Journalist at the Northwest German Radio Station

Abstract

Zahn’s fluency in English, willingness to completely break with Nazism, Scots-Irish wife, and connection – if rather tenuous – with the July 20, 1944 coup attempt, as well as his considerable talent as a journalist, led to his hiring by the British radio station in Hamburg in July 1945. Zahn made broadcasts urging Germans to break with Nazism and arguing that Germans had been misled and used by Hitler and his associates. He defended the Nuremberg trial of German leaders on the grounds that the trial might convince the world that Germans had been tyrannized by a small group of criminals. In 1948 Zahn attacked the dismantling of German heavy industry by occupation authorities as likely to impoverish the country. In 1950 and 1951, now employed by the German successor to the British radio station, he supported union efforts to play an equal role with owners in managing West Germany’s largest industrial firms, a position that led figures in the conservative West German government to demand his dismissal. In part to put more distance between himself and West German authorities, Zahn left the country in November 1951 to become the Northwest German Radio Station’s first permanent correspondent in the United States.