Kurt Grossmann

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Kurt Richard Grossmann (born May 21, 1897 in Berlin , † March 2, 1972 in Saint Petersburg , Florida ) was an originally German, later American journalist and publicist who wrote mainly in German.

Life

Kurt Grossmann (far left) together with Rudolf Olden , Carl von Ossietzky , Alfred Apfel and Kurt Rosenfeld on May 10, 1932 in front of the prison in Berlin-Tegel on the occasion of Ossietzky's entry into prison.

Kurt Grossmann was Secretary General of the German League for Human Rights from 1926 to 1933 and a committed opponent of the emerging National Socialism. On February 28, 1933, he fled the National Socialist regime to Prague, then to Paris and finally to the USA. Grossmann was one of 33 Germans who lost their German citizenship as a result of the First Expatriation List of the German Reich in 1933 . In the United States, he took American citizenship after the war. Grossmann was a gifted organizer. He was a leading employee of refugee aid organizations and helped many emigrants in Prague, later in Paris and in the USA to flee and also provided material support, although he himself often lived in poor conditions. After the war he worked for the World Jewish Congress WJC, later the Jewish Agency and then the Jewish Claims Conference . In addition, he published - as he did before and during the Second World War - in almost all émigré newspapers, including the Aufbau , the Neue Weltbühne , the Neuen Vorwärts , the Pariser Tageblatt , the Neues Tage-Buch and others.

After the war, Grossmann was briefly the US correspondent for the social democratic forward and wrote for all the major left-liberal newspapers in Germany and for the Berner Tagwacht and for Jedioth Chadashoth . Grossmann published around 8,500 journal articles and numerous books. His best-known work is the book The Unsung Heroes , published in 1957, which describes acts of resistance by individual Germans against Nazi persecution. In doing so, he created the basis for a memorial initiative by the Berlin Senator for the Interior, Joachim Lipschitz , which first honored the anti-fascist activities of largely unknown citizens in 1960. In 1972 Kurt Grossmann was a candidate for the Carl von Ossietzky Medal of the International League for Human Rights , but could not accept it because of his death in the meantime.

Grossmann's estate is kept in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University .

Fonts (selection)

  • Ossietzky: A German patriot . Kindler, Munich 1963. With a bibliography by Ossietzky. Albert Schweitzer Book Prize
  • Emigration - The History of the Hitler Refugees 1933-1945 . EVA, Frankfurt am Main 1969
  • The debt of honor. Short story d. Reparation . Ullstein, Frankfurt 1967
  • The unsung heroes; People in Germany's dark days . Arani Verlag, Berlin 1957
  • The Jewish refugee. Together with Arieh Tartakower. Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress, New York 1944
  • Peace and the German problem . New Europe, New York 1943. Series title: World reconstruction pamphlet series, 3
  • Five years! Escape, distress and rescue . Edited and published by Democratic Refugee Care, Prague 1938 (published anonymously)
  • Carl von Ossietzky (under the pseudonym "Felix Burger" together with Kurt D. Singer ). Europa Verlag, Zurich 1937
  • People on the run. Three years of care work for the German refugees . Edited and published by Democratic Refugee Care, Prague 1936 (published anonymously)
  • The yellow spot: a report from the spring of 1933 . Under the pseudonym Hermann Walter. Publishing house Czech League Against Anti-Semitism, Prague 1933
  • Jews in a brown hell: eyewitnesses report from SA barracks and concentration camps. Under the pseudonym Felix Burger, envelope John Heartfield . Die Abwehr publishing house, Prague 1933
  • 13 years of “republican” justice. Voco-Verlag, Berlin 1932. Series title: Republican Library, 1

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Hepp (ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3 (reprinted 2010).
  2. ↑ Not accepted by Grossmann because Otto Dibelius was a juror
personal data
SURNAME Grossmann, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grossmann, Kurt Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American journalist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 21, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 2nd 1972
Place of death Saint Petersburg