Allan Merson

Allan Leslie Merson (born August 26, 1916 in Monkseaton , † October 28, 1995 in Lyndhurst ) was a British historian. He wrote one of the first scientific accounts of the German communist resistance to National Socialism .

Life

The son of an engineer and a teacher grew up in a well-off family home. In addition to attending Monkseaton Village School, his mother gave him private tuition. He then graduated from the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne and studied from 1934 to 1937 at the College Balliol of Oxford University 's history. In early 1937 he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In the fall of 1937 he went to Würzburg as an exchange teacher for a year and in 1938 took a summer course at the University of Munich . In 1938 he received a scholarship from Queen's College (Oxford) to study Romance languages in Paris .

In October 1938, Merson passed the consular service exam, which enabled him to pursue a career in the diplomatic service . He decided to work in the foreign department of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and worked there from late autumn 1938 as an export and credit officer.

Merson did military service from March 1940 to July 1946. He was first called up for the artillery and in September 1940 he was drafted into the intelligence forces. In early 1941 he took part in the British occupation of Iceland , initially as a member of a field security force. He later moved to the information department, where he was responsible for press and propaganda issues. When, after an agreement to this effect, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's American troops replaced the British in early 1942 , Merson was one of a small group of specialists who stayed in Iceland for a few months longer . Among other things, he published the Daily Post there .

Merson returned to England in June 1943 and was transferred to a special school of the Political Warfare Executive in the field of political and psychological warfare at Woburn Abbey . Specialists were trained here for the press and radio , among other things , who were to be deployed after the liberation of the countries occupied by the Axis powers . Merson came to France immediately after the Allied invasion of Normandy . After a short stay in Paris in August, he worked in Brussels for three months from September 1944 . There he was responsible for information control and the development of the press.

After surviving jaundice , Merson worked mainly in Germany . He authorized the Neue Westfälische Zeitung , which appeared in June 1945 with a circulation of over 700,000 copies. In July 1945 Merson was transferred to Berlin, where from August 1945 he published Der Berliner , the first German-language newspaper of the British military authorities. In late autumn 1945 Merson took over the management of the British Army's press department for North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf .

Merson retired from the army on June 18, 1946. He had turned down offers to remain in the army or to work as a civilian employee of the occupation authorities. Instead, he took a position as a lecturer at the University of Southampton in October 1946 . There Merson remained active as a lecturer until his retirement in 1978.

Merson remained a committed communist until the end of his life . He gave courses in Marxism for the party , was a member of the party committee for the district of Hampshire and Dorset and joined the Communist Party of Britain after the self-dissolution of the CPGB .

plant

Merson was primarily concerned with English history from the 16th to the 18th centuries and regional history . He participated in the editing and editing of the Southampton Records Series . He also published on historical subjects in the Communist Party press, belonged to the Communist Party Historians Group and wrote some pamphlets in the Our History series .

In the early 1960s, Merson began researching the history of communist resistance in Nazi Germany . He drew on sources from the Main State Archives in Düsseldorf and the Hamm Higher Regional Court , interviewed contemporary witnesses and, above all, researched the communist resistance in Düsseldorf. He published the first partial results in 1973 under the title The Nazis and Monopoly Capital in the Our History series . In 1985 he dropped Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany (dt. Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany , 1999) one of the first scientific studies on the topic before.

Fonts

• as editor: The third book of remembrance of Southampton, 1514-1602. Vol. 1. (1514-1540). Southampton University, 1952.
• Problems of the German anti-fascist resistance, 1933-1945. History Group of the Communist Party, [London] 1966.
• with Arthur James Willis: A calendar of Southampton apprenticeship registers, 1609–1740. Southampton University Press, Southampton 1968.
• Nazis and monopoly capital. New evidence reviewed. History Group of the Communist Party, London 1973.
  • German: The Nazis and monopoly capital. Self-published by A. Billstein, Krefeld 1973.
• The Free Press (1851-1856) . In: Contributions to Marx-Engels research 11. Berlin 1982, pp. 137–156. Digitized
• Communist resistance in Nazi Germany. Lawrence and Wishart, London 1985, ISBN 0-391-03366-2 .
  • German: Communist resistance in Nazi Germany. Pahl-Rugenstein, Bonn 1999, ISBN 3-89144-262-9 .

literature

• Karl Heinz Jahnke : Allan Merson (Great Britain). In: Ders .: Antifascists. Inconvenient witnesses of the 20th century. Pahl-Rugenstein, Bonn 1994, ISBN 3-89144-203-3 , pp. 179-191.

Web links

• Kurzbiographie (English)
• The papers of the historian Allan Merson, held at the People's History Museum