Marcus van Blankenstein

Marcus van Blankenstein (born June 13, 1880 in Ouderkerk , † September 18, 1964 in The Hague ) was a Dutch journalist.

Life and activity

Origin and early career

Van Blankenstein came from an Orthodox Jewish family. He was a son of Heijman van Blankenstein, a butcher, and his wife Judith, nee. Bekkers.

After attending school, van Blankenstein studied comparative linguistics at the University of Leiden from 1902 to 1906 . He then continued his studies with the help of a scholarship at the University of Copenhagen . During this time he began to write articles for the Rotterdam newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant (NRC), one of the most widely read daily newspapers in the Netherlands, in which he reported on important events in the Danish capital.

Because of their satisfaction with the reports from Denmark supplied by Blankenstein, the NRC editorial team offered him the position of their permanent correspondent in Berlin in 1909 . He accepted this offer and from then on reported from the capital of the German Empire. In addition, he worked on his dissertation, which he completed in 1911, so that he received the doctoral degree from the University of Leiden that year. He turned down a professorial position offered to him and instead turned to journalism for good.

Van Blankenstein remained in the post of Berlin correspondent for the NRC for a total of eleven years, until 1920. In this capacity he reported in particular on the events in the capital of the Reich during the First World War .

Activity in the 1930s

In 1931 van Blankenstein received the position of senior foreign editor of the NRC. In this capacity he wrote a large part of the foreign policy commentaries for his paper. Because of his Jewish ancestry, but above all because of his critical articles about the conditions that existed in the German Reich since the Nazis came to power as well as about the policies of the Nazi government - in particular about numerous atrocities perpetrated against minorities and dissidents in Germany under its aegis and about the increasingly aggressive foreign policy course of the German government - van Blankenstein attracted the hostility of Joseph Goebbels , head of the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and other German government agencies in the course of the 1930s . The German Ministry of Propaganda repeatedly threatened the NRC with a boycott of advertisements if it failed to induce its editor to stop his anti-German comments. After there was no reaction, the previous German tourism advertisements of the NRC were withdrawn in the first half of 1936.

After additional conflicts with the designated editor-in-chief Swart, van Blankenstein, although one of the most respected journalists in the Netherlands at the time, was dismissed from the management of the NRC at the end of 1936. In 1937 he became deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly Haagse Post , but had to give up this position in 1939 under pressure from the German government.

Second World War

After the German occupation of the Netherlands , van Blankenstein managed to escape to Great Britain. There he took over the position of editor of the exile magazine Vrij Nederland .

After van Blankenstein had been a target of Nazi propaganda for a long time , in 1940 at the latest he was also targeted by the National Socialist police, who classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940 the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of People who the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be located and arrested with special priority by the special SS commandos following the occupation forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht.

After the war van Blankenstein worked a. a. as a freelance correspondent for the daily newspaper Het Parool .

Family and offspring

Van Blankenstein was married to Nelly Lohr (1883–1947) since May 29, 1908, with whom he had a son and two daughters.

literature

• Encyclopeadia Judaica , Vol. 3, 2007, p. 740.
• Elisabeth van Blankenstein: Dr. M van Blankenstein. Een Nederlandse dagbladdiplomaat, 1880-1964 , 1999.

Web links

• Short biography of van Blankenstein in the files of the Reich Chancellery

literature

• Paul Stoop: Dutch press under pressure: German foreign press policy and the Netherlands 1933-1940 , 1987, p. 35.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry on van Blankenstein on the special wanted site GB (reproduction on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London)