Philip Pembroke Stephens

Philip Pembroke Stephens (born September 23, 1903 in Little Missenden , Buckinghamshire , † November 11, 1937 in Shanghai ) was a British journalist .

Life

Stephens was a son of Mebroke Scott Stephens and his wife Pauline Elizabeth, nee Townsend. After attending Gresham's School in Norfolk and studying law at the University of Cambridge , Stephens tried his hand at various professions: initially as a lawyer, then as a stage and film actor (in 1926 he had a role in the silent film Satan's Sister ) and as an official in the secretariat of the League of Nations . He became a journalist around 1929 and worked for the London daily Daily Express .

As a correspondent for the Daily Express , Stephens reported from Vienna and Paris in the early 1930s . At the end of 1933 he was sent to Berlin as the successor to Sefton Delmer as a correspondent for the Daily Express . In contrast to his predecessor, he immediately took a critical stance on the Nazi regime established that year and focused less on getting close to influential exponents of the new system, but on the effects that the reality of the Nazi regime had. Rule over the life of "simple" people in Germany had to find out and report on this to the British newspaper audience. Stephens was particularly interested in the suffering of the minorities oppressed and marginalized by the Hitler dictatorship, such as the communists, the social democrats and especially the Jews. His numerous articles critical of the Nazi regime finally led to the fact that on June 1, 1934, at the instigation of the Reich Propaganda Ministry, he was accused of disrupting or damaging bilateral relations between the German Reich and Great Britain and in general opposing himself in an "anti-subversive" manner had activated the Reich by spreading "atrocity propaganda", arrested them and expelled them from the country: The immediate reason for this step was the article "New Hitler Blow at the Jews" published in the Daily Express on May 25, 1934, in which Stephens spoke to dealt with the situation of the Jews who remained in Germany and dealt critically with the terror carried out against them by the Nazi state. He was escorted by train to the Belgian border under police supervision and released there. Stephen's expulsion was justified to the German public on the grounds that he "reported in a disfiguring and frivolous manner about German conditions and thereby grossly abused the hospitality granted to him." A few weeks earlier, Stephens had been briefly imprisoned near Magdeburg after he had undertaken an "inspection trip" to Dessau in order to gain insight into the covert German armament in order to expand the Junkers factories there under the auspices of the Reich Aviation Ministry to study the manufacture of military aircraft.

As a result, Stephens wrote numerous extremely critical articles about the National Socialist state and the danger it would pose for peace in Europe (e.g. "The Evil Genius of Germany - Goebbels the Jew Baiter", "Menace to Europe", "Austria's new leader - He Believes Hitler is 'Crazed'").

In 1935 Stephens switched to the service of the Daily Telegraph , for which he was sent to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as a correspondent , from where he reported on the 2nd Italian-Abyssinian War. He then reported on the Spanish Civil War. On April 29, 1937, he was one of the first international journalists to visit the ruins of the city ​​of Guernica in the Basque Country, which was destroyed by the German Condor Legion in heavy air raids - a process that is widely regarded as one of the most serious war crimes that took place during this conflict. While he kept a low profile in his official reporting about the consequences of the incident, he privately informed the British ambassador, Henry Chilton in Hendaye, about the involvement of German and Italian air units in the destruction of the city, but asked that he be the source of this information so that he could continue as a tolerated war correspondent in the wake of the nationalist armies under Franco , visit the hotspots of the war with their approval and report on them what they, he feared, would prevent - and expel him from the country - if they would learn that he had leaked compromising information to British government agencies for their Italian fascist and German National Socialist allies.

In the summer of 1937, Stephens went to East Asia to report on the massive expansion of the Japanese occupation of parts of China that was underway at that time. In the context of this activity, too, he reported in detail on atrocities, namely attacks by the Japanese occupation forces on Chinese civilians and prisoners. As part of this activity, he was fatally wounded by Japanese machine gun bullets during the Battle of Shanghai in November 1937 : he was shot in the head while fighting with other press people in Nantao (old town of Shanghai) from a water tower at the end of Dubail Avenue in France The city's sanctuary. His Danish photographer, Bernhard Strindberg, suffered a minor gunshot wound. The incident was widely reported in the international press. The Japanese authorities apologized for Stephen's death, which they attributed to the fact that Japanese troops mistook him for a Chinese sniper.

Both in contemporary obituaries and in the later evaluation by the memoirs and research literature, Stephens has mostly been recognized as a courageous journalist and a representative of his guild who was first about helping the truth to be right. In his study of the press of the 20th century, John Simpson calls him "one of the heroes of British journalism in the 1930s".

Stephens was married to Jocelyn Maureen Carey, with whom he had the daughter Patricia Jane Stephens and one other daughter.

literature

• Markus Huttner: British press and National Socialist church struggle: an investigation by the "Times" and the "Manchester Guardian" from 1930 to 1939 , 1995, pp. 130-133.
• John Simpson: Unreliable Sources: How the Twentieth Century Was Reported . Macmillan, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-4050-5005-0 , pp.?.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Report on Stephen's death with Edgar Snow : The Battle for Asia , 1942, pp. 47 and 53f.