Richard Lauterbach (journalist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Richard Edward Lauterbach (born June 18, 1914 in New York City ; died September 20, 1950 there ) was an American journalist.

Life

Richard Lauterbach first visited the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s; according to the Venona papers , he was a secret member of the US Communist Party . Lauterbach became the correspondent and office manager of Time magazine in Moscow in 1943 . He also wrote articles for Life aimed at strengthening the image of the Soviet Union in the United States, and in doing so came into conflict with Time editor-in-chief Whittaker Chambers , who by then had gone from being an NKGB agent to being a critic of the Soviet Union and the Chinese communists . The Soviet secret service considered him as an informant, but it remained unknown whether he was being recruited.

Lauterbach took on 21./22. On January 1st, 1944, he took part in a trip for Western journalists from Moscow to the site of the Katyn massacre organized by the Soviet Foreign Ministry . The delegation of correspondents had 17 members: eleven Americans, five British and one French. Most of the journalists did not question the "evidence" presented by the Burdenko Commission that the massacre had been committed by the Germans. "As far as most of us were concerned, the Germans had slaughtered the Poles," summarized Lauterbach for Time Magazine, as Ambassador W. Averell Harriman reported to the State Department . Lauterbach reported in September 1944 from the Majdanek extermination camp liberated by the Red Army .

In his book “These are the Russians”, published in 1945, he created a very likeable picture of Stalin : He was humorous and hardworking, the people love his works, which are bestsellers in the Soviet Union. He described the Stalinist purges as inevitable and praised the domestic political development of "party democracy", which was a "common good". In the book he also affirmed the version that the Germans were the perpetrators of Katyn. In the same year he took part alongside Jerome Davis , John Hersey , Edgar Snow , Edmund Stevens and Alexander Werth in a campaign by pro-Soviet journalists against the publisher and publicist William Lindsay White , who described Soviet society as a dictatorship in his book "Report on the Russians" , which is characterized by repression and fear in the population.

Lauterbach went to China in 1946, where in May he interviewed the national Chinese politicians Chiang Kai-shek and Chen Lifu before they took Changchun by military force and sent his report to American negotiator General George C. Marshall . In 1947 he published a book about a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vladivostok to Moscow. In it he wrote for the first time about labor camps for political prisoners in the Soviet Union ( concentration camps for political prisoners ). In 1947 Lauterbach was a Nieman Fellow . In 1950 he interviewed Charles Chaplin .

In the same year, at the age of 36, he suddenly died of polio .

Afterlife

After his death, the "Richard E. Lauterbach Award" was awarded by the Authors Guild with an annual prize money of USD 1,000 . The first winner in 1952 was William O. Douglas , the second Elmer Davis . That same year, the Madden Commission , a US Congress of Inquiry into the alleged suppression of information about the Katyn massacre by the Roosevelt administration , rated Lauterbach's reporting from Moscow as "pro-Soviet".

Richard Lauterbach was married to Elisabeth Stuart Wardewell and they had a son, Jennifer, a lawyer born in 1940, and Ann Lauterbach , a writer born in 1942 .

Fonts

Article (selection)
  • Murder, Inc. In: Time, September 11, 1944
  • Sunday in Poland. In: Life, September 17, 1944
  • Stalin at 65. In: Life, January 1, 1945
  • Zhukov. In: Life, February 12, 1945
  • USA and USSR. In: Aufbau , June 1, 1945, p. 8
Books
  • These are the Russians. New York: Harper, 1945
  • Danger from the East. New York: Harper, 1947
  • Through Russia's back door. New York: Harper, 1947

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Births reported in 1914 - Borough of Manhattan, No. 22351.
  2. ^ A b R. E. Lauterbach, Editor, Writer, 36 , in: New York Times , September 21, 1950, p. 31.
  3. ^ A b Harvey Klehr : The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010, p. 221
  4. ↑ Krystyna Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. Recent Research. Warsaw 2012, pp. 96–97.
  5. ↑ Day in the Forest , in: Time Magazine, February 7, 1944, text at warsawuprising.com
  6. ↑ Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2015, p. 283.
  7. ^ Text excerpts from Time and Life , at The Van Pelt Report .
  8. ^ Richard E. Lauterbach: These are the Russians. New York 1945, pp. 93, 108, 116-119.
  9. ↑ William L. Oneill: A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990, p. 91.
  10. ^ Harold M. Tanner: The Battle for Manchuria and the Fate of China: Siping, 1946 . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013
  11. ^ Edgar Snow, Vladivostok to Moscow Express, in: The Saturday Review , March 22, 1947, p. 26.
  12. ^ Richard E. Lauterbach Award is given in memory of a journalist who publicly stood in defense of the Soviets and of American Communists
  13. ^ William O. Douglas: The One Un-American Act , from: Nieman Reports, vol. 7, no.1 (Jan. 1953): p. 20, at American Library Association
  14. ↑ The Katyn Forest Massacre. US Government Printing Office. Washington 1952, vol. VII., P. 2146.
  15. ↑ Jennifer Lauterbach Robbins . In: Washington Post , February 17, 1987.
personal data
SURNAME Lauterbach, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lauterbach, Richard Edward (full name); Lauterbach, Richard E.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 1950
Place of death New York City