The heroic Guardian reporter who documented the rise of the Nazis
In this episode, two fellow former Berlin correspondents, Helen Pidd and Philip Oltermann, discuss Voigt's incredible reporting on the rise of Nazi Germany.
'I think he saw that it was important not to give the Nazis the 'both sides' treatment,' Philip says. 'And was really razor sharp when it came to focusing on the political violence that the Nazis were inflicting on political opponents or on Jewish citizens.'
The pair discuss how Voigt became a target and moved to Paris in 1932, where he learned about a Gestapo plan to track him down and shoot him.
'He slept in this tiny apartment with several French secret service agents with machine guns sleeping on the floor to protect him,' Philip says.
Philip and Helen also reflect on how the media covers the far-right AFD party in Germany today.
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Telegraph
27 minutes ago
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Unite's doing an astounding PR job for Reform
Unite's shock decision to suspend Angela Rayner's membership and re-examine its relationship with Labour on Friday left the trade union community aghast. As senior union officials messaged each other in shock, political rivals were left salivating. This is just the kind of shake-it-up drama they were hankering for. 'This is an odd hill to die on,' one bemused union insider says of Unite chief Sharon Graham's decision. 'It's bonkers – what's their endgame here? Your average union member doesn't give a f--- about political affiliations, but this is damaging for Labour and now is not a good time to damage them.' Unite, Labour's biggest union backer, should be very careful what it wishes for. When it ran a private poll of its members before last year's general election, insiders were alarmed to discover growing support for Nigel Farage's Reform. Clearly concerned about the shift in political tone among its membership, a Unite insider told me earlier this year that Reform was simply an example of 'very wealthy people plugging into the zeitgeist of workers. Is Reform a friend to workers? No'. So it seems odd that the very same union is now doing some pretty astounding PR for Reform, knowing from their own membership base exactly how effective ex-City trader Farage's efforts have been (the union never revealed the results of the poll). If the gameplan here is to shift funds to Jeremy Corbyn's new Left-wing party, it's unlikely to work – those union members who have been caught up by Farage's razzle dazzle won't suddenly become Corbynites just because Sharon Graham says so. While it's younger voters who are more likely to vote for the Corbyn-led party, it's older workers who are more likely to join a union. According to official data, 40pc of union members are over 50 years old while just 3.7pc are under the age of 24. 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Daily Mail
an hour ago
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The Independent
an hour ago
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For me, it was a particularly unpleasant prospect given that my Jewish father fled Czechoslovakia shortly after Hitler had marched in and several members of his extended family were killed in the concentration camps. In Germany, the book has been taboo, subject not just to legal copyright restrictions (new versions could not be printed), but also to social shame. However, from India to Turkey and beyond, it has done a healthy trade around the world. It took me nerves of steel to plough through the more than 700 pages of this grubby work, 30 pages a night, with its endless distorted references to biology and race theory, with its warnings about miscegenation and the poisoning of good German blood. Much of it is predictable: a badly written mix of narcissistic autobiography and job application to lead Europe's nascent fascist movement. But, the main conclusion I drew from my research was that, just as Hitler's odious book was based around a cut and paste (not that typewriters of the 1920s were capable of such things) of late 19th- and early-20th-century race-based ideology, much of what is appearing online today in the 2020s follows the same path. It is part of a continuum. With the help of Dr Simon Strich, an academic from the University of Potsdam, I traced a direct line between many of the ideas contained in Mein Kampf to videos on current YouTube, popular podcasts and social media posts, many of them with millions of hits and clicks. From that, you can move to speeches from the likes of Hungary's Viktor Orban, Italy's Giorgia Meloni and (you guessed it), Donald Trump. Consider this: 'They're destroying the blood of our country, that's what they're doing. They're destroying our country. They don't like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf. They said, 'Oh, Hitler said that, in a much different way'.' That was Trump during an election campaign rally in December 2023. There are a number of other examples that I could have cited. Then run alongside it the following: 'The poisonings of the blood which have befallen our people … have led not only to a decomposition of our blood, but also of our soul.' Mein Kampf, chapter two of volume two. Again, there were plenty of contemporary examples to choose from. Or this, from Orban, telling an audience in July 2022 that it is acceptable for Europeans to mix with each other – but not with those arriving from outside. 'We are not mixed race,' he says, 'We do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.' Then stand it alongside this sentence in chapter 11 of Mein Kampf, entitled People and Race: 'Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures.' And what of Elon Musk? While he was Trump's right-hand man, he was conducting an interview with Alice Weidel, leader of Germany's far-right AfD, in which the only criticism they could find for Hitler was that he was a 'Communist'. History is clearly not their forte. Now, even as Musk is cast into the Trumpian wilderness, the X's AI chatbot showers praise on the Fuhrer. All it was doing was reproducing much of the bile that appears on his very own social media platform. 'Mein Kampf is not special,' Strich tells me as we dart from one grisly website to the next. 'There are a million different versions of the same material, the same ideology out there.' The most intriguing aspect for me was Hitler's loathing of the French and his respect for the English, even when expressed through suspicion. When musing about Lebensraum, about the need for Germans to find new lands in the East, he believed there was only one like-minded country with whom he could strike a deal: 'For such a policy, there was but one ally in Europe: England.' In another section, he states: 'No sacrifice should have been too great for winning England's willingness. We should have renounced colonies and sea power, and spared English industry our competition.' We know what happened in the end. Once Churchill was at the helm, Britain played a heroic role in resisting Hitler. But history has a habit of simplifying, of drawing straight lines that do not necessarily exist. It wouldn't have taken much for the British or another country to embrace something hideous in the 1930s. And it wouldn't take much now.
