Helmut W. Kahn

Helmut W (olfgang) Kahn (born May 24, 1922 in Mannheim ; † January 13, 2005 in Hamburg ) was a German publicist .

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Helmut W. Kahn grew up without siblings in Mannheim, where he attended school and received commercial training. As the son of a Jewish father, he converted to the Protestant faith in 1935. His mother tried to enable her son to emigrate to England. But they contacted the as Paul Association known National Association of Christian-German citizen . Shortly before the outbreak of World War II in June 1939, Kahn reached England. The German who immigrated on a Kindertransport was regarded as an enemy alien there since May 1940 and was held on the Isle of Man . In July 1940 he boarded the HMT Dunera together with more than 2,000 other Jewish refugees . The crossing, during which the boat always had to fear torpedo hits from German submarines, led to Australia . Kahn lived here in the Tantura camp until August 1942 and then returned to England. He spent the years up to the end of the war as a worker on a chicken farm. Kahn lived in England until late summer 1947. Kahn later said that he mostly found the time abroad to be an “emigration” and “adventure”.

The return to Germany led Kahn to Kassel , where he got a job as a trainee with the Hessische Nachrichten . In 1949 he briefly worked as a journalist in Berlin , where he worked for the Tagesspiegel and from 1952 to 1956 at the American embassy based in Bad Godesberg . Here he worked in the press department and moved to Hamburg in 1956, where he was a member of the English-language editorial team at dpa until 1932 . For a short time he also worked for the NDR , first for the Weltspiegel program , and later for the television magazine Panorama , for which he was responsible for foreign policy editing. From September 1966 to April 1967 Kahn was a member of the editorial team of the news magazine Deutsches Panorama under the direction of Gert von Paczensky , for which he reported critically on Germany's defense policy. From 1967 he wrote for the news magazine Stern as an editor on military policy.

Kahn himself stated that it was important not to be influenced in his judgment by "fearful men and women". He saw himself as a "cold warrior" who had developed into a critical journalist, according to Kahn. Kahn followed and commented on national and international world events well into old age.

Works

In addition to working as a journalist, Kahn wrote several books on various topics. The most important work is The Cold War , which has more than 1000 pages and was published in three volumes from 1986 to 1988. In 1973 Kahn wrote a critical biography about Helmut Schmidt with the title Helmut Schmidt. Case study of a popular . The books The Russians Are Not Coming were among the works with provocative titles . Failures of our security policy of 1969 and Pentagon. Friedensfeind Nr. 1 from 1983, the second edition appeared in 1984.

literature

• Wilfried Weinke: Kahn, Helmut W. In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 4 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0229-7 , pp. 179 .