Bruno Heilig

Bruno Heilig was born the son of a Jewish village merchant in Hohenau an der March in Lower Austria. After attending elementary school, he transferred to the humanistic grammar school in Lundenburg, around 20 km from his birthplace. After graduating from high school, he moved to Vienna and enrolled in law at the University of Vienna, but dropped out after two years.

After working for Viennese newspapers for a short time and completing his military service as a one-year volunteer, he moved to Budapest, where he worked for the Hungarian news agency Magyar Távirati Iroda (MTI). When the First World War broke out, he was drafted into a Hungarian telegraph regiment, where he was able to deepen his knowledge of the Hungarian language. After returning to Budapest from the war, he marries Hilda Wodiáner, with whom he has two sons, and works for a Hungarian news agency. From 1920 to 1923, he was night editor of the Budapest daily newspaper Pesti Napló and, from the end of 1920, representative of the Ullstein news service in Budapest and, until 1928, also correspondent for the Vossische Zeitung, part of the Ullstein empire.

Under the imperial governor Miklós Horthy of Nagybánya, the environment for free reporting worsened. When Bruno Heilig wrote a report on demonstrations by nationalist students in 1928, he was expelled on November 1, 1928.

After this, Bruno Heilig worked as a reporter for the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin until March 1931, after which he worked as a Berlin correspondent for the Wiener Tag and the Prager Presse. A large number of articles on the political situation appeared under his name. Because of his articles against the emerging National Socialism, he fled Germany in September 1933 when he learned that his arrest was imminent.

Back in Vienna, he worked as an editorial writer for the Wiener Tag until the summer of 1934, but lost his job again due to critical reporting. From August 1934 to early 1935, he edited the Jewish newspaper Die Stimme and in August 1935 he joined the editorial team of the Monday newspaper Der Morgen as foreign affairs editor and editorial writer, and from 1937 he was also a correspondent for the British Jewish Chronicle.

In his book Nicht nur die Juden geht es an, published in 1936, there is a selection of the articles he wrote for the above-mentioned newspapers between 1933 and 1936.

In these roles, he witnessed the downfall of a free and independent Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht on March 12, 1938. He was arrested by the Gestapo on March 15, 1938 and deported to Dachau concentration camp on April 2, 1938 on the so-called Prominent Transport. From there, he was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp on September 22, 1938.

In December 1938, Heinrich Himmler had ordered that Jewish prisoners should be released from the concentration camps if they wanted to prepare their emigration. On April 26, 1939, his birthday, Bruno Heilig received a telegram from his wife Hilda stating that a passage from Genoa to Shanghai had been booked for him. The booked passage is a pure invention, but the feint saves his life. The next day, he boards the train to Vienna as a free man. From there he went to Milan, where his wife and older son soon followed him; his younger son Gerhard had already arrived in England on a Kindertransport in December 1938 and later became a Royal Air Force pilot during the war in 1943.

With the support of the Jewish Chronicle, Bruno Heilig was able to emigrate to Great Britain, where he arrived on August 12, 1939. The rest of the family should have followed him, but the war, which broke out less than three weeks later, made this journey impossible. It is known that his mother, who still lived in Hohenau - his birthplace - as a merchant, was later murdered in a concentration camp.

Bruno Heilig becomes involved in the Free Austrian Movement in London. In June 1944, he took up a position at the British-American headquarters. His task there was to produce radio broadcasts, magazines, leaflets and other propaganda material to undermine the will to fight in the German Reich.

After the end of the war, Bruno Heilig worked for the news agency DANA and later for the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. In 1947, he left the American service and went to East Berlin, joined the SED and worked as a journalist. In January 1948, he became deputy editor-in-chief of Deutschlands Stimme and at the end of 1949, he was editor-in-chief of this newspaper together with Max Spangenberg. When the staunch communist reported critically on the GDR leadership, he lost his position at the end of August 1952.

He then made a name for himself as a translator from Hungarian and was honored with the PEN Medal of the Hungarian PEN for his services in 1960. He died in East Berlin in 1968.