George Eric Rowe Gedye

George Eric Rowe Gedye ( [ˈgɛdiː] ; born May 27, 1890 in Clevedon , Somerset ; † March 21, 1970 ; often quoted in the form G. E. R. Gedye ), was a British journalist, author and secret service official.

Live and act

The foreign correspondent for major British and American papers was the son of grocer George Edward Gedye. Early on he was committed to democracy in Germany and Austria and against National Socialism . Personally, he was described as cool, reserved, and aloof and polite.

Gedye attended an officer training course at London University in order to then fight in the First World War as a simple infantryman on the Western Front. After being wounded in 1916, he worked as an officer in the British military intelligence service from 1917. First he was assigned to the staff of the British Military Governor of Cologne, where he was primarily entrusted with interrogating prisoners of war, not least because of his excellent knowledge of German and French. He later worked for the Allied High Commissioner for the Rhineland.

In 1922 he chose a journalistic career and worked for almost two decades as a reporter for leading English and American newspapers in Central Europe. He lived in Cologne and was soon known and recognized for his investigative way of working. Gedyes reports for the Times on the Ruhr occupation of 1923 were an indictment of the imperialist quest Poincaré . In the economic gagging of Germany by the Peace Treaty of Versailles , he recognized early on the breeding ground for the rise of National Socialism. Because of these reports he was called back to London in 1924 to the foreign affairs section of the Times .

In 1925 the Times sent him to Vienna. After he did not adapt his reports to the editorial line, he was dismissed. Soon after, he worked briefly for the Daily Express before starting his collaboration with the Daily Telegraph . Gedye set up an editorial office in Vienna, which was soon responsible for several countries from Central and Eastern Europe.

In 1929 Gedye moved to the New York Times , which appointed him in 1931 to head the office for Central and Southeastern Europe. He also wrote for other newspapers, including The Nation and British papers, but kept a certain distance from the Anglo-Saxon correspondents Marcel Fodor , John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson, who often met in the Café Louvre in Vienna . “In Vienna he witnessed the young republic's struggle against inflation and the economic crisis, and here he witnessed the achievements of a social democratic local government - and the ominous policies of a number of clerical governments. Gedye had come to Vienna as a democrat - as a social democrat, which in his own words he had become under the thunder of the Dollfuss cannons , under the experience of the February fighting , he left it. ”In 1934 Gedye helped the young Kim Philby to rescue the fighters of the Republican Protection Association . He bypassed the news blackouts temporarily imposed on Austria by driving to nearby Bratislava .

Three days after the " Anschluss ", Gedye was deported by the Gestapo as an unwanted foreigner . After a short stay in London, he first lived in Prague, where he completed his most famous book, Fallen Bastions. The Central European Tragedy . In it, Gedye sharply attacked the British appeasement policy and said "what the Austrians and Czechoslovaks who were sold to fascism felt and suffered, but could no longer say themselves under Hitler's knack, under the threat of the concentration camp."

After Gedye's book represented a passionate indictment and crushing condemnation of Neville Chamberlain 's appeasement course , the originally intended publisher declined to publish the book. The conservative Daily Telegraph , for which Gedye had worked for ten years, also confronted him with the decision to either renounce the publication of his book or his post as Central Europe correspondent. Gedye gave up his job and opted for his book. The success proved him right, his work appeared in five editions within two months.

After the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia on March 14, 1939, Gedye had to hide in the roof of the British legation in Prague until ten days later the Germans gave him permission to leave for Poland. For a short time, until 1940, Gedye was a correspondent for the New York Times in Moscow and spent a few years in Turkey, where he worked for the British War Intelligence Service Special Operations Executive (SOE). Among other things, he acted as a command officer for the exiled Austrian social democrats Karl Hans Sailer and Stefan Wirlandner . The latter attempted to establish connections with Austria from Istanbul from 1943 onwards. In 1942, Gedye was arrested by the Turkish police and German newspapers claimed that he was involved in a plot to murder the German ambassador Franz von Papen . Gedye was quickly released and spent the remainder of the war in the Middle East.

From 1945 Gedye was again a Central Europe correspondent, this time for the socialist London newspaper Daily Herald , among other things he wrote a series of articles in favor of starving Vienna. Gedye also spoke out against the expulsion of the Sudeten German population from Czechoslovakia after 1945.

His son Robin Gedye was a long-time Germany correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Bonn until 1996 .

Works

• A wayfarer in Austria . Methuen & Co Ltd., London 1928.
• The Revolver Republic. France's bid for the Rhine . Arrowsmith, London 1930.
  The Revolver Republic. France's courtship for the Rhine . Translated from the English by Hans Garduck. Foreword by Friedrich Grimm . Gilde-Verlag, Cologne 1931.
  Excerpts from it appeared as:
  The French in the Ruhr. From the Revolver Republic . Edited by Maria Alphonsa Beckermann. Schöningh, Paderborn / Würzburg 1935 (Schöningh's English reading sheet; No. 30)
  The Revolver Republic . Edited by Maria Alphonsa Beckermann. Schöningh, Paderborn / Würzburg 1938 (Schöningh's English reading sheet; No. 31)
• Heirs To The Habsburgs . With a foreword by GP Gooch. JW Arrowsmith, Bristol 1932.
• Fall bastions. The Central European Tragedy . Victor Gollancz Ltd., London 1939.
  Betrayal in central Europe. Austria and Czechoslovakia, the fallen bastions . New and revised edition. Harper & Brothers, New York 1939.
  Suicide de l'Autriche. La Tragedie de l'Europe Centrale . Texts francais de Maximilien Vox. Union latine d'editions, Paris 1940.
  The bastions fell. How fascism overran Vienna and Prague . Translated by Henriette Werner and Walter Hacker. Danubia, Vienna 1947.
  When the bastions fell. The establishment of the Dollfuss dictatorship and Hitler's invasion of Vienna and the Sudetes. A report about the years 1927–1938 . Reprint of the German edition from 1947. Junius, Vienna 1981, ISBN 3-900370-01-X .
• Communism in Czechoslovakia . The Contemporary Review Company, London 1952.
• Introducing Austria . Methuen & Co., London 1955.

Collaboration and contributions

• La justice militaire . In: Gerhard Wächter: French Troops on the Rhine. A danger to the peace of Europe . G. Heger, Heidelberg 1927. (Not commercially available.)
• We Saw it Happen: The News Behind the News That's Fit to Print . Anthology, ed. by Hanson W. Baldwin and Shepard Stone. With contributions by Arthur Krock; F. Raymond Daniell; Frank Nugent; Douglas Churchill; Elliott V. Bell; Ferdinand Kuhn Jr .; Russell Owen; John Kieran; William R. Conklin; Hugh Byas; Brooks Atkinson and Louis Stark. Simon and Schuster, New York 1939.
• The truth about February 1934 . With contributions by Otto Bauer , Léon Blum , Julius Deutsch , Rosa Jochmann , Theodor Körner , Wilhelmine Moik, Rudolfine Muhr, Adolf Perlmutter, Marianne Pollak, Oscar Pollak , Helene Potetz, Gabriele Prost, Erwin Scharf, Adolf Schärf , Paul Speiser, Emile Vandervelde , Paula Wallisch and PG Walker. Sozialistischer Verlag, Vienna undated (around 1946); (= Socialist Notebooks, Volume 12).
• Vienna . Part of the article: Letters from four capitals: Crisis of parliamentarism? In: The month. An international magazine for politics and intellectual life . With contributions by Czesław Miłosz , Oscar Handlin, Arthur Koestler , Gustav Stern, Fritz Brühl, Gustav Mersu and Friedrich Luft . Edited by Melvin J. Lasky . Berlin 1953. 5th year, June. Issue 57.4.

Translations

• Ernst Marboe (Ed.): The Book of Austria . Austrian State Printing Office, Vienna 1948.

literature

• Peter Pirker : Subversion of German rule. The British War Intelligence Service SOE and Austria . Vienna University Press, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89971-990-1 .
• Thomas Wittek: Forever enemy? The image of Germany in the British mass media after the First World War . Dissertation. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-57846-4 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
• Matthew Frank: Expelling the Germans ( limited preview in Google Book Search).

Web links

• Literature by and about George Eric Rowe Gedye in the catalog of the German National Library
• Reunion in Vienna Article about Gedye in Time Magazine from September 10, 1945.
• Front and back of the dust jacket of the American edition of Fallen Bastions , Betrayal in Central Europe (with a portrait photo by Gedye; The New York Public Library)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Résumé according to Time Magazine of September 10, 1945, date of death according to an obituary in The Times (London) of March 24, 1970
2. ↑ Lobster. A Who's Who of the British Secret State. 1989  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )
3. ↑ Overview of the articles for The New York Times ( Memento of the original from January 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Overview of articles for The Nation
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Walter Hacker in the foreword to: The bastions fell. How fascism overran Vienna and Prague . Translated by Henriette Werner and Walter Hacker. Danubia, Vienna 1947.
6. ↑ Mission at headquarters . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1968 ( online - January 29, 1968 , article about the meeting of Philby and Gedye in Vienna).
7. ↑ The Press: Gedye Guesses In: Time Magazine, May 15, 1939
8. ↑ 2009 Yearbook of the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance over Gedyes and Stefan Wirlandners agent activity in Istanbul and Peter Pirker: Subversion German domination. The British War Intelligence Service SOE and Austria , Vienna University Press, Göttingen 2012, pp. 139–150, pp. 249–272
9. ^ Distance to the German model Die Zeit 1997, No. 41