George Eric Rowe Gedye


Eric Rowe Gedye , often cited as G. E. R. Gedye, was a British journalist- foreign correspondent for eminent British and American newspapers- author and intelligence officer. He rose to prominence for his early warnings about the dangers posed by the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria.

Life and work

Gedye was the eldest son of George Edward Gedye, a provisions merchant who owned a food canning factory in Bristol, and his wife Lillie. He was educated at Clarence School, Weston-super-Mare, and Queen's College, Taunton. Gedye attended an officer's course at London University, but then fought in the First World War as a simple infantryman on the western front in World War I. On the strength of his fluency in German and French which he had studied at school and night classes he was promoted to officer and transferred to the British Army Intelligence Corps in 1916. He was first assigned to the staff of the British military governor of Cologne where he was put in charge of interrogating prisoners of war. Later he worked for the Allied High Commissioner for the Rhineland. It was during this earlier period that he became interested in journalism. Presiding over a large source of original information from debriefing prisoners he wrote to The Times offering the occasional article on non-classified information.
In 1922, Gedye chose a career in journalism. He spent almost two decades working as a reporter for leading British and American newspapers in Central Europe. Based out of Cologne, he was soon known and recognised for his investigative reporting. Gedye's reports for The Times about the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 were an indictment of the imperialist pursuits of Poincaré. Early on he recognised the severe economic restrictions on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles as providing fertile ground for the rise of National Socialism. Because of this reporting, he was recalled to London in 1924 to the foreign policy department of The Times.
He was unhappy working at an office desk in London. Believing that Austria would become a crucial listening post for rapidly growing political problems in Central Europe he asked to be transferred to Vienna. His increasingly alarmist warnings about the dangers of the rise of fascism failed to endear him to his establishment editors and he parted ways with The Times. With a growing reputation for his fearless reportage and contacts he found little difficulty in freelance work contributing to the Daily Express before settling as The Daily Telegraph Central Europe correspondent while working in the evenings, because of later deadlines, for The New York Times.
Working for both papers from 1929, he was appointed as New York Times Bureau Chief for Central and South Eastern Europe. He also wrote for other newspapers, including for The Daily Herald and other British newspapers. In Vienna he became known among colleagues as “The Lone Wolf” for keeping a certain distance from the group of Anglo-Saxon correspondents that often gathered in the city’s cafes and bars including Marcel Fodor, John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson.
"In Vienna, he had witnessed the struggle of the young republic against inflation and economic crisis, he had witnessed the services of a social democratic local government – and the disastrous policies of a number of clerical governments. Gedye had come to Vienna as a democrat. But, as he explained in his own words, under the thunder of Dollfuss cannons, under the experience of the February battles, he became a Social Democrat." In 1934 Gedye helped the young Kim Philby rescue fighters of the Republican Defense Corps.
At times Gedye circumvented news censorship imposed by Austria by driving to Bratislava to submit his reports.
Three days after the Anschluss Gedye was deported by the Gestapo as an undesirable alien. After a short stay in London, he moved to Prague, where he completed his most famous book: Fallen Bastions with the sub-title “Betrayal in Central Europe—Austria and Czechoslovakia”. In it, Gedye sharply attacked Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, putting into words "what the Austrians and Czechs sold to fascism felt and suffered, but under the thumb of Hitler and the threat of the concentration camp could not say themselves."
Despite becoming one of the pre-eminent political journalists of that era for opening the eyes of a British government blundering through compromise and appeasement, the newspaper eventually recalled him to London shortly before the publication of Fallen Bastions. The book’s original publishers had backed out of publication after showing the manuscript to the newspaper. Both publisher and the newspaper’s editors objected to the book's passionate indictment and scathing condemnation of Chamberlain's course. The Daily Telegraph, for which Gedye had been working for a decade, gave him the choice of either removing certain passages attacking Chamberlain and continuing his post as Central Europe correspondent or resigning. Gedye decided in favour of publishing and gave up his position. The success of the work proved him right — it appeared within two months in five editions. He also took at his erstwhile employers by getting the new publishers Victor Gollancz to write on the dust cover “By G E R Gedye, former Central Europe Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph.”
After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia on 14 March 1939, Gedye, on the wanted list of the Gestapo, had to hide for ten days in the attic of the British Embassy in Prague, until receiving permission from the Germans to emigrate to Poland. Until 1940, Gedye was the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, having asked to be posted there because of his admiration for the intellectual attraction of Communism. It took him just over a year working in Stalinist Russia with all its cruelties and deprivations to disabuse him of his romantic ideals. Asking to be relieved of his assignment he returned to Europe where he followed up on an earlier offer from the British embassy in Prague to join SOE, the fledgling wartime intelligence service. He and his partner and future wife Litzi, his PA in Vienna who was recruited at the same time, spent the war years several years in Turkey, Cairo and Istanbul. Among other things, he served as an executive officer for the exiled Austrian Social Democrats Karl Hans Sailer and Stefan Wirlandner. The latter tried in 1943 to make connections from Istanbul to Austria. In 1942, Litzi and Gedye were arrested by the Turkish police. German newspapers claimed that he was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the German Ambassador Franz von Papen. They were soon released and re-assigned to the Middle East.
From 1945 Gedye was again a central Europe correspondent, this time for the socialist London newspaper The Guardian. Among other things, he wrote a series of articles exposing conditions in starving Vienna. A civil assistant with the rank of Major in the War Office, Gedye was appointed MBE in 1946. Gedye also wrote against the expulsion of the Sudeten German population from Czechoslovakia after 1945. In 1950 until he retired in 1967 he was appointed bureau chief of Radio Free Europe in Vienna, the American news organisation monitoring and reporting on Communism throughout Europe.
Gedye was twice married; firstly in 1922, to Liesel Bremer, secondly in 1948, to Alice Lepper Mehler. Gedye's only son, by his second marriage, Robin Gedye, joined The Daily Telegraph in 1978 where he worked worked until 1996 as a foreign correspondent. He was expelled from Moscow in 1985 in a tit-for-tat when Margaret Thatcher’s government expelled 34 Soviet diplomats. He covered the rise and fall of the Polish free trade union Solidarity and was the newspaper’s bureau chief in Germany when the Berlin Wall was breached and for the subsequent years of reunification.

Works

Die Revolver-Republik. Frankreichs Werben um den Rhein. Aus dem Englischen von Hans Garduck. Vorwort von Friedrich Grimm. Gilde-Verlag, Köln 1931.
Excerpts from this work appeared as:
The French in the Ruhr. From the Revolver Republic. Edited by Maria Alphonsa Beckermann. Schöningh, Paderborn/Würzburg 1935
The Revolver Republic. Edited by Maria Alphonsa Beckermann. Schöningh, Paderborn/Würzburg 1938
Betrayal in central Europe. Austria and Czechoslovakia, the fallen bastions. New and revised edition. Harper & Brothers, New York 1939.
Paperback reissue. Faber & Faber 2009..
Suicide de l'Autriche. La Tragedie de l'Europe Centrale. Texte francais de Maximilien Vox. Union latine d' editions, Paris 1940.
Die Bastionen fielen. Wie der Faschismus Wien und Prag überrannte. Übersetzt von Henriette Werner und Walter Hacker. Danubia, Wien 1947.
Als die Bastionen fielen. Die Errichtung der Dollfuss-Diktatur und Hitlers Einmarsch in Wien und den Sudeten. Eine Reportage über die Jahre 1927–1938. Nachdruck der deutschen Ausgabe von 1947. Junius, Wien 1981,.
Collaborations und Contributions:
Translations: