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 ''Manchester Guardian'' and his opposition to dictatorship and totalitarianism on the European Continent.

Life

Voigt was born in Hampstead, London, on 9 May 1892, the fourth child of Ludwig Voigt (a wine merchant) and his wife 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 Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School and Birkbeck College, London, where he at first studied biology before abandoning the natural sciences for literature and modern languages. In 1915 he graduated with a first-class honours degree in old and modern Germanic languages from King's College London, and he worked briefly as a schoolmaster, teaching German, French, botany and zoology at the "New School", Abbotsholme, Derbyshire.

In 1916 Voigt was called up for military service in the First World War and spent nearly three years in the British Army, two of them on the Western Front. Out of this experience came his first published work, a book of memoirs of his war service based on his diaries and letters home from the front, entitled ''Combed Out'' (1920).

In May 1919 Voigt joined the advertising department of the ''Manchester Guardian'' and the following year was dispatched by the editor, C. P. Scott, to act as assistant to the newspaper's Berlin Correspondent, J. G. Hamilton. From 1920 until 1933 Voigt was the ''Manchester Guardian''’s correspondent in Germany, reporting on political, social and economic conditions under the Weimar Republic. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the vibrant cultural and social scene of Weimar Germany and developed valuable contacts at all levels of German society and particularly on the left of German politics. In 1926 he scored a journalistic coup with his disclosures about the secret collaboration of the Reichswehr and the Soviet military authorities in direct contravention of the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, disclosures that sparked a major domestic and diplomatic crisis for the German Government.

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 (Nazi) movement and from 1930 he was an implacable opponent of Hitler and the Nazis. Nevertheless, like many British intellectuals, he failed to predict the Nazi seizure of power, confidently predicting as late as December 1932 that the German left would never allow the Nazis to take power.

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 BBC
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