Hilde Walter (journalist)

Hilde Walter (born March 4, 1895 in Berlin , † January 22, 1976 in West Berlin ) was a German publicist.

Life

Hilde Walter attended Alice Salomon's social school for women in Berlin.

Until 1918 she worked as a social worker. She later studied literature and art history at Berlin University.

After the First World War she began to work as a journalist, initially for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . She later wrote for the liberal Berliner Tageblatt and for the trade union press. From 1927 to 1933 she wrote articles for the Weltbühne and was also active in its editing. Walter's main topics were social policy, labor legislation and women in professional life. She became a member of the German club of the women's association Soroptimist International, founded by the Berlin surgeon Edith Peritz in early 1930 . Walter reports that after the handover of power to the National Socialists , she and other opposition members initially underestimated their anti-Semitism and believed that the political opponents of the National Socialists were most at risk, while non-political Jews had nothing to fear.

At the end of February 1933, Walter was denounced for telling a joke about the Reichstag fire . She was then interrogated twice and her home ransacked several times without being arrested. Walter believed that as a lesser-known journalist and a woman, she was taken less seriously by the government. Although emigration seemed inevitable to Walter, she was reluctant to apply for a passport so as not to attract the attention of the authorities.

When the publisher of the Weltbühne Carl von Ossietzky was arrested after the Reichstag fire, Walter and the secretary of the Weltbühne Hedwig Hünicke were the only people in Germany who supported him financially and with food. Walter and Hünicke also took care of von Ossietzky's wife Maud and daughter Rosalind. Walter established contacts with foreign authors and politicians in order to support von Ossietzky and to raise money for him.

On the day before the boycott of Jews on April 1, 1933, the order of the Reich Commissioner for the Prussian Ministry of Justice asked all presidents of the higher regional courts, public prosecutors and presidents of the penal authorities in Prussia to “agree today with the bar associations or local bar associations that from tomorrow morning 10 Only certain Jewish lawyers appear in a ratio that roughly corresponds to the ratio of the Jewish population to the rest of the population ”and these lawyers“ are to be selected and appointed in agreement with the Gaugruppen of the Association of National Socialist German Lawyers ”; "Where an agreement of this content cannot be reached due to obstruction by the Jewish lawyers, I request that they forbid them to enter the court building." The law on admission to the bar of April 7, 1933 also provided for people who were "not Aryan Descent ”or“ have acted in a communist sense ”should be excluded from the legal profession. Walter therefore feared that she would not be able to continue her work as a freelance court reporter. Her publisher then offered to write on similar topics that did not require a trial. This, too, became impossible for Walter due to the exclusion of Jews and Communists from their professional association in the summer of 1933. In any case, she could not obtain the "admission to the profession of editor" according to the Editor's Act of October 1, 1933, due to her lack of "Aryan descent".

In November 1933 she fled to France, where she was accepted by a Soroptimist member. She was a leader in the "Friends of Carl von Ossietzky", which supported him and his family. From Paris, as the successor to Hellmut von Gerlach, who died in August 1935, Hilde Walter led an international campaign to award the imprisoned Ossietzky the Nobel Peace Prize, as happened in 1936. In 1940 she was interned in Gurs , but was able to escape there. In 1941 she managed to escape to the USA with an emergency visa. There she founded an agency for authors in exile.

In 1952 she returned to Berlin as a correspondent for the American Council on Germany . With Lotte Philips, Alfred Wiener's second wife , she wrote an eyewitness account of the early years of the National Socialist dictatorship for the Wiener Library in 1959 . In 1965 she received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class .

literature

• Hilde Walter: Eyewitness testimony (1959), Wiener Library Document Collection 1641 / Eyewitness testimony series, reference P.II.a No. 1090
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Vol.1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur 1980, p. 792 f.
• Gerhard Kraiker, Elke Suhr: Carl von Ossietzky . Reinbek near Hamburg 1994. ISBN 3-499-50514-2
• Frithjof Trapp, Knut Bergmann, Bettina Herre: Carl von Ossietzky and political exile. The work of the “Friends of Carl von Ossietzky” in the years 1933–1936 . Hamburg 1988
• Leo Katcher : Post mortem: the Jews in Germany - now , 1968, pp. 88-90

Web links

• Literature by and about Hilde Walter in the catalog of the German National Library
• Paula Oppermann: Beyond a Biography: Hilde Walter's Testimony and a Research Journey through the Wiener Library Archives , Wiener Library , March 19, 2015
• Collection Freundeskreis Carl von Ossietzky at the International Institute for Social History

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Of course, we all abhorred the Anti-Semitism of the Nazis [...]. But we saw ourselves and our friends as the actual victims and the most endangered enemies of the Nazis [Jews as much as Non-Jews], and [thought that] the a-political Jews had nothing to fear ”, quoted from Paula Oppermann: Beyond a Biography: Hilde Walter's Testimony and a Research Journey through the Wiener Library Archives . Wiener Library, March 19, 2015
2. ^ "I was only a 'second rate' oppositionist and considerably unimportant compared to the journalists and politicians who were arrested at that time; and finally, women were not taken seriously in general ”, quoted from Paula Oppermann: Beyond a Biography: Hilde Walter's Testimony and a Research Journey through the Wiener Library Archives . Wiener Library, March 19, 2015
3. ↑ holocaust-chronologie.de ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 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.