Douglas Reed

Douglas Lancelot Reed (born March 11, 1895 in London , † August 26, 1976 in Durban ) was a British journalist , writer and publicist . During the 1930s he was a Central Europe correspondent for The Times newspaper and made a name for himself as a sharp critic of Adolf Hitler and the politics of appeasement . At the same time he represented an increasingly radical anti-Semitism and advocated a national socialism , as represented by Otto Strasser . After World War II , Reed developed conspiracy theories that Hitler was an agent of Zionism . He was one of the first Holocaust deniers and, as a declared opponent of Hitler, an important point of reference for right-wing extremist circles after the Second World War.

Life

Reed began working as an office boy in a publishing house at the age of thirteen. At nineteen he became a bank clerk. When the First World War broke out , he volunteered. He first served in the infantry and then moved to the Royal Flying Corps . He was an officer , wounded twice and mentioned in daily reports (" Mentioned in Despatches ").

After the war, Reed initially got by with odd jobs. In 1921 he joined the editorial staff of the Times , although initially not in the editorial office, but instead worked as an employee in the Paris office in 1921/22 . In 1925 he became a proofreader . In 1928 he went to Berlin as a correspondent .

Reed made a name for himself as an opponent of Adolf Hitler after the National Socialist “ seizure of power ”. As a trial reporter he observed the Reichstag fire process and published a critical book about it in 1934. In 1935 he became the Times correspondent for Central Europe in Vienna . His experience as a foreign correspondent made him a sharp critic of the appeasement policy. The most sensation was his 1938 book Insanity Fair , which became a bestseller . It appeared shortly after the " Anschluss of Austria " to the German Reich, which Reed predicted as well as Hitler's next destination, Czechoslovakia . Reed then fell out with the Times and left the paper to become a freelance writer. By 1953 he wrote ten political books, a play and four novels. In 1944 he was a war correspondent in Normandy . For a while he was in charge of the international department of the Kemsley Newspapers Group .

Reed was a sharp opponent of Hitler, but by no means of National Socialism per se. He orientated himself on the Nazi renegade Otto Strasser, whom he saw as a representative of a true, Christian national socialism. He wrote two books about Strasser and translated his Erlebte Weltgeschichte under the title History in my Time .

Reed's virulent anti-Semitism was already noticed in Insanity Fair , which intensified in his subsequent books and brought him lawsuits for libel for All Our Tomorrows (1942) and Lest We Regret (1943). When Reed worked for the Times , the newspaper had at times rejected his articles about Jews because of anti-Semitic tendencies. After the Second World War, Reed developed into a pioneer of right-wing extremist historical revisionism by developing his anti-Semitism into a dedicated anti-Zionism . For him, Eastern European Zionists were not Semites , but rather, in accordance with Lothrop Stoddard's racial theory, Asians from inner Russia, descendants of the Khazars . As a proven opponent of Hitler, Reed enjoyed a special reputation among right-wing extremists as a pioneer of national socialism and anti-Semitism without Hitler.

Reed advocated a conspiracy theory with occult and irrational arguments in books such as Far and Wide and the posthumously published The Controversy of Zion , in which he interpreted the Old Testament as a plan to rule the world and Zionism as a new form of messianism . For Reed, Adolf Hitler was neither a genuine National Socialist nor an anti-Semite, but actually an agent of Zionism. Reed only considered the Nazi persecution of the Jews to be fake, and with Far and Wide he became one of the first Holocaust deniers . According to his logic, Hitler destroyed Europe in order to bring it under the hegemony of Wall Street , which in turn was behind American imperialism and communism . According to Reed, Zionism had already organized the Russian Revolution .

Reed barely found publishers for his books, which were perceived as increasingly irrational. He settled in South Africa , which he regarded as one of the last bastions of white European civilization. He supported the independence movement of Rhodesia under Ian Smith .

Reed's works are still widespread among anti-Semites and right-wing extremists, especially in circles of the British National Front , which is also oriented towards Otto Strasser.

Fonts

• The Burning of the Reichstag. Gollancz, London 1934.
• Central Europe, the political problem. In: War is not inevitable. 1938, pp. 49-62.
• Insanity Fair. 26th edition. Cape, London 1938.
• Nemesis? The story of Otto Strasser. Douglas Reed. The Far Eastern Book Co, Shanghai 1940.
• Otto Strasser: History in my time. by Otto Strasser. Transl. from the German by Douglas Reed. 3. Edition. Cape, London 1941.
• How odd of God [to choose the Jews]. [Douglas Reed]. s. n, sl @ 1942.
• All our To-morrows. Douglas Reed. 5th edition. Cape, London 1943.
• The next horizon. Or, Yeomans' progress. J. Cape, London 1945.
• Somewhere south of Suez. Cape, London 1950.
• The anonymous plan. Douglas Reed. [In Dt. transfer v. James Schwarzenbach]. Thomas Verl, Zurich 1951.
• Far and wide. Cape, London 1951.
• The Prisoner of Ottawa. Otto Strasser. Cape, London 1953.
• The battle for Rhodesia. 8th edition. Haum, Cape Town 1967.
• The Siege of Southern Africa. Macmillan South Africa, Johannesburg 1974.
• The controversy of Zion. Noontide Pr, Torrance, Calif 1985.

literature

• Richard Thurlow: Anti-Nazi Anti-Semite. The Case of Douglas Reed . In: Patterns of Prejudice 18 (1984): pp. 23-34.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Mr. Douglas Reed. Journalist and Author (Obituaries) . In: The Times , Thursday Sep 23, 1976; pg. 16; Issue 59816; col F.
2. ^ Thurlow, Anti-Nazi Antisemite , p. 24.
3. ↑ Thurlow, Anti-Nazi Antisemite , pp. 24f.
4. ↑ Thurlow, Anti-Nazi Antisemite , pp. 26-28.
5. ^ Thurlow, Anti-Nazi Antisemite , p. 29.
6. ↑ Thurlow, Anti-Nazi Antisemite , p. 31f.
7. ^ Anthony Julius: Trials of the diaspora. A history of anti-semitism in England. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2010, ISBN 0199297053 , p. 410.
8. ^ Thurlow, Anti-Nazi Antisemite , p. 32.
9. ^ Clive Seale: Social research methods. A reader. Routledge, London 2004, ISBN 9780415300841 , p. 16.

Web links

• Literature by and about Douglas Reed in the catalog of the German National Library