Frederick Augustus Voigt
Frederick Augustus Voigt (9 May 1892 – 8 January 1957) was a British journalist and author of German descent, most famous for his work with the
Life
Voigt was born in Hampstead, London, on 9 May 1892, the fourth child of Ludwig Voigt, a wine merchant, and Helene Hoffmann. Both his parents had been born in Germany, but became naturalised British subjects before his birth. He therefore grew up in a multi-lingual household, spent summer holidays in France and Germany and became fluent in both French and German.
Voigt was educated at
In 1916 Voigt was called up for
In May 1919 Voigt joined the advertising department of the
Although based in Berlin, Voigt travelled widely throughout Germany, reporting on political and social conditions in the provinces and also ventured further afield in Central and Eastern Europe, taking a particular interest in the political conditions within Poland. His particular interest was in the exposure of political repression and state terror and he caused a sensation with his reports on Polish attacks on the Ukrainian minority in eastern Poland.
Voigt was among the first British journalists to bring attention to the threat to Germany and Europe posed by the nascent National Socialist (
Voigt was transferred from Berlin to Paris in the first months of 1933 and then moved back to London in September 1934 where he took up the position of diplomatic correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, a post specially created for him. However, he continued to write on Central and Eastern Europe throughout the 1930s and with the help of German émigrés and a Swiss agent named Wolf he built up a confidential news network that made him one of the few reliable sources of information about what was really happening within Germany under the Nazi regime.
Between 1935 and 1939 Voigt broadcast fortnightly talks on foreign affairs for the
At that time, Voigt used his contacts in the
After the
Despite not being conventionally good-looking with his thinning hair and thick
Voigt died peacefully in hospital in Guildford, Surrey, on 8 January 1957, aged 64. At the time of his death he was working on a follow-up to Unto Caesar, to be entitled In the Beginning.
Politics
Voigt was described by his former tutor in 1919 as “a first-rate and rather old-fashioned liberal”, and, as befitted the German Correspondent of a left-leaning liberal, if non-partisan, newspaper, Voigt was a champion of individual liberty and democracy. He worked closely with many on the left of German and Eastern European politics in the 1920s and 1930s, was a supporter of the Weimar Republic and broadly opposed to the post-war peace settlement, which he regarded as unfair and too harsh. He was a staunch and implacable opponent of injustice and the use of coercion and state terrorism, a crusading journalist determined to expose the cruelty and injustice meted out to the oppressed peoples and minorities of Central and Eastern Europe. He was also sceptical about the ability of the League of Nations to solve international disputes.
However, after the
After World War II he became a leading exponent of what George Orwell termed “neo-toryism”, regarding the maintenance of British imperial power as an invaluable bulwark against Communism and as being indispensable to the creation and continuation of international peace and political stability. He also became a fierce critic of the communist Czechoslovak expulsions and murders of German citizens after the war, most notably in the 1953 book Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans for which he wrote the foreword.
Major works
In addition to his prolific journalism during the interwar years, Voigt published a number of books, including a volume of war memoirs, translations of works on German politics and foreign affairs and The Greek Sedition, a study of the international situation based on the visits he made to post-war Greece between 1946 and 1950. However, his two major works—key to understanding his late political views—are Unto Caesar (1938) and Pax Britannica (1949).
The central thesis of Unto Caesar is that Communism and
In Pax Britannica, Voigt set out his views as to how the
Bibliography
- Combed Out (1920)
- Ein Engländer über Oberschlesien (1921)
- Hindenburg: The Man and Legend (with Margaret Goldsmith) (1930)
- Unto Caesar (1938; new edition 1939)
- Pax Britannica (1949)
- The Greek Sedition (1949)
References
- David Ayerst, Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper (1971) London: Collins.
- Gannon, F. R., The British Press and Germany 1936–1939 (1971) Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Markus Huttner, “Frederick Augustus Voigt” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 56 (2004) Oxford: OUP, p. 588–590
- Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933–1939 (2003) Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.