Charles Bausman

German War Propaganda Gets Shrill - meet #1 podcaster Paul Ronzheimer, by Charles Bausman - The Unz Review Substack: arkrussia.substack.com/p/ger… (All links and videos are in Substack) And how Tucker Carlson lit up Germany by giving him an ass-whupping in a “debate”. Is Ronzheimer knowingly peddling Intel agency lies? It certainly looks like it. Charles Bausman Okt. 13, 2026 Note: The malpractice and buffoonery described here is the tip of an iceberg worthy of a series, something I’m seriously considering. If you’d like more exposes of German media and politics, let me know in the comments. I enjoy doing it. I’m on X at @CBausman This has been republished on Unz.com and a lot of interesting additional information is showing up in the comments section, which is very lively: unz.com/article/german-war-p… I’ve been following and critiquing German mainstream media since 2014, primarily while running Russia Insider, and it always had a peculiar, almost comical character to it, especially in military reporting, the result, I believe of strong Intel agency influence at the main outlets, pushing the most transparent bosh and outright lies. It is on a par with similar UK propaganda, with a German flavor. Both are far more strident and outrageous than similar fare in the US, which is more subtle, while all are venal. Egregious falsehood and false logic regarding all things Russia is rampant throughout the upper reaches of German media, but there is no more glaring example than that of Russia-preoccupied, award-winning Mr. Ronzheimer, one of the top 5 most influential journalists in Germany, Deputy Editor of the rabidly pro-Israel and anti-Russian Bild, whose influential podcast is regularly ranked #1 in the country. Other than the state-owned TV news broadcasters, Bild is the largest news brand in Germany, by far. Ronzheimer posts about Russia/Ukraine incessantly, providing the ideal case-study of how disconnected from reality German media has become, and how misleading, especially on this topic. Ronzheimer’s main activity is his podcast, which had 6.5 million downloads in August, excluding YouTube (another 5 million), making it #1 in Deutschland, beating all others, even in other categories. His output is prodigious, posting 1 hour episodes 7 days a week, and sometimes more, often late at night or the wee hours, often first with in-depth analysis of breaking developments. He does this together with his colleague Filipp Piatov, also a Russia expert at Bild. Piatov’s family emigrated from St. Petersburg in 1992 as Jewish refugees, when he was 1. Ronzheimer, 41, soy-faced, and openly homosexual, perhaps has no family obligations, which may partly explain his ability to work seemingly non-stop. He has 235k followers on X, 107k on Instagram, 73k subscribers on YT. Bild’s massive online and offline reach also drives traffic, explaining the large number of YT views relative to subscribers. His political views are center-left by German standards, with a strong anti-AfD bias. Piatov with Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny He interviewed Tucker Carlson last July, which was very entertaining and revealing, and quickly turned into a debate. It was widely watched and discussed in Germany (1 million estimated views). You can watch the whole 2 hours on YouTube in the original English. Carlson, clearly enjoying the encounter, blasted everything Ronzheimer labors 7 days a week to defend - the “absurd” German elites, their support for Ukraine, “wrecking” their country with immigration, their censorship of dissent, unfair tactics against the AfD, letting the US blow up their Northstream pipeline, Zelensky, and much else. He repeatedly decried them as having “no self-respect”, being “self-hating”, “brainwashed”, “weak”, “masochists” - “your leaders suck, and that’s a fact.” “Ronzheimer embarrasses Germany!” He told Ronzheimer he had a “low-IQ mindset”, and was a “victim” of a profession (journalism) designed to serve its rotten elites. He correctly pointed out that as long as certain political opinions are illegal in Germany, it has no right to call itself a democracy: “[Certain opinions are] illegal. They’re against German law. You just said that, and that tells me conclusively that you do not live in a democracy, no matter what you tell yourself. … It’s not a democracy unless the average citizen, a German, can say what he thinks. If he’s not allowed to say what he thinks, [he is] a slave, no different than German citizens were slaves at other periods in German history. I’m just saying, it’s important.” Ronzheimer rather haplessly protested and argued his side, but Carlson pretty much steamrolled him. It laid bare how unimpressive Ronzheimer is, and his preposterous phony “journalism”. The interview quickly became one of Ronzheimer’s most watched (about 1 million views), and ignited a boisterous debate, with comments evenly split between those delighted with Tucker and those siding with Ronzheimer. The Tucker episode is a comical digression, but an edifying one, so I’ll return to it at the end of the article with some more observations and clips. Here’s a clip which Tucker posted. (1.4 million views) Ronzheimer has been covering Ukraine in detail since 2014, and is a frequent visitor, Germany’s go-to expert on Russia’s involvement, despite speaking neither Russian nor Ukrainian. He reports from there every few months or so, and has stayed for extended periods, reporting from the front and the capital. He has had 5 formal, fawning interviews with Zelensky. He does a Ukraine / Russia related show almost every week, and often much more than that, more than any other topic, although he also covers foreign and domestic politics generally. There is no evidence of him ever reporting from Russia, and it is likely he has never been there. The last public evidence that Piatov was in Russia was around 2014, on an extensive journey across the country which he later wrote about in his book, Meschugge Russia - Putin, my Family, and other Misfits, and he has never reported from there. (Meschugge means ‘crazy’ in Yiddish.) Scrolling through episodes is a non-stop meander through the crudest of NATO propaganda: Sept. 1st - All about how Russia is carrying out covert attacks inside Germany, focusing on an explosive-laden drone discovered at Leipzig airport, which the German government and establishment media accused Russia of. Most honest observers, including many serious German analysts, have pointed out that this was most likely a false flag by NATO, for Russia would have nothing to gain from such a caper, while the war apologists would, a possibility that for some reason never occurs to the inquisitive Mr. Ronzheimer. “An attack on Germany” - Selling obvious false flags and lies. Again on Sept. 1 - Scare porn about how German counterespionage has uncovered a Russian plot to assassinate executives at German weapons manufacturers, including using “Novichok”, itself a UK false flag caper. Likely completely fictitious, a textbook example of Intel agency fake news. August 31 - Interview with Finland’s uber-hawk president Alexander Stubb, who doled out one thigh-slapper after another, none of which Ronzheimer challenged. For example, that Russians are dying at a rate 5X greater than Ukrainians, that Russia is on the verge of complete social and economic collapse, that Russia carried out an attempted terrorist attack in Leipzig (the drone incident mentioned above), that in the last year, Ukraine has taken back 800 sq. km. over the preceding 12 months, leaving Russia’s net gain to be 70 sq. km, and that Europe is prepared to continue supporting Ukraine indefinitely and is suffering no significant negative effects from not receiving Russian energy exports. Interview with Stubb in English (you might need to switch it to English in the video settings.) August 30, an interview with an AfD politician, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, during which he happened to notice a “Russian Army” souvenir mug from a trip to Moscow on a bookshelf in Tillschneider’s office. Ronzheimer was visibly astounded, as if he had just discovered Tillschneider with espionage-encryption equipment under his desk, and rushed to announce this ground-breaking discovery to the public, where it was breathlessly repeated on the main TV news channels. The AfD ended up winning that one by ridiculing the whole affair on social media, pionting out the preposterous anti-Russian media bias. Tillschneider put the mug up for auction on German Ebay, where it quickly reached over EUR 2000, after which Ebay canceled the auction for “offensiveness”. He put it on a different German auction site, and the same thing happened. The social media response. Fair disclosure, I also possess Russian military souvenir mugs, so my take may be somewhat biased. That was an unusually Russian week for Ronzheimer, but illustrative of the kind of slop he serves up day after day. Podcasts are an ideal format, because one can invite on a guest, a supposed “expert” (often working for the propaganda arm of NATO), and they can talk the most extreme rubbish and innuendo supported by nothing at all, and all the host has to do is play the fool and not challenge any of it. Nobody is downloading transcripts and checking facts, so this kind of shameless lying, (and that is really what 90% of it is), gets pumped into the greater German info space, into the heads of gullible journalists and politicians who repeat it, and then most elites run around believing it and repeating it to the public. It would be a full time (and excruciating) job just to listen to all of Ronzheimer’s content, and then refute everything, and so it just goes on, unchallenged, priming the public for ever more absurd outbursts from Germany’s ruling politicians, including the chancellor himself. More: August 24, a Russian economist, Andrey Gurkov, explains how the attacks on Russia’s internet retailer warehouses will likely spark a banking crisis which will bring down the economy, (didn’t happen) which is on the verge of collapse anyway. “Putin on the verge of collapse!” August 12, CNN hack Fred Pleitgen, from Moscow, again says that Russia is on the verge of economic collapse due to the drone strikes on energy infrastructure, that “more and more” Russians are speaking out, and that it is highly likely Putin will announce a draft, but this will likely capsize his government. (none of this happened, but who’s checking?) August 12, CNN hack Fred Pleitgen, from Moscow, again says that Russia is on the verge of economic collapse due to the drone strikes on energy infrastructure, that “more and more” Russians are speaking out, and that it is highly likely Putin will announce a draft, but this will likely capsize his government. (none of this happened, but who’s checking?) “Putin looked exhausted at his parade.” August 10, Ronzheimer, relying on his “sources in Ukraine’s intelligence services, military, and elsewhere”, warns of an “alarming” possibility that Russia might “test” NATO in the near future with a “cyber-attack, other hybrid attacks, or even a limited military engagement”. “Putin might attack NATO members!” August 7 - “Putin’s plan against Germany”. He interviews the author of this gem, again about how “Putin” is trying to do in Europe with covert attacks, sneaky propaganda, and other dastardly deeds. August 5 - he interviews a “terrorism and security expert” again!, about the Leipzig drone incident, who strongly implies it was obviously the Russians! He never tires of mentioning the drone incident, it comes up in other episodes again and again and again… August 2 - “Inside Moscow - Putin is planning an ugly surprise.” - the same kind of fearmongering from the recently returned German ambassador to Russia, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff. “Putin is afraid of his own people!” - another former German ambassador to Russia. That’s just a few weeks, but you get the point. The drumbeat is relentless, as are the unsupported accusations, the innuendo, and the outright lies. In 2022, Ronzheimer even received a service medal 3rd class from Ukraine, along with noted Ukraine and Israel-loving windbag Ulf Poschardt (picture here), and Julian Roepcke. They were thrilled, and to be fair, they deserved it. So what is this really? On one level, it looks like extremely gullible, tendentious, biased, and deeply unprofessional journalism from one of Germany’s news heavies. But is that all? To me, who has covered this kind of thing for over a decade, it is obviously Intel agencies inserting outright lies into the narrative. The question is, how complicit is Ronzheimer in this? If he’s a dupe, he’s a very dumb one, (entirely possible), because the disinfo he peddles is crude indeed, and he doesn’t come across as an idiot frankly, although, not terribly bright either. What strikes me as much more likely is that he and his colleague Piatov are likely actively complicit in deliberate and conscious disinfo, in other words, they are not just naive journalists, rather active agents of military propaganda. I can’t prove it, but that’s what the end result looks like. Beyond his main bread and butter, Russia and Ukraine, he mixes in handwringing episodes about the ascendance of the AfD which he incessantly describes as “confirmed extreme right-wing”, fretting about the anti-semitism of the German progressive left because of their support for Gaza, and plenty of blow-by-blow analysis of German parliamentary maneuvering, which is frankly tedious and ridiculous, something which never seems to occur to him. The head of the AfD and her right wing extremism keeps Ronzheimer up at night. I mentioned that German media is comical in the way they shovel their bias, and here is a small, emblematic example. When talking about the war, they never just say, “the war”, they say “the Russian war of aggression” (Angriffskrieg), which sounds very sinister to Germans, because we all know who else was accused of Angriffskriege. And very frequently, they add the adjective, “volkerrechtswidrig” (violating international human rights law). Both terms are straight-up dishonest, because both are matters of opinion, not fact. Not just the Russians, but platoons of serious analysts in the West and Germany: Tucker, Mearsheimer, etc. etc., and millions of Germans, think the exact opposite, that the Russians are fighting a defensive war against NATO aggression, and that international human rights law provides ample justification for their actions. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and the entire Russian diplomatic corps have talked themselves blue in the face explaining their view on human rights law, a thousand times. Yet all top mainstream German media and political figures (except the AfD and a few others like BSW) keep saying this as if these are established, self-evident facts. It’s not a matter of which is right, rather that these “journalists” seriously believe that the case is closed, which it most obviously, indisputably isn’t. It shows what a silly bubble they all live in. Another favorite is to state as a matter of fact that Putin is a war-criminal and a dictator, again a matter of opinion. Regarding war-crimes, there is no court ruling saying so, and in fact, the allegation is ridiculous and would apply much more to Zelensky and his military than Putin. Victor Bout@realvictorbout Strapping a POW with explosive to use him as a suicidal terrorst against one's comrades is a war crime. Using civilian areas, houses, malls as a living shield for hiding their weaponry is a war crime. Do not forget that the regime in Kiev is commiting them over and over again. 10:34 PM · Oct 12, 2026 · 3.94K Aufrufe 3 Antworten · 23 Reposts · 185 Likes Like for Netanyahu, there is a warrant out for Putin’s arrest from the ICC, but no trial has been conducted, nor verdict delivered. Big American media personalities frequently call Netanyahu a war criminal, but usually in a way which clearly shows they are expressing an opinion, (correct in my view), but an opinion nonetheless. The perniciousness of Ronzheimer and his colleagues is that they state this as if its a settled fact which no serious person disputes. “This is a genocide of the Ukrainians.” It is precisely this kind of daft, tendentious, opinionated “reporting” which is driving outrage at the media across much of German society. Thankfully, many Germans (I would guess about half, especially the youth) don’t buy it and can see (how could they not) the absurdity. This is particularly true in the former GDR across all age groups, partly because this kind of out-of-touch delusion of elites is within living memory. Indeed, the behavior of German elites is strikingly similar to those of the former East bloc just before the collapse. A sign of this is that Ronzheimer has become a meme, poking fun at his reporting from war zones acting like he is in a lot of danger, when he clearly is not. People started photoshopping him onto all sorts of backgrounds. I struggle to convey just how comical German mainstream media is to an American. I think one of the reasons is that the hilarity transpires in a German language bubble, replete with a culture of shame over WW2, a profound emasculation of German men, and swathes of verboten! topics. If Americans could watch and understand, they would LMAO. It would be endless fodder for social media ridicule, and the offending parties might at least start getting the hint that something is seriously wrong. A huge part of German society gets it, and the large German alt and social media are busy pointing out the absurdities, but the elites are unfazed as of yet. The fireworks which erupted with Tucker were essentially from the clash of these worlds, so insulated from each other by language. A majority of Germans speak very passable English, so can consume American social media, and this is having an enlightening effect. Beitragsmüll@beitragsmuell Die unwichtigste Meldung des Tages. #örr #Lokalzeit 6:00 PM · Oct 12, 2026 · 100 Aufrufe 1 Like Black (0.5% of population) presenters are not uncommon and funny. Back to the question of whether Ronzheimer or Piatov, or both, are conscious intel assets deliberately disseminating what they know to be disinfo, there is more meat on that bone than most people realize. After WW2, the occupying powers in West Germany took extensive measures to prevent two things, any possible renaissance of Nazi-era attitudes, and any ascendance of sympathies with the menacing Soviets, which was a real thing before the National Socialists came to power, and in other European countries after the war, Italy being a good example. They did this in part by planting active Intel agents in the government and media, and by interlacing the whole political space with NGOs like the Atlantik-Brucke (1952), German Marshall Fund (1972), Aspen Institute Germany (1974), Konrad Adenauer Foundation (1954), Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (1947), etc., without whose blessing you could have no high-level career in German media or politics. Here is an insightful report from the admirable Kit Klarenberg. Global Delinquents How CIA Created Modern Germany All my investigations are free to read, thanks to the generosity of my readers. Independent journalism nonetheless requires investment, so if you value this article or any others, please consider sharing, or even becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is always gratefully received, and will never be forgotten. To buy me a coffee or two, please… Read more 3 years ago · 316 likes · 45 comments · Kit Klarenberg A former whistleblower editor of the prestigious daily FAZ, Udo Ulfkotte, wrote about how many top media figures are actually intel agents or consciously working with the agencies, as he himself confessed to have done. (He died under mysterious circumstances shortly after, in 2017, age 56). If you search “CIA control of German politics” you will find plenty of material explaining it all, and all about Ulfkotte, and there is no reason to assume these practices do not continue to this day. I don’t understand why more Germans, especially the AfD, and others not taken in by the fraudulent nature of their elites, don’t talk about this more, when the likes of Ronzheimer, Piatov, and many, many others seem to be engaging in these practices in plain sight. Germany has a very large and lively alternative media space, with excellent podcasts, TV, publications and a rollicking discussion on social media, especially Twitter. An interesting tie-in to all this with Bild, rabidly pro-Israel today, and rabidly anti-Communist right up to the end of the Cold War, is that, since 1967, the employment contracts of German employees of Axel Springer, the publisher of Bild, include a clause requiring them to “support the vital rights of the Israeli people”. What precisely those “vital rights” are is not defined, but the message is clear - support Israel or else, and Bild employees obediently comply, often in the most shameless manner, screaming about anti-semitism and supporting Israel’s obvious crimes in Gaza and Lebanon at every possible opportunity. A senior editor recently quit because of this clause, which is only for employees of publications inside Germany, not their international holdings, which are considerable, probably because anyone outside Germany would find this peculiar in the extreme. Bowing and scraping before all things Israel is a national sport in Germany, especially for politicians and media, even across most of the AfD, and is only recently getting serious pushback from the leftier regions of the left and parts of the AfD, and some of the public.