Julius Epstein (Author)

Julius Viktor Stefan Epstein (born December 26, 1901 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † July 3, 1975 in Palo Alto ) was an Austrian - American journalist , author and political scientist .

Family and early years

Julius Epstein was the son of Alice Epstein-Strauss (later Alice Meyszner ), the Jewish stepdaughter of Johann Strauss's son , and grandson of Adele Strauss, Strauss's third wife; he was called Tully by the family . He studied at the German universities in Jena and Leipzig . There he was already active as a journalist. In 1922 he joined the KPD , but was expelled from the party after a few months. In March 1933 he left Germany and lived in Prague for some time . During the Sudeten crisis in 1938 he fled with his wife and son to Zurich and the following year to the USA.

His mother, his brother Hanns, his great-aunt Louise Simon and her husband Josef Simon, who owned extensive estates from Strauss, were meanwhile described in the Nazi propaganda paper Der Stürmer as "Jewish legacy sneaks in the family of the Waltz King". The threat that “the responsible authorities know how to find the way that is expedient in order to be able to return the crooked values ​​to the general public” led Alice Meyszner and Hanns Epstein to “donate” their collection to the city on June 19, 1939 Vienna transferred.

Publicist in the USA

Epstein was accredited to the United Nations as a correspondent for Swiss newspapers and also wrote articles on political events in Europe for US magazines and newspapers in exile, such as: B. the socialist perspective .

In 1942, Epstein became a language editor for the United States Office of War Information . After the war he was appointed New York correspondent for a group of West German daily newspapers and wrote articles for German and American magazines, including Plain Talk , Human Events and National Review .

In 1954/55 he wrote several articles in the Herald Tribune which ultimately prevented Article 16 on the repatriation of displaced persons to their home countries , which was then required by the Soviet Union for the Austrian constitution, from being included in the constitution, which was passed in 1955.

In 1962, Julius Epstein caused the so-called Epstein affair in the Federal Republic of Germany . He had published the text of secret dispatches from the German Embassy in Washington to the Foreign Office in Bonn in a documentation of the German-American differences over Berlin in the Rheinischer Merkur and in the Spiegel , which reported how far the English and Americans secretly wanted to go to enable a Berlin arrangement with the Soviets. The German federal government feared that the western allies were ready to go too far towards the Soviet Union. For three years, the federal prosecutor's office unsuccessfully determined who had issued the paper to Epstein. It later emerged that Epstein had published the dispatch in agreement with Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer .

A year later, Epstein published the article "On the problem of betrayal of secrets" in the Swiss monthly magazines . In the Dreyfus case, he illustrated the importance of “betrayal of secrets”: “Certainly, it would have taken tremendous courage to do such an act! Certainly, the personal consequences would have been inconceivable [...]. "

In 1963, Epstein became a research assistant to Stefan Thomas Possony at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University , who designed the US Strategic Defense Initiative . Three years later he became a full professor of international relations at Lincoln University in San Francisco .

Works

Katyn massacre

The US government had suppressed news of the Katyn massacre in 1940 for years . As an employee of the Office of War Information, Epstein had analyzed material on this. In 1949 he published a series on Katyn in the European edition of the Herald Tribune . When he learned that the state foreign broadcaster Voice of America had banned its Polish program staff from reporting on Katyn, he researched it. Epstein published his findings in the booklet The Mysteries of the Van Vliet Report: A Case History , funded by the Polish American Congress . He won over a group of US House representatives to conduct an investigation. The committee was headed by Democratic MP Ray J. Madden . The final report of the Madden Commission presented in 1952 came to the conclusion that the Soviet secret police NKVD had carried out the shootings of Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940.

After Khrushchev's secret speech about Stalin's crimes on the XX. At the CPSU party congress in 1956, Epstein and his colleagues from the private Katyn Committee sent a letter to the Kremlin in Moscow. In it they asked Khrushchev for information about the fate of all missing Polish prisoners of war. In another letter to CIA boss Allen Dulles he suggested, in Warsaw to let up a Katyn monument as a "gift from the American people." Answers to both letters have not survived.

Lost cosmonauts

In 1962, at the height of the Cold War , Julius Epstein publicly claimed that at least a dozen Soviet cosmonauts had died in secret accidents in space . Epstein also claimed that the US government was aware of it but did not publish it in order to “not anger the Russians”. Instead, according to Epstein, "it appears that Washington's silence is guided by a strong desire not to hear evil, see no evil, and say no evil about the USSR." He called on the US government to make its knowledge of the Soviet space accidents public.

Operation Keelhaul

In his book Operation Keelhaul , Julius Epstein revealed details of the forced repatriation of around four million Soviet citizens, expatriate Belarusians, and other Eastern Europeans at the end of World War II . Most of these people were viewed by the Soviet Union as "traitors" and severely punished or executed. This forced repatriation, after Alexander Solzhenitsyn "the last secret of the Second World War", was based on a secret amendment to the Yalta Treaty and remained unknown to the general public for decades. On April 5, 1954, Julius Epstein was researching the United States Government`s Historical Records branch in Alexandria, Virginia, USA (state historical agency of the US government) on an index card with the file number of the Allied High Command of the Armed Forces in Europe No. 383.7-14.1 and the identifier "Forcible repatriation of abducted citizens - Operation Keelhaul", which had inadvertently been made available to the public but was kept secret (Nikolai Tolstoy, 2012, Victims of Yalta, ISBN 978-1-60598-362- 2 , page 431 ff). Despite more than 20 years of legal proceedings, the US government has refused to give him access because the British government, which is jointly responsible with the US government for the confidentiality of files from the Second World War, has refused to grant it.

Fonts (selection)

• The nothing. The narrative of a recovery . Leipzig 1927.
• The fate of accumulation in Germany or the insanity of self-sufficiency . Leipzig 1932.
• The yellow paw. Japan on the threshold of world domination . Prague 1933.
• With Heinrich Mann and Artur Seehof (eds.): Last Judgment on hatred of Jews. An international survey about the nature of anti-Semitism . Prague 1933.
• The Case Against Vera Micheles Dean and the Foreign Policy Association . 1947.
• The Mysteries of the Van Vliet Report: A Case History . Chicago: Polish American Congress, Inc., 1951.
• Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present . Old Greenwich: Devin-Adair, 1973.

literature

• Epstein, Julius. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 6: Dore – Fein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-22686-1 , pp. 404-406.
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 160

Web links

• Julius Epstein: On the problem of betrayal of secrets , in: Swiss monthly books, 43 (1963–1964), issue 5, pp. 482–491.
• Julius Epstein's estate at the Hoover Institution

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 367.
2. ↑ Ralph Braun: Opening address for the opening service of the Coburg Johann Strauss Music Festival 2009 on ralph-braun.com (PDF; 1.4 MB)
3. ↑ Maria Wirth: "The negotiations about the Strauss collections in the Vienna City and State Library". Democracy Center Vienna, 23./24. April 2003 (PDF; 112 kB)
4. ↑ Alice Meyczner was married to Rudolf Meyczner, brother of August Meyszner , an SA and SS man who was executed for mass murder in Yugoslavia after the war. Because of her “privileged mixed marriage” she was protected as a Jew.
5. ↑ telegrams. Announcements and information from the German Johann Strauss Society . 2011/1. P. 2 ff. ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 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. (PDF; 3.3 MB) 
6. ^ Der Spiegel , October 10, 1962
7. ↑ Der Spiegel , August 4, 1965
8. ↑ Julius Epstein: "On the problem of betrayal of secrets." In: Swiss monthly books. Journal for politics, economy, culture . 43 / 1963-1964. Pp. 482-491
9. ↑ "12 Russian Cosmonauts Claimed Killed," The Spokane Review, February 5, 1967 . News.google.com. Retrieved August 19, 2012.
10. ^ Julius Epstein, Author, 74, Dies; Wrote of Forced Repatriations , NY Times, July 5, 1975, at 16.
11. ^ George Sandford: Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940. Truth, justice and memory. London / New York 2005, pp. 148–162.
12. ↑ Andrzej Przewoźnik, Amerykanie a Katyń ( Memento of the original from August 8, 2014 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. , Rzeczpospolita, April 9, 2010.  
13. ^ Library of Congress. Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series: 1951. Washington 1953, p. 70.
14. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, pp. 366-370.
15. ↑ Andrzej Przewoźnik, Amerykanie a Katyń, in: Rzeczpospolita , April 9, 2010, p. 10.
16. ^ Letter from Julius Epstein September 14, 1956 , CIA Archives Washington.
17. ^ Bob Considine, "Here's Red Roster of Lost Astronauts," The Evening News, July 8, 1965 . News.google.com. Retrieved August 4, 2013.
18. ^ "Were twelve cosmonauts killed?", The Windsor Star, 5/1/1967 . News.google.com. Retrieved August 19, 2012.
19. ↑ English text: "Washington's silence appears to be motivated by the strong desire to hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil about he USSR" Julius Epstein, "Soviet Space Losses: US Public Not Properly Informed," Los Angeles Times, 10/4/1967, p. A5.
20. ^ "12 Cosmonauts Killed, US Historian Believes," Milwaukee Sentinel, 5/1/1967 . News.google.com. Retrieved August 4, 2013.
21. ↑ "More Light on 'Keelhaul,'" The Nevada Daily Mail . News.google.com. December 13, 1972. Retrieved August 19, 2012.