Varian Fry

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Varian Fry

Varian Mackey Fry (born October 15, 1907 in New York City , † September 13, 1967 in Redding , Connecticut ) was an American journalist and freedom fighter in France during World War II . He led a rescue network in Marseille that enabled around 2,000 people to flee from the National Socialists .

Life

Memorial plaque , Potsdamer Strasse 1, in Berlin-Tiergarten

Varian Fry attended Hotchkiss School and Harvard University , which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1931 . As a correspondent for the American magazine The Living Age , he visited Berlin in 1935 and personally witnessed the persecution of Jews by the National Socialists several times. Badly shaken by his experiences, he began to collect money for the work against National Socialism. In 1938 he received his doctorate from Columbia University in New York, until 1940 he published books for the Society for Foreign Policy.

Shortly after the occupation of France , the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) was founded in the United States , in particular to enable intellectuals who had fled to France to travel to the United States. In the Franco-German armistice agreement , a list of opponents of the regime who were to be extradited to Germany, including primarily Jewish intellectuals, was drawn up. In June 1940, the US government decided to allow those threatened by persecution free entry into the US. Therefore, 200 visas were issued mainly for intellectuals. Varian Fry was sent to Marseille, where a large number of regime critics were gathered. He received funds and lists of people whom he should enable to leave the country.

His arrival was known in Marseilles and far more people turned to him for help with leaving the country. Fry gathered a small group of volunteers around him (including Albert O. Hirschman ) who, under the vigilant supervision of the Vichy regime, hid people in the Villa Air-Bel until they were smuggled out of the country - often under the leadership of Lisa and Hans Fittko could become. In this way he succeeded in enabling more than 2,200 refugees to cross the border into neutral Portugal , from where they could travel on to the United States. He made it possible for others to emigrate by ship from Marseille to the French colony of Martinique , from where the route to the USA was also possible.

His work could not be kept secret for long. The US authorities were suspicious because they believed that Fry was particularly committed to “leftists and Jews”. Both the US embassy in Vichy France and the Vichy regime itself tried to put a stop to its pursuit. Only Hiram Bingham (1903–1988), the US Vice Consul in Marseille, supported him. He was arrested in December 1940 but was released and continued to work. After working for 13 months in Marseille, he was finally arrested by the French police in August 1941 following a tip from the US embassy and deported to the USA.

Among Fry's closest aides were Americans like Miriam Davenport , a former art student at the Sorbonne , and the American heiress Mary Jayne Gold , an art lover who had come to Paris in the early 1930s . When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Gold went to Marseille, where she worked with Fry and helped fund the organization he had built.

Those rescued by Fry included Hannah Arendt , Ernst Josef Aufricht , Georg Bernhard , André Breton and his wife Jacqueline , Marc Chagall , Marcel Duchamp , Max Ernst , Lion Feuchtwanger , Leonhard Frank , Fritz Kahn , Siegfried Kracauer , Konrad Heiden , Heinz Jolles , Wifredo Lam , Wanda Landowska , Jacques Lipchitz , Alma Mahler-Werfel , Heinrich Mann and Golo Mann , André Masson , Walter Mehring , Otto Meyerhof , Soma Morgenstern , Hans Natonek , Hans Namuth , Hertha Pauli , Alfred Polgar , Hans Sahl and Franz Werfel .

In 1945 Fry published a book about his time in France under the title Surrender on Demand (German delivery on demand ). In 1968, the American schoolbook publisher Scholastic published a paperback edition under the title Assignment: Rescue ; as a result, many more editions appeared under both titles. Fry made a name for himself with clear critical statements against the US immigration regulations and brought them into direct connection with the fate of the Jews in Europe. In December 1942 he had already published an article The Massacre of Jews in Europe .

Upon his return to the United States in September 1941, Fry was quickly forgotten. He was denied access to the ERC. He turned to artists he had saved, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and André Breton, and asked them to support a new aid project for exiles - in vain.

Fry became involved in the civil rights movement and became a member of the International League for Human Rights . In 1944 he joined the Liberal Party of New York . From 1943 to 1946 he was director of international affairs for the American Labor Conference. From 1946 he tried his hand at a film production company (Cinemart), which had to cease operations in 1953. He then worked as a copywriter, a. a. for the Coca-Cola Company , as a journalist and as a teacher.

Awards

Varian-Fry-Strasse in Berlin on Potsdamer Platz

In 1967 he was accepted into the French Legion of Honor “for his heroic contribution to freedom” . Apart from that, Fry was almost forgotten for a long time until his deeds were made known again with the publication of Mary Jayne Gold's book Crossroads Marseilles in 1940 (1980). He was now sometimes referred to as the "American Schindler". In 1994, Varian Fry was the first and until 2005 the only US citizen to be admitted to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial among the Righteous Among the Nations . On January 1, 1998, he received additional recognition as an honorary citizen of the State of Israel.

Since December 3, 1997, a street in the newly created central Potsdamer-Platz area in Berlin has been called “Varian-Fry-Straße”.

On the initiative of Samuel V. Brock, the US Consul General in Marseille from 1999 to 2002, the square in front of the consulate was renamed “Place Varian Fry”.

The Active Museum Fascism and Resistance in Berlin showed from November 18 to December 30, 2007 in the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz in Berlin-Mitte the exhibition “Without hesitation. Varian Fry: Berlin-Marseille-New York ".

Publications (selection)

  • Delivery on request. The rescue of German emigrants in Marseille in 1940/41 . Hanser Verlag, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-446-13791-2 . Ed. U. with e. Appendix vers. by Wolfgang D. Elfe u. Jan Hans. Original English edition entitled Surrender on demand , New York 1945
  • Was in China: America's role in the Far East . With maps and charts by Henry Adams Grant, Foreign Policy Association, New York 1938
  • War atlas: a handbook of maps and facts . Foreign Policy Association, New York 1940
  • The peace that failed: how Europe sowed the seeds of war. Foreign policy Association, New York 1939

and articles in The Nation , New Leader , The New Republic , Common Sense, and New Europe magazines .

Film adaptations

literature

Technical literature:

  • Lisa Fittko : My way across the Pyrenees. Memories 1940/41. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-423-11028-7 ( dtv - dtv-Zeitgeschichte 11028).
  • Mary Jayne Gold: Crossroads Marseille 1940. A Memoir . Doubleday, New York 1980, ISBN 978-0-385-15618-9 .
  • Karen J. Greenberg (Ed.): Columbia University Library, New York. The Varian Fry Papers, the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter papers. Garland Verlag, New York NY 1990, ISBN 0-8240-5487-3 ( Archives of the Holocaust 5).
  • Emmanuelle Loyer : Paris à New York. Intellectuels et artistes français en exile, 1940–1947 . Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, Paris 2005.
  • Andy Marino: A Quiet American. The Secret War of Varian Fry. St. Martin's Press, New York NY 1999, ISBN 0-312-26767-3 .
  • Sheila Isenberg: A Hero of Our Own. The Story of Varian Fry . Random House, New York 2001, ISBN 0-375-50221-1 .
  • Angelika Meyer, Marion Neumann (Red.): Without hesitation. Varian Fry: Berlin - Marseille - New York. 2nd improved edition. Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance in Berlin, Berlin, 2008, ISBN 978-3-00-022946-6 (exhibition catalog, Berlin, Akademie der Künste, November 18 - December 30, 2007).
  • Anne Klein, Refugee Policy and Aid to Refugees 1940–1942. Varian Fry and the Committees for the Rescue of Politically Persecuted People in New York and Marseille. Metropol, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-938690-17-8 ( Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin: Series of Documents, Texts, Materials 61), (At the same time: Berlin, Freie Univ., Modified diss., 2004: Refugee Aid 1940-1942 ).
  • Julijana Ranc, Odysseus and Don Quichotte - On the hundredth birthday of Varian Fry (1907–1967) . In the journal Exil 1933–1945: Research, Findings, Results . Editha Koch Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main, Vol. 27 (2007), Part I; Pp. 5-39.
  • Giorgia Sogos, Varian Fry : “The Angel of Marseille”. From legality to illegality and rehabilitation , in Gabriele Anderl, Simon Usaty (ed.). Dragging, sluicing, helping. Escape between salvation and exploitation . Mandelbaum, Vienna 2016, pp. 209–220, ISBN 978-3-85476-482-3
  • Rüdiger Strempel, last stop Marseille - Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee , in Winrich C.-W. Clasen / W. Peter Schneemelcher (ed.), Mediterranean Passages, CMZ-Verlag, Rheinbach 2018, ISBN 978-3-87062-307-4

Fiction presentation:

Web links

Commons : Varian Fry  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ La villa d'Air Bel à La Pomme à Marseille , accessed on January 6, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c Knud von Harbou : Einsamer Retter . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 9, 2017, p. 51.
  3. ^ The Massacre of the Jews , www.varianfry.org, accessed February 12, 2012.
  4. ↑ Sheila Isenberg: A Hero of Our Own. The Story of Varian Fry. Random House, New York 2001, pp. 250-254.
  5. ↑ table of contents .
personal data
SURNAME Fry, Varian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fry, Varian Mackey (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and freedom fighter in France during World War II
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH September 13, 1967
Place of death Redding (Connecticut)