Hugh Greene

Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, KCMG , OBE (born November 15, 1910 in Berkhamsted ( Hertfordshire ), † February 19, 1987 in London ) was a British journalist . Hugh Greene was after 1945 on behalf of the British occupying power organizer of the Northwest German Broadcasting Corporation (NWDR) and later until March 31, 1969 as Director General of the BBC . Hugh Carleton Greene was the younger brother of the writer Graham Greene , along with two other brothers .

Life

Hugh Greene was married four times: with the British Helga Guinness, the American Elaine Shaplen, the German cabaret artist and actress Tatjana Sais and with Sarah Grahame.

family

Hugh Greene came from a wealthy family. His great-grandfather Benjamin (* 1780) laid the foundations for his wealth. As a 19-year-old brewer, he and a partner took over the bankrupt brewery on Westgate Street in Bury St. Edmunds and managed it so successfully that he established sugar cane plantations on St. .Kitts could buy. The family still held shares in the brewery during Hugh's time.

Hugh's father Carles Henry (* 1865) was a teacher at Berkhamsted Public School from 1889 and rose to head of the pension house in 1894 and headmaster in 1910. The latter meant that he was allowed to move into the schoolhouse. Hugh attended the school his father ran.

Education

In December 1928 Greene received a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford. Before starting his studies, he went abroad for a short time. Because of his language skills, France would have been close, but because the English middle class were enthusiastic about the Weimar Republic and Goethe at the time , he decided on Germany. In Marburg an der Lahn he lived with the widowed Ms. von Pritzelwitz and her family. This woman still attached importance to the formalities of the empire; so it was customary, after the table was lifted, to shake hands with the lady of the house and make a servant.

Merton College was a rich college with barely more than 100 students and Oxford was then still a very quiet city with little traffic. Philosophy and history of antiquity would have been close as degrees, but Greene did not consider himself a philosophical head. There was only one boring tutor in German. The recommendation of a friend to try Immanuel Kant's work , which is easier to understand in English than in German, failed because he fell asleep after reading a single page of Kant. Eventually Greene graduated with a degree in English literature, which, in retrospect, he thought was a sensible decision.

As a newspaper correspondent

Greene initially considered becoming a university professor, but was advised against it as he could not get used to the quiet university life. So he tried journalism, an area in which he had at least minimal experience: as early as March 31, 1931, he wrote an 18-line newspaper article about a fire. The province did not interest him, so he went to Munich. He was only accepted for a line fee from the New Statesman and Daily Herald newspapers and a £ 200 grant from his father on condition that, if unsuccessful, he would return after a year to take the British civil service exam.

In December 1933 Greene first went to Berlin to meet with correspondent King of the Daily Herald. He gave him business cards labeled Correspondent for the Detroit Daily News , as both the New Statesman and Daily Herald were too left-wing to be able to stay in Munich. At the end of the month, Greene also succeeded in obtaining permission to visit the Dachau concentration camp from the SS , about which he later wrote that it was evil in broad daylight, not a shadowy nightmare . A first highlight was an interview with the clown Grock . In Munich he saw Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels up close. Greene spent his first Christmas in Germany with the British consul Donald St. Clair Gainer, where he was introduced to Eustance Wareing, the Daily Telegraph correspondent for Germany. In January 1934, Hugh was already earning 200 RM. In February 1934 Wareing brought him to Berlin as an assistant, where he got 500 RM after an unpaid probationary period of one month, but was not yet given a permanent position. This was the National Union of Journalists' minimum wage. His duties included looking through German newspapers, paying special attention to articles in which Germany responded to British news. In addition, there was the cultivation of contacts with representatives of the government, the party and banks and the anti-fascist opposition. Greene read Mein Kampf , quickly realized that it described the main points of Hitler's intentions, and considered it irresponsible that leading politicians in western countries should ignore the book.

When the Vienna Telegraph correspondent was expelled in March 1938 because he had described the German invasion too forcefully, Greene temporarily replaced him. In May 1938 Eustance Wareing went to Paris and Greene was his successor; as chief correspondent, he now earned over £ 1,000 a year, which is what he said to have jumped four digits through the apartment with the words Now I am . After the German invasion of Prague in March 1939, he was forced to flee, which meant that Greene went there. On May 4, 1939, six correspondents, including Greene, were expelled on the grounds that it was retaliation for the expulsion of Dr. Rösels from London. (Rösel was officially a correspondent for the National-Zeitung, but was in fact a chief propagandist.)

Greene then went to Warsaw in June 1939 and found Poland lulled in a foolish complacency; Compared to Berlin, the country seemed free and lively to him, although it was basically a military dictatorship. When he found out after the outbreak of war that the Polish government, together with the British, French and US embassies, were moving to the small spa town of Nałęczów, he set off there in his car on September 5 amid a stream of refugees. On the evening of September 6th, at the Nałęczów post office, where the British embassy had found shelter, he learned that the German army was only 10 miles away and immediately went to Romania , reached the border town of Chernivtsi on September 9th and continued his activities then continued in Bucharest , where he lived as a hotel guest in the Athenée Palace and was able to report on the assassination of Prime Minister Armand Călinescu on September 21: After the assassination all telephone connections were blocked, whereupon the journalists went to the border to post their messages can, but that didn't work. Greene had colitis , so he stayed in town and was the only one to give his information when the lines went back up that evening.

In November 1939, the London editors asked for reports on the Germans from the Netherlands. Greene then went to Amsterdam in December. At the beginning of May 1940 he waited for the German attack in Brussels and then left the day before the German invasion.

military service

Back in London, Greene found out that his class would be drafted in the autumn and then volunteered as an officer in order to get a pleasant job. He then worked as a so-called branch manager at the Air Force - that's what the intelligence service called those who were responsible for two counties and who interrogated pilots who survived when German aircraft crashed. The BBC offered him the editing of the news programs for Germany. Both the information minister Duff Cooper and the aviation minister Sir Archibald Sinclair supported this proposal, especially since it was an important task for which Greene, with his excellent knowledge of German, was particularly suitable.

At the German service of the BBC

On October 15, 1940 Greene became editor-in-chief for the news broadcasts of the German-language program in the European service of the BBC. During the war, the European Service was subordinate to the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), whose guidelines had to be observed. Initially, the news was written in the central newsroom and then translated into foreign languages. The head of the France service, Darsie Gillie, whom Greene already knew as a Times correspondent, then put through separate texts for each country. Looking back, Greene said:

If the news was to be the most important part of your production, and it clearly was, then the text design had to take into account the needs of the recipient country and the conditions there.

With the texts, the influence of the BBC was just as great as that of the PWE, which gave very detailed instructions on possible news every week and described which general line was to be followed. Problems always arose when there were events for which there were no instructions. Greene managed to set up an autonomous intelligence service for Germany. He insisted on always reporting the truth:

I said to myself: If we lose the war and the Germans invade England, we'll all be shot anyway, so we can confidently tell the truth. If we persevere and the tide turns, the fact that we stayed with the truth will mean that the German people will continue to believe us. And that's how it turned out.

At the age of 29, Greene was now leading a larger group of people for the first time, having previously had at most one or two employees as a correspondent. In doing so, he had great skill: he spoke only a few, but decisive, sentences in conferences, asked his subordinates to understand texts that were easy to understand, and did not shy away from firing people who did not comply. The editorial team included many refugees from Germany who came from the publishing industry or were writers. In August and September 1942 Greene traveled to Stockholm to experience listening to a disturbed transmitter in practice. It turned out that when there was background noise, deep voices and simple, slow formulations could be better understood. Long features were no longer necessary and two speakers attracted more attention with their different voices. The BBC became the most important foreign source of information for Germans who wanted to find out more independently from Goebbel's lies.

On April 28, 1945 Greene visited the Dachau concentration camp again. There he met a French journalist among the inmates whom he knew from his time in Berlin.

After the war

Robert Skelton of News of the World offered Hugh Greene in July 1945 to become a Paris-based European correspondent for his newspaper for a salary of £ 2,500 plus expenses, travel and a promise that all texts would be printed unchanged. On the other hand, the BBC had promised to stay abroad for at least three months after the spring of 1946, which is why the News of the World offer came to nothing.

So it happened that Hugh Greene set up a kind of BBC for Germany: After the occupation of Germany, the mood among the Allies changed, they wanted to create a liberal and democratic society in Germany. In December 1945 Alex Bishop was commissioned to set up information services, press, radio and film. For radio, he created the NWDR with its broadcast houses in Hamburg and Cologne, based on the model of the BBC domestic service, and entrusted WA Palmer with the organization. But this man was unable to convince the German employees, whereupon Bishop wrote to the BBC Director General Sir William Haley in July 1946 asking for a replacement. He asked around and suggested Hugh Greene.

Structure of the NWDR

Greene joined in as an organizer in October 1946 and had the plan to turn the NWDR into a public corporation that would be independent of commercial interests and political pressure from the government, centralized and financed through radio contributions. He was unable to achieve complete independence of broadcasting from political parties. As in the BBC tradition on public broadcasting, the foundation should be characterized by independence, impartiality and tolerance. Through Greene's influence, the NWDR should become a medium of political, cultural and liberal democratic education with tolerance and the ability to compromise. No sooner had the parties been officially approved in Germany than there were disputes over control of the radio.

The parties were concerned with votes. According to Greene's idea, the radio should not become a mouthpiece for the parties, but the Germans should be able to inform themselves about attitudes, values ​​and ideals. After Adolf Grimme (SPD) had been elected as General Director and Heinrich-Georg Raskop (CDU) had been elected to the Board of Directors, Greene handed the NWDR over to his successors on November 15, 1948:

In my speech in the large concert hall, where I contacted the NWDR staff for the first time more than two years ago, I underlined - neither for the first nor for the last time, by the way - that public broadcasting is subject to state and party political constraints must be withdrawn as far as possible ... When I came down from the podium, Mr. Brauer , the mayor of Hamburg , growled in my ear, quietly but unmistakably hostile: “You will not reach your goal, Mr. Greene. You will not achieve it. "

The successors to the NWDR were later the NDR and the WDR . The TV department of the NDR, the NDR television, is today on Hugh-Greene-Weg in Hamburg - Lokstedt .

BBC

On January 15, 1949, Greene took over the management of the BBC's Eastern Europe Service, which was responsible for broadcasts for the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece. In 1950 he was taken over by King George VI. for Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) appointed and knighted. Greene was also Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) . He spent the years 1950 to 1951 in Malaya . An expert in psychological warfare was needed there. Back to London in 1951 he worked for the Efficiency Committee, in which the performance of the BBC was recorded and was then Deputy Head of the Overseas Service. Greene had an excellent knowledge of journalism but had no experience of how an institution worked, and that was to change thanks to the efforts of his mentor, Sir Ian Jacob (Director General from 1952). Greene was tasked with determining the profitability of selling BBC television films in the form of an overseas TV service. With this impressive study, he impressed his colleagues with Greene's known lack of television experience. Greene attempted to sell educational films made by the BBC for the overseas television service in North America. The plans had to be changed due to the private television and the saturated market that resulted from it, placing the emphasis on distribution and no longer on commercial use. He was a deputy until December 1954 and then took over the management of the overseas service. He was its director until October 1956 and then took up the post of Director of Administration . There he was responsible for personnel issues, administration, finances, copyright matters and for the working atmosphere of the entire BBC. After Greene got a thorough look at the administrative work, he became "Program Director for News" (DNCA) in August 1958. In this position, he was responsible for directing all BBC productions of news on radio and television that had to do with magazine-type programs, lectures and documentaries.

General manager 1960–1969

On January 1, 1960, he became director general of the BBC, which he chaired until 1969. During this time the BBC got increasing competition from the private broadcaster ITV . Greene fought against the loss of audience ratings through numerous reorganizations. Among other things, Greene opened the BBC to the general public and said goodbye to the idea of ​​broadcasting for a specific shift. An attractive program for young people should create a moral force. One of his first considerations was a change in the program plan through the improved design of the evening program. A debate took place about the future of radio and television, culminating in the July 1960 Pilkington Inquiry . The investigation was chaired by Harry Pilkington . In the study, questions were asked about the validity and importance of commercial use. Greene spent the next two years convincing influential people and committee members about the merits of public service broadcasting. The independence through advertising income was to be maintained and the full license fee was to be paid to the BBC for the development of its technical systems and the introduction of a second channel, since part of the fees was withheld by the tax office and the postal ministry. He also wanted to build a second channel as an alternative to the serious BBC program.

literature

• Hugh Carleton Greene: Decision and Responsibility - Perspectives of Broadcasting . Hans Bredow Institute publishing house, 1970.
• Michael Tracey: The Unachievable Idea - An attempt on Hugh Greene and the re-establishment of broadcasting in northwest Germany after 1945 . Kohlhammer-Grote, Cologne et al. 1982, ISBN 3-17-008000-8 .
• Michael Tracey: Sir Hugh Greene - A Biography . Quadriga Verlag, 1984, ISBN 3-88679-114-9 .
• Carl Brinitzer : This is London speaking. From someone who was there ; Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1969 / Foreword by Hugh Greene

Web links

• Image by Hugh Greene
• Hans Bredow Institute
• Sir Hugh Carleton Greene Fellowship
• Literature by and about Hugh Greene in the catalog of the German National Library

• Sir Hugh Greene in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ British Film Institute (English)
2. ↑ Today 895 euros This figure was determined using the template: inflation .
3. ↑ Today 63,960 euros
4. ↑ ^{a b} Sir Hugh Greene - A Biography , Chapter 5
5. ^ NDR: NDR television: Hamburg-Lokstedt. Retrieved January 1, 2019 .