Donald Day

Donald Satterlee Day (born May 15, 1895 in Brooklyn Heights , Brooklyn , New York City , † October 1, 1966 in Helsinki ) was a conservative American journalist, author and radio propagandist for Großdeutscher Rundfunk .

Life

Day was the son of John I. Day, an editor for the New York Morning Telegraph, and Grace Satterlee. After attending school, he worked for the Chicago City News Bureau , a press service for various Chicago newspapers. Before joining the United States Navy as an aviator in 1917 , he had returned to New York and worked as a sports reporter for The Morning Telegraph . After the war he received an invitation from the (unofficial) Soviet US representative Ludwig Martens , who had been expelled from the United States, as an editor at New York World . He was to accompany him back and write about Soviet Russia . In Riga ( Latvia but arrived) he received a visa for the country and offered to the European Director of the Chicago Tribune , Floyd Gibbons, on to report from eastern Europe.

As a result, Day was the foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Riga from 1921 to 1942 and continued to report on Poland , Sweden , Finland , the Ukraine and the other Baltic states . During this time he was the only US correspondent in Northeast Europe. His articles continued to appear in the New York Daily News and a dozen other American newspapers that subscribed to the Tribune's foreign news service.

Since he refused a visa for the Soviet Union, which was bound to report positively, he had to limit himself to reports from emigrants and specially hired reporters, whom he repeatedly sent to the country. The Tribune had withdrawn its correspondent George Seldes from Moscow so as not to subject him to censorship and three months of reporting to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Day informed about the great Ukrainian famine of 1920/1921, which probably killed 8 to 15 million farmers. After Day, this was the result of the activities of Artemi Bagratowitsch Chalatow , who with the help of the Cheka had food requisitioned on a massive scale. He uncovered a scandal over illegal foreign exchange deals of the US ambassador to Moscow William C. Bullitt , which led to his removal in 1936.

Political competitor of the Tribune under Robert R. McCormick was the then liberal, Soviet-friendly New York Times with its Moscow reporter Walter Duranty . When Donald Day intervened in the presidential campaign in 1936 with an article under the headline "Moscow instructs Rote in the US to support Roosevelt ", the Times offered $  5,000 for anyone who could prove it. In September 1944 she followed suit by renewing the offer and noting that Day was now broadcasting as a Nazi propagandist for Großdeutscher Rundfunk.

When the two powers split up Poland as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 , Day said, with a view to the persecution of the German minority and the Polish interference in Ukrainian politics: "Poland gets exactly what it deserves. No neighboring country regrets that. Poland pursued a policy of terror. "

Day reported on the Soviet-Finnish winter war and from Riga when the Red Army occupied Latvia in 1940 : "On June 17th, a mob was at the railway station, waving red flags and shouting in hysterical joy over the arrival of the Russians. Latvian was spoken I couldn't hear. The speeches and shouts, the screams, were all in Russian or Yiddish. "

Day was expelled from Latvia in mid-July 1940. He went to Finland and in 1942 to Stockholm , where his newspaper asked him to return to the United States. At the instigation of the Roosevelt government, which in the meantime worked with the Soviet Union and wanted to eliminate the unwelcome reporter, his passport was declared expired, making him stateless ; a year later he went to Germany. He was convinced that the Third Reich was the West's only bulwark against Soviet tyranny. From September 1944 to April 1945 he spoke on the German radio especially against communism , against Jews , as well as "America's military-political alliance with the Soviet Union" ( lending and leasing law ) and castigated the "merciless war against Germany and Christian Europe ".

Towards the end of the Second World War , the US Department of Justice examined the radio programs recorded by the FBIS , Day, who was interned in the American zone of occupation from May 1945 . It decided that Day could not be charged with treason and fired him.

Day returned to Finland with his wife, whom he married in Riga before 1940, but was no longer employed by the Chicago Tribune . He died of a heart attack in Helsinki.

additional

Day's sister, Dorothy Day , founded The Catholic Worker and St. Joseph's House of Hospitality in New York, and his brother John worked for the Hearst press.

Donald Day should not be confused with the American author and editor of the same name (1899–1991).

literature

Donald Day publications

• Donald Day: Onward Christian Soldiers: An American Journalist's Dissident Look at World War II . Noontide Press. Newport Beach CA. 2002. (First print Sweden 1944) ISBN 0939482622
• Donald Day: Onward Christian Soldiers: 1920-1942 Propaganda, Censorship and One Mans Struggle to Herald the Truth . Noontide Press. Newport Beach CA. 1985.

Publications about Donald Day

• John Carver Edwards: Berlin Calling: American Broadcasters In Service To The Third Reich. (Chapter: Donald Day, a late recruit to the German propaganda network ). Praeger, London 1991. ISBN 0-275-93905-7 .

swell

1. ^ Donald Day, Ex-Tribunite, Dies at 70, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 1, 1966, p.12
2. ↑ Time Monday, Sep. 18, 1944
3. ↑ Donald Day: Poland rushes 20,000 police to 'pacify' Ukraine. Report political foes being beaten , Chicago Tribune Press Service, October 22, 1938
4. ↑ Centropa Quarterly 10-2006  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.