Kurt D. Singer

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Stumbling block for Kurt D. Singer, Berlin-Wilmersdorf Jenaer Strasse 9

Kurt D. Singer (actually Kurt Deutsch , pseudonym P. Carbone , born August 10, 1911 in Vienna , † December 9, 2005 in Santa Barbara ) was an Austrian-American publicist and spy.

Life

Kurt Deutsch was a son of the businessman Ignatz Deutsch († 1925) and his wife Irene, b. Singer. His mother came from a Jewish family, his father was a Catholic, he himself was baptized Catholic, was mainly influenced by the moderately religious Jewish household of his grandparents and later described himself as a staunch free thinker and agnostic . From 1919 he grew up in Berlin . After the early death of his father, he had to break off his visit to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Realgymnasium in Berlin-Neukölln and did an apprenticeship in a company that built rail freight cars and rented them to companies.

Olivaer Platz
Stumbling block for Hilde Singer, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Jenaer Strasse 9

After briefly studying at the University of Zurich in 1932, he married the X-ray assistant Hilde, geb. Tradelius (1911-2014). Her parents bought the bookstore on Olivaer Platz for the couple . After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Kurt and Hilde Deutsch produced illegal leaflets in its cellar. The testimony of an employee led to the arrest of Hilde Deutsch in February 1934 and to Kurt Deutsch's escape. He went first to Reichenberg and then to Sweden via Prague and Vienna. His wife was released after a year in prison and followed him to Sweden. Of his relatives, his mother Irene, his grandparents Julius and Clementine Singer, his uncles Adolf Deutsch and Leo Bratmann and his cousins ​​Richard Deutsch and Nemeti Sandor were murdered in the Holocaust ; his mother-in-law Alice Tradelius was found hanged in a cell in 1938.

In Sweden he worked as a journalist and publicist in Stockholm . He first wrote under the pseudonym P. Carbone and then took the maiden name of his mother Singer . He worked for the weekly newspaper Free Germany published by Max Sievers , wrote for social democratic newspapers and published a number of anti-Nazi papers. In 1935 he was a co-founder of the Ossietzky Committee. His biography of Ossietzky, published in 1936, and his commitment to the committee contributed to Carl von Ossietzky being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 1935 retrospectively on November 23, 1936 . The couple later campaigned for Ossietzky's daughter Rosalinda to come to Sweden. He did an interview with Leon Trotsky in his Norwegian exile for the magazine Folket i Bild .

In 1939 his publication Göring appeared. Tysklands farligaste man , in which he portrayed Hermann Göring as Germany's most dangerous man because of his drug addiction ( morphinism ) . The book was confiscated in Sweden at the request of the German government. Singer escaped a required extradition by being made the foreign correspondent of a Gothenburg newspaper and thus receiving a visa for the USA. He reached New York City on July 3, 1940 on a Finnish ship via the then Finnish port of Petsamo .

In the USA he worked as a publicist, author and speaker and took on research tasks for various allied secret services. Short term he was Agent Otto Strasser in the US. After the war he worked as a lecturer and author.

In 1951 he earned a doctorate from the School of Metaphysics in Indianapolis . In the same year he received US citizenship .

He moved to California and founded the press service Singer Communications Inc. in Anaheim .

From his first marriage, which was divorced in 1955, he had the daughter Marian Alice Birgit, married. Fozard (born January 5, 1940 in Stockholm - November 29, 2003 in Palm Harbor, Florida) and their son Kenneth Walt (born November 1945). In 1955 he married the literary agent Jane Sherrod (1917–1985) for the second time. After her death he married Kyung Ja (Katherine) Han (* 1944).

estate

Most of his estate and his library came to Boston University . The Leo Baeck Institute in New York owns a small collection on Kurt Singer . The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum holds his publications on Lyndon B. Johnson and his environment .

Works (selection)

  • Det command Luftkriget. 1935
2nd edition: Det kommande kriget. Stockholm: Folkets Förlag 1935
  • Carl von Ossietzky: fredskämpen i koncentrationsläger Stockholm 1936
several editions, including Danish (translated by Esther Gretor ) and English
German-language edition: Carl von Ossietzky. Zurich: Europa-Verlag 1937
  • Martin Niemöller: presten i concentration lenght; With 50 brev från concentration lenght. Stockholm 1938
  • Goering. Tysklands farligaste man. 1939
  • Duel for the Northland. The War of Enemy Agents in Scandinavia. 1943
  • Spies and traitors of World War II. New York: Prentice-Hall 1945
German-language edition: Spies and traitors of the second world war. Zurich: Falken 1946
  • Three thousand years of espionage. New York: Prentice-Hall 1948
  • The greatest spies in the world. Bern: Joke 1954
  • Today's spies. Velden aW: Obelisk 1956
  • The Danny Kaye saga. London: Hale 1957
  • Hemingway. Los Angeles: Holloway House Publ. Co. 1961
  • Great adventures in crime. Minneapolis: Denison 1962
  • Dr. Albert Schweitzer, medical missionary. Minneapolis: Denison [1963]
  • Lyndon Baines Johnson, man of reason. Minneapolis: Denison 1969
  • Who stayed in the shadows. Hamburg: Xenos 1970
  • Kurt Singer's Gothic horror book. London: Allen 1974
  • I spied and survived. New York: Leisure Books 1980
  • Horror. (Anthology series)
Horror 1: classic and modern stories from the realm of demons. 1969
Horror 2: Horror stories from old and new times. 1969
Horror 3rd 1970
Horror 4th 1974
Horror 5th 1975

literature

  • Singer (originally German), Kurt , in: Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 Volume 1: Politics, Economy, Public Life. Munich: Saur 1980 ISBN 9783110970289 , p. 704
  • Singer, Kurt , in: Handbook of Austrian Authors of Jewish Origin: 18th to 20th Century. Berlin: de Gruyter 2002 ISBN 9783110949001 , p. 1274 No. 9779
  • Herbert Lehner: Kurt Singer , in: Deutsche Exilliteratur since 1933. Volume 3/2: USA, Munich: Saur 2001 ISBN 978-3-907820-46-9 , pp. 489–501 ( full text )
  • Christoph Schottes: The Nobel Peace Prize campaign for Carl von Ossietzky in Sweden. Oldenburg 1997, ISBN 3-8142-0587-1 Book as PDF
  • Ursula Seeber (Ed.): Small allies: Displaced Austrian children's and youth literature . Vienna: Picus, 1998 ISBN 3-85452-276-2 , p. 161

Web links

Commons : Kurt D. Singer  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Herbert Lehner: Kurt Singer , in: Deutsche Exilliteratur since 1933. Volume 3/2: USA, Munich: Saur 2001 ISBN 978-3-907820-46-9 , pp. 489–501 ( full text )
  2. ^ Kurt D. Singer Collection , Leo Baeck Institute, New York
  3. ↑ Obituary , Der Tagesspiegel
  4. ↑ Biography Alice and Siegfried Tradelius from the Jena street in Der Tagesspiegel on 18 April 2014
  5. ^ Kurt D. Singer Collection , Leo Baeck Institute, New York
  6. ↑ Obituary
  7. ^ Singer, Kurt (1911-2005) and Jane (1917-1985) Collection , Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University
  8. ^ Kurt D. Singer Collection , Leo Baeck Institute, New York
  9. ↑ Papers of Kurt D. Singer, 1960-1969
personal data
SURNAME Singer, Kurt D.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES German, Kurt (real name); Carbone, P. (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American publicist and spy
DATE OF BIRTH August 10, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 2005
Place of death Santa Barbara