Studnitz - While Berlin Burns : the memoirs of Hans-Georg von Studnitz

Hans-Georg von Studnitz was born in Potsdam in 1907. Of old Silesian aristocratic stock, he initially trained as a banker and worked in the Americas in the late 1920s, before returning to Berlin as a young man in 1929. Switching to journalism with the onset of the Depression, he would again travel widely, spending most of the 1930s as a foreign correspondent for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, reporting from various European capitals, as well as India and the Middle East, and covering the Spanish Civil War.

Like many other journalists of his era, Studnitz was engaged by the German Foreign Office with the outbreak of war in September 1939, where he was given the task of preparing articles for the domestic press and monitoring the reports of foreign journalists. In the autumn of 1940, he then shifted to the Press Department of the Foreign Office, where he was responsible primarily for writing daily political reports for German embassies and legations abroad. He would remain there until the end of the war.

At some point in those interesting times, Studnitz started to keep a diary, to record as he put it; a critical survey of a moment of history. That diary loyally transcribed and concealed by his Foreign Office secretary would form the basis of this book: While Berlin Burns. Opening with the fall of Stalingrad in February 1943, it is Studnitzs personal account of the final two years of the Second World War; the story of the collapse of Hitlers Third Reich, and of the violent humbling of his once-proud capital city.

Unlike many commentators of the era such as Ruth Andreas-Friedrich or Missie Vassiltchikov Studnitz was not what one might describe as an innocent bystander or an opponent of the Nazi regime. Rather, as one of the leading members of the Foreign Office Press Department, he was a man of considerable influence, and a key player in the politics of propaganda within the Third Reich. A Nazi Party member from 1933, Studnitz had quickly proved himself to be an adept propagandist, penning a number of articles and brochures for the Nazi press, usually under a pseudonym, alongside his regular work in the Foreign Office. In this capacity, Studnitz would parrot many of the well-worn Nazi slogans and would wax lyrical in print about the historical perfidy of the British, the wanton materialism of the United States or the revanchism of the French, pausing only to laud those nations that had allied themselves to Nazi Germany, as the shining representatives of western Christian culture.

For all such utterances and allegiances, however, it seems that Studnitz did not quite view himself as a Nazi. He certainly does not come across in his diary as an ideological animal, thereby leaving the reader to wonder whether he was careful with the thoughts that he committed to paper, or whether he assiduously edited himself prior to post-war publication. On this particular point, the wider record is silent, but it is quite possible that the Studnitz revealed in the pages of this diary is the real one, and the pontificating ideologue of the press was a career-driven affectation.