Michael Vermehren (journalist)

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Michael Vermehren in Brazil in 1965

Michael Vermehren (born June 25, 1915 in Lübeck ; † November 3, 2010 in Marbella ) was a German journalist and long-time foreign correspondent for ZDF .

Live and act

origin

Michael Vermehren spent his childhood, youth and school days in his hometown of Lübeck, where his grandfather Julius Vermehren was a senator. His father was the lawyer Kurt Vermehren , among others the syndic of HaFraBa and the Hamburg-America Line , who became known as the lawyer of Anna Anderson ( Anastasia ) after the Second World War . His mother, the journalist Petra Vermehren , was the daughter of Possehl partner Johannes Schwabroch. Michael was the oldest of four siblings; his sister was the later known actress , cabaret artist and nun Isa Vermehren ; his brother, later the defense agent and insurance broker Erich Vermehren . In 1953 his father married Elisabeth Michelsen, widowed by Lilie, with whom he had another daughter, Beate (born February 11, 1954 in Hamburg).

Education and war years

Michael Vermehren tried to study economics at the University of Freiburg , where he met Peter von Zahn , with whom he became a lifelong friend from now on [e] . Because of a study ban, he had to move to the London School of Economics in England, where he also trained as an auditor at Price Waterhouse . After his return to Germany at the end of 1938, he started working as a journalist. His mother Petra was from 1937 a correspondent for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in Athens ; later she went to Lisbon for the Berliner Tageblatt and wrote, among other things, for Das Reich . From 1939 Michael Vermehren was employed as an editor at the Transocean news agency working for the Reich Propaganda Ministry . In the winter of 1941 he made friends with PG Wodehouse , who at that time was staying with his wife in the Berlin Hotel Adlon , and prevented the naive author from getting involved with the Nazi regime. In 1942 Das Reich Vermehrens published a full-page article Lübeck - After 14 days. The city mastered all of life's questions by euphemizing the situation in Lübeck after the British bombing raid on Palm Sunday 1942. On March 28, 1943, he married Elisabeth Countess de Rességuier de Miremont in Salzburg (* July 20, 1916 at Tannenmühle Castle ; † April 12, 1997 in Madrid ).

After Michael Vermehren's brother Erich, who was stationed as a diplomat, but actually as an agent of the Abwehr , in Istanbul , in early 1944 with his wife Elisabeth, née. Countess Plettenberg, who had defected to the British for political reasons, the Vermehren and Plettenberg families were lured to Potsdam under a pretext , where they were first placed under house arrest in a hotel and then interned as part of the “ kin detention ”. Kurt, Petra and Michael Vermehren were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on April 15, 1944 . Isa Vermehren survived her stay in the Ravensbrück , Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps . As a member of the hostage transport of prominent concentration camp prisoners and clan prisoners , she was deported to South Tyrol and liberated there on May 4, 1945. Kurt, Petra and Michael Vermehren were released from Sachsenhausen concentration camp on April 15, 1945, one day before the camp was closed, on the instructions of the Reich Security Main Office .

Journalist and foreign correspondent

In 1947 Vermehren emigrated to Colombia , where he initially worked as an auditor and later as a farmer and rancher. Twelve years later Peter von Zahn called him to the Windrose, the first network of foreign correspondents for television in Germany, to report from Latin America. A little later he became the first Latin America correspondent for ZDF , based in Rio de Janeiro .

Vermehren has already booked several exclusive reports from South America, such as his first extensive documentaries from Castro's Cuba and his report on the student massacre at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, which he and Oriana Fallaci were the only foreign journalist to experience. During this time he also wrote for the political magazine The Month . In 1969 he was with the establishment of foreign studios in Madrid the first permanent Spain correspondent of ZDF and remained so for many years until his retirement in 1981. He reported for the ZDF news programs, especially for the heute-journal and Auslandsjournal over the last years of the Francoist dictatorship, the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 and the first years of the democratization process (span. Transición ) under King Juan Carlos I and in February 1981 through the attempted coup " 23-F " by right-wing military and parts of the paramilitary Guardia Civil against the democratic government.

His early realization that the then aspirant to the throne Juan Carlos was a serious democrat, he testified in several documentaries that supported the reputation of King Juan Carlos, who had been in office since 1975, and contributed to his plans to transform the Francoist dictatorship into a parliamentary democracy. Vermehren got on just as well with the socialist leader Felipe González as with other politicians and personalities. He later recorded this more personal perspective in his book The King and Other Spaniards .

Increasing footage from Spain in those years (largely thanks to his cameraman Peter Schumann) later formed the core of Victoria Prego's series La Transición on Spanish television RTVE , in which he participated.

retirement

Castellar de la Frontera

Michael Vermehren retired as an author in his adopted home Spain. His son Johannes Gottfried (* 1944) died in 1989. His son Michael married Leticia de Silva y Allende, Duquesa de Lécera.

In 1995, Vermehren, as the last of the three siblings, converted to the Catholic faith under the leadership of his long-time friend, Oldenburg-born Bonaventura Kloppenburg , Bishop of Novo Hamburgo , in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Michael Vermehren died in Marbella in 2010. He was buried in Castellar de la Frontera ( Cadiz ), the Andalusian home of his son Miguel Antonio Vermehren.

Honors

Fonts

  • The King and Other Spaniards: Encounters and Observations. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-421-06617-5
  • Grandezza: houses and people in Spain and Portugal. Econ, Düsseldorf / Vienna / New York 1991, ISBN 3-430-19356-7
  • Arrested in the Potsdamer Palast Hotel and imprisonment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In: Winfried Meyer (Ed.): Conspirators in the concentration camp. Hans von Dohnanyi and the prisoners of July 20, 1944 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (Series of publications by the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, Volume 5). Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-89468-251-5 , pp. 371-373

literature

  • Winfried Meyer: Kurt, Petra and Michael Vermehren . In: Winfried Meyer (Ed.), Conspirators in the concentration camp. Hans von Dohnanyi and the prisoners of July 20, 1944 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (Series of publications by the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, Volume 5). Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-89468-251-5 , pp. 365-371
  • Ute Waffenschmidt: Spanish Contrasts: on the relationship between contemporary history and television in the international reporting of the ZDF. Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Bern / New York / Paris 1989, ISBN 978-3-631-42201-4 (European university publications: History and its auxiliary sciences, 407; also: Cologne, Univ., Diss., 1988)
  • Peter von Zahn : Voice of the first hour: Memories 1913–1951. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-421-06593-4
  • Peter von Zahn: Reporter of the Windrose: Memories 1951-1964. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-421-06667-1

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary. In: Lübecker Nachrichten , November 9, 2010
  2. ↑ Jan Zimmermann: St. Gertrud 1860-1945. A photographic foray. Bremen 2007, pp. 112–113 (on the family's summer house at Jerusalemsberg 6) ISBN 978-3-86108-891-2
  3. ↑ Peter von Zahn: Voice of the first hour: Memories 1913–1951. 1991, p. 128.
  4. ^ Based on Robert McCrum: Wodehouse: the truth of his years in Nazi Berlin . In: The Guardian , June 17, 2001; Retrieved November 12, 2010
  5. ↑ The British secret service, which kept a file on her, thought she was an intelligence agent, see the entry on her file in The National Archives ; Retrieved November 13, 2010
  6. ^ Robert McCrum: Wodehouse. A life. Norton, New York 2004, ISBN 0-393-05159-5 , pp. 330 ff. See also Haft de luxe . In: Der Tagesspiegel , October 21, 2007, accessed on November 22, 2010
  7. ↑ Das Reich No. 21 of May 17, 1942
  8. ^ Dietrich Schmidt-Hackenberg: May 8, 1945: The question of political responsibility. Books on Demand , 2005, ISBN 978-3-8334-2793-0 , p. 168, calls the article “a single apology for the regime”.
  9. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol . Myth Elser, 2006
  10. ↑ Peter von Zahn: Reporter of the wind rose: Memoirs 1951-1964. 1994, p. 325
  11. ↑ The German ambassador to Spain at that time was Hermann Meyer-Lindenberg , who was married to Vermehren's sister-in-law Marie Rosa Countess de Rességuier de Miremont.
  12. ↑ La Transición
personal data
SURNAME Increase, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and television correspondent
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Lübeck
DATE OF DEATH November 3, 2010
Place of death Marbella