Frederick Augustus Voigt - Life

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 and from 1938 to 1946 he was editor of The Nineteenth Century and After, and from January to June 1939 he edited a newsletter called The Arrow. His assessment of the totalitarian dictatorships, Unto Caesar, was published in 1938 and marked a shift in Voigt’s political thinking. In January 1940 he left the Manchester Guardian to join the Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, where he worked as German advisor to the British psychological warfare department.

At that time, Voigt used his contacts in the Secret Intelligence Service to help his Polish friend Krystyna Skarbek (subsequently also known by the nom de guerre, Christine Granville) overcome British official skepticism about her wish to help the war effort. She eventually entered upon a wartime undercover career with the Special Operations Executive, winning fame with her exploits in Hungary, Poland and France.

After the Second World War, Voigt devoted himself to writing and published several books on foreign affairs and European politics, including Pax Britannica (1949) and The Greek Sedition (1949).

Despite not being conventionally good-looking with his thinning hair and thick glasses, Voigt seems to have been something of a "ladies' man" and was married three times. He married his fellow journalist, the American Margaret Goldsmith (with whom he collaborated on a biography of Paul von Hindenburg in 1930) in 1926, but she divorced him in 1935. The same year he married Hungarian violinist Janka Radnitz, with whom he had a daughter, Evelyn Elizabeth, but the marriage was eventually dissolved. In 1944 he married Annie Rachel Bennett.

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.