Peter August Stern

Peter August Stern (born March 1, 1907 in Burbach ; † April 4, 1947 in Munich ) was a German journalist , editor and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Peter August Stern grew up as a son in a Protestant home in Burbach. In 1925 he graduated from the commercial college in Saarbrücken and then worked in a bookstore for two years. He then moved to Cologne , where he studied theater studies. However, he broke off his studies and became a proofreader for the Saar and Blies newspaper . From there he rose to editor-in-chief and in this position moved to the Saarbrücker Abendblatt . On May 3, 1933, he married Marie Louise Stern, a Jew , against the warnings of the supervisory board of this newspaper . He was released shortly afterwards. Under his successor Theodor Schlemmer , the newspaper developed into a Nazi propaganda paper .

Together with his wife he founded the Westland publishing house and published the weekly newspaper Westland - a radical democratic paper - which opposed the burgeoning National Socialism. The printing was done by the publishing house of Saarbrücker Volksstimme . The weekly magazine reached a circulation of 13,300 copies, some of which were also smuggled into the German Reich for conspiracy . Stern himself published articles under a pseudonym. In addition to him, Konrad Heiden , Norbert Mühlen , Victor Weber and Fritz Heymann were regular authors. Gustavgler , Max Beer and numerous other writers were involved as freelance authors.

In the run-up to the Saar referendum , Stern was committed to the status quo , i.e. remaining as a mandate area of the League of Nations . Even the political opponent Josef Bürckel praised the high professionalism of the newspaper and compared the articles with the well-known world stage . In 1934 the National Socialists succeeded in buying up the newspaper through a deception maneuver. The entire editorial team then founded the new Grenzland newspaper , which continued with a similar focus. The last issue appeared on January 13, 1935, shortly before the Saar referendum, with a circulation of 100,000 copies.

After the vote was announced, Stern left the Saar region and settled in Paris with his wife. There he worked as a publisher for department store catalogs, but also for propaganda material. He also wrote under a pseudonym for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Basler Nationalzeitung . The construction of a political exile magazine called The Month - Sheets for Criticism and Construction failed due to a lack of capital. In 1936 he had his first attack of multiple sclerosis , a disease that would determine his life from then on.

In 1938, Stern became editor and spokesman for the German department of Radio Strasbourg . He worked there until the beginning of the western campaign . He was able to escape the German troops and reached the unoccupied part of France via Châteauroux . Together with his wife, they made a detour to New York City . In April 1943 Peter August Stern was able to get a job as an editor in the Office of War Information . There he was "Peter Saar" writer for propaganda radio plays . When he found out about the Morgenthau plan , he resigned and became editor of the German-language newspaper New Yorker Staatszeitung und Herold .

After the end of the war he returned to Saarland alone and took care of the reconstruction there. First he became editor-in-chief of Radio Saarbrücken , then he worked in Munich on building the daily newspaper Münchner Mittag (later Münchner Merkur ). A few weeks after the newspaper started, Stern died of complications from multiple sclerosis.

literature

• Klaus-Michael Mallmann ; Gerhard Paul : The fragmented no. Saarlanders against Hitler . Ed .: Hans-Walter Herrmann (=  resistance and refusal in Saarland 1935–1945 . Volume 1 ). Dietz, Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-8012-5010-5 , p. 243-251 .