM and Standard Oil, and GM.

Some firms even successfully sued the American government after the war for damages incurred during Allied air raids against Germany:

After the war GM and the other American corporations that had done business in Germany were not only not punished, but even compensated for damages suffered by their German subsidiaries as a result of Anglo-American bombing raids. General Motors received 33 million dollars and ITT 27 million dollars from the American government as indemnification. The Ford-Werke had suffered relatively little damage during the war, and had received more than 100,000 dollars in compensation from the Nazi regime itself; Ford’s branch plant in France, meanwhile, had managed to wrest an indemnification of 38 million francs from the Vichy Regime. Ford nevertheless applied in Washington for 7 million dollars worth of damages, and after much wrangling received a total of 785,321 dollars “for its share of allowable losses sustained by Ford-Werke and Ford of Austria during the war,”

which the company has acknowledged in its recently published report.

True patriots. (Isn’t it special that war bonds shoved down the throats of average Americans might have been used to pay GM for “damages” incurred during its own collaboration with the Nazis?)

And of course, we can’t forget that “George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.”

The moral of this story is: The Associated Press has been peddling anti-Russia, pro-fascist garbage since 1933. And they’re hardly alone.

America #1!