From The Guardian: Nazis, fear and violence: when reporting from Berlin was dangerous...
...Our Germany correspondent salutes the man who did his job 100 years ago, when it was far more perilous and unpredictable(.)
Frederick Augustus Voigt, who was the Manchester Guardian’s Berlin correspondent between 1920 and 1932, did not look like an intrepid reporter.
(Note: Sometimes I wonder where I've been all my life since I continue to come across reports like
this about people I've never heard of before. But I'm still willing to learn and share.)
snip
And yet brave is the only suitable adjective to describe Voigt’s journalism. Known as “Freddy” to colleagues in England, as “Fritz” to friends in Berlin, but only as “our own correspondent” to readers of the Manchester Guardian, Voigt always went straight to where the story was, even if the story might imperil his life.
Within months of arriving in Germany, while covering the Ruhr miners’ uprising in Essen, he was kidnapped by rogue Reichswehr officers who accused him of being a spy, stood him against a wall and peppered the space around his head with bullets. His write-up of the incident, which named the officer who maltreated him and described the squalid conditions of other prisoners, earned him an official apology from the German chancellor.0
His 1926 exclusive on a covert collaboration between the Reichswehr and the Soviet Red Army brought the German government to collapse. Other journalists would have known of the secret deal, which was common knowledge among European intelligence agencies, just as they would have known that making it public risked being sent to prison for treason in Germany. They decided not to publish. Voigt did.
(Note: This is a long read with some photos at the link, and a very good use of time, I think.)
https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2021/jul/12/guardian-200-nazis-hyperinflation-and-violence-when-reporting-from-berlin-was-a-dangerous-job
= new reply since forum marked as read
