The news agency Associated Press reportedly cooperated with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s, supplying American publications with material directly from Joseph Goebbels’s infamous propaganda machine.

The revelations, published in the Guardian, came to light after German historian Harriet Scharnberg published research claiming to show how AP retained access to the Third Reich by promising not to undermine Hitler’s regime.

Several agency bureaus were forced to close in Germany when Hitler seized power in 1933 but AP was the only western organisation to continue operating out of the county, until the United States entered world war two in 1941.

AP, according to Ms Scharnberg's research, signed up to so-called 'Schriftleitergesetz' (or, editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home”. Her article was published in the academic journal, Studies in Contemporary History – where she claims the agency entered a mutually beneficial two-way cooperation with Hitler’s regime.

Ms Scharnberg told the Guardian: “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.”

How the Nazis escaped justice Show all 4 1 /4 How the Nazis escaped justice How the Nazis escaped justice holocaust2-ap.jpg Nazi guards at Belzec death camp in occupied Poland in 1942 AP How the Nazis escaped justice holocaust-south-america.jpg Clockwise from top left: Josep Mengele (Brazil); Klaus Barbie (Bolivia); Walther Rauff (Chile); Adolf Eichmann (Argentina) How the Nazis escaped justice holocaust1.jpg Former concentration camp prisoners attend a ceremony at the memorial site of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, on Holocaust Day AFP How the Nazis escaped justice holocaust3-epa.jpg Prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi German Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945) EPA

She added: “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.”

An AP spokesperson told the newspaper: “As we continue to research this matter, AP rejects any notion that it deliberately ‘collaborated’ with the Nazi regime.

"An accurate characterisation is that the AP and other foreign news organisations were subjected to intense pressure from the Nazi regime from the year of Hitler’s coming to power in 1932 until the AP’s expulsion from Germany in 1941.