Additional details about some of the people we’ll meet during our trips back in time. Not all are German nationals. Some are visitors from the United States and the British Empire.
Cast of Characters
Geoffrey Cox, born 1910 in New Zealand
Graduated from Oxford in 1935. Worked with News Chronicle and Daily Express covering the Spanish Civil War, British Expeditionary Force in France, and Finland during the Winter War. He joined the New Zealand Army and served on Crete and North Africa, before being assigned to the Embassy in Washington DC.
Bella Fromm, born 1900 in Nuremburg
She worked as a high-society journalist in the elite circles of Berlin until 1938 when she fled to the United States to escape Nazi anti-Semitism. Eventually, she settled in New York.
Her memoir, Blood & Banquets was first published in 1943. It is used heavily in the podcast.
Image Credit: Findagrave.com. Unedited.
Gunther Goldschmidt, born 1914 in Oldenburg
He studied music during the final years of Weimar but was expelled in 1933 on account of his Jewish heritage. Fleeing to Sweden in 1935 he returned to Germany to marry his sweetheart. They will eventually flee Germany together and start a life in the United States.
His son, Martin, wrote the story of his parents lives in Germany in the book The Inextinguishable Symphony.
Cicely Hamilton, born 1872 in London.
This woman had an eventful life. An actress, author, suffragist in the UK. She is best known for writing How The Vote Was Won (1909). During the First World War she worked as a nurse in France. After the war she worked as a freelance journalist.
Her play, Just to Get Married, was recently staged in London for the first time in 100 years.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia. Link Source. Unedited.
Sebastian Haffner, born 1907 in Berlin.
He was a young man living in the German capital when the Empire collapsed and the Weimar Republic rose. He attended university and had a successful career as a lawyer. He fled to Britain in 1938 with his fiancée. There he became a notable journalist.
Photo Credit: OFTW, Berlin. Unedited.
Victor Klemperer, born 1881 in Landsberg an der Warthe (now Poland)
A professor of philology in Dresden and the author of several academic works on French literature, he took pride in his country. Half-Jewish on his mother’s side, he converted to Protestantism after marrying his wife. He was afforded “special status” by the Nazis and spared deportation but was forced to live in the Jewish-House with others exempt.
Photo Credit: Deutsche Fotothek. Unedited.
Lady Rumbold, born 1879 in Wiltshire, England
Born as Etheldred Constantia, she was wife to Sir Horace Rumbold who served as British ambassador to Germany. During her residency in Berlin she often wrote home to her mother her views and experiences which are recounted in this podcast.
Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery. NPG x121544. Unedited.
Colonel Truman Smith, born 1893 in New York.
Joined the Army in 1916 and participated in the German occupation in 1919-1920 before serving as assistant military attaché in Berlin 1920-1924. He met Adolf Hitler in 1922 and called him a “marvelous demagogue”. He served as military attaché from 1935-1939.
Historians
William Shirer, born 1904 in Chicago.
CBS correspondent in Berlin from 1937 to 1940, when Nazi security police informed him he had to leave Germany. He smuggled his manuscript out when he left.
Authored: Berlin Diary (1941), Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), and more.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia. Link Source. Unedited.
“Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times”
(c) Jay Daniels. All rights reserved.
