📰 May 12, 1925 — What the world was reading 100 years ago

Two papers. Two cities. One Tuesday in 1925.

The New York Times led with a roar — literally.

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, 77 years old and freshly elected German President, entered Berlin on the evening of May 11 to a crowd of 500,000. The old Imperial colors — black, white, red — blanketed the five-mile route from the station to the Chancellery. Republican flags were nowhere.

NYT correspondent T.R. Ybarra filed by wireless: "The Republican colors were utterly swamped." One graybeard in the crowd turned to a neighbor: "This is the old Germany."

He was right. Hindenburg would take his oath before the Reichstag the very next morning. The same man who would, eight years later, hand power to Adolf Hitler.

The Times of London, meanwhile, had a different kind of front page.

No headline. No photograph. No Hindenburg.

The entire front page — The Times's unbroken custom until May 3, 1966 — was classified advertisements. Births. Deaths. Legal notices. A dense wall of small type for Britain's moneyed classes.

The actual news ran on inside pages. Including a leading article mourning New Zealand's Prime Minister William Massey as "an Imperial leader of the old school" — one of the last wartime statesmen still standing.

Slide 2: The real Times of London front page, May 12, 1925. Public domain via Granth Sanjeevani.

Slide 3: A surviving copy of the May 12, 1925 New York Times — the same paper 500,000 Berliners had no idea would define their future.

Slide 4: Somewhere in Berlin, the lead type was already being set.

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