National Committee for a Free Europe

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Berlin freedom bell

The National Committee for a Free Europe (English. National Committee for a Free Europe ) was an American anti-communist organization in the year 1949 in New York City was founded. Its members were composed of different nationalities, the leadership consisted of Charles Douglas Jackson , John Jay McCloy and Allen Welsh Dulles .

The goal was the liberation of after the Second World War under Soviet - Stalinist standing influence peoples of Europe.

From July 1950, the committee operated the radio station Radio Free Europe . Wages, current expenses and technical facilities were funded by the US government. The CIA provided a complete transmitter system installed in Germany for this purpose. According to Bernd Stöver , the station was "the first anti-communist station that was founded specifically for the liberation of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe and was deliberately outsourced from the area of ​​responsibility of official US policy."

As a symbol of freedom, the committee gave the residents of West Berlin the freedom bell that has been hanging in Schöneberg Town Hall since 1950 . It was created after its model, the American Liberty Bell . The historian Dominik Geppert rates this gift as the “most mass-effective propaganda campaign” of the “Crusade [s] for Freedom” launched by the National Committee in 1950 in the “anti-communist fighting spirit of those years focused on Berlin”.

According to Tim Weiner , the committee was "one of the many front organizations of the CIA in the United States."

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ As of July 4, 1950 - Radio Free Europe goes on air in Munich. WDR 2, July 4th, 2015.
  2. ↑ Andrew Defty: Britain, America and anti-Communist propaganda, 1945-1958. The Information Research Department. Routledge, London / New York 2004, p. 148.
  3. ^ Lars Fredrik Stocker: Bridging the Baltic Sea. Networks of Resistance and Opposition during the Cold War. Lexington Books, London 2017, p. 68.
  4. ↑ Stefan Meining : A Mosque in Germany: Nazis, Secret Services and the Rise of Political Islam in the West. CH Beck 2011, pp. 65f
  5. ↑ Bernd Stöver: The Veto of the Bomb. American Liberation Policy in 1956: The Example of Radio Free Europe. In: Roger Engelmann, Thomas Grossbölting, Hermann Wentker (eds.): Communism in the Crisis: De-Stalinization 1956 and the Consequences , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, pp. 207ff
  6. ↑ Dominik Geppert: Symbolic politics: Berlin conjunctions of the memory of the airlift. In: Helmut Trotnow (Ed.): The Berlin Airlift: Event and Memory. For the Allied Museum, Frank & Timme, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86596-267-6 , p. 140; limited preview in Google Book search
  7. ↑ Tim Weiner: CIA: The Whole Story . Fischer Verlag, 2011, e-book without page numbers