Carsten Wiethoff Wrote:https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-on...2/a658883/
Seems at least possible to me, and at least in Munich he was informed by a text message on his way to work and was on the scene a few minutes later.
Thanks for this Carsten, very interesting.
I decided to do a small amount of digging into this guy and followed parts of his Vitae that seemed interesting to me. I noted (
HERE) that in 2013, he received a personal award from the Grimme-Institut, the very first time the Institut have ever presented an award. As far as I can determine from Googlish translation (
HERE) of the German language Wiki entry for the institut (
HERE) it was founded in 1973/4 but the Adolf Grimme prize was available since 1964 (any corrections to the Googlish would be appreciated btw). So the first time a personal award was given was one year short of 40 years, which struck me as strange. But perhaps I'm ove-regging the significance of this.
In any event, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the founder of the Grimme-Institute, namely Adolf Berthold Ludwig Grimme from the Wiki page (
HERE), which is poorly translated. At the end of WWII, Grimme seems to have become a government official in the British sector of occupied Germany. The entry has the following:
Quote:In March 1948, he was appointed as the Lower Saxony Minister of Culture of the Board of the North West German Radio (NWDR) and elected in May as its Chairman. In September 1948, the Board of Directors elected him unanimously as the first Director-General of that time by far the largest broadcasting company in Germany, which until then by the British control officer Hugh Carleton Greene had been passed. His new office joined Grimme on 15 November 1948th In 1952 he was confirmed for another five years as general manager. As the NWDR at year 1955 in Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Westdeutsche Rundfunk was divided, Grimme went to his 66th birthday in pension. He spent his retirement in Degerndorf am Inn. His grave is located on the city cemetery Engesohde in Hannover.
.
Clearly the British regarded him as a safe pair of hands.
This Wiki entry led me to checkout Hugh Carleton Greene, from whom Grimme took over in 1948 as the Director-General of North West German Radio (NWDR) that hitherto had been the responsibility of Greene. Greene's Wiki entry is
HERE, and very clearly he was a journalist with a background expertise of psychological warfare in the style of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) where Greene had been made the Chief Editor of the German programme ("desk" might be more accurate?) for transmission to Germany (here again the translation is uncertain and not entirely clear but I think I have it correctly).
If you read Greene's later CV it is fairly evident (in my view anyway) from his postings that he was a sort of journalist-cum-spook with an emphasis on psychological warfare operations
HERE . Besides this, Wiki states that "psychological warfare" was his speciality. His mentor was Sir Ian Jacob (
HERE), who's CV is self explanatory. Interestingly, Jacob who was appointed Director-General of the BBC in 1952, and was replaced in 1960 by none other than his student, Hugh Carleton Greene - himself the brother of famed writer Graham Greene, a well-known operative for British intelligence (
HERE).
But to get deeper into Greene's background took some further delving:
Quote:The intelligence background was probably more important in the sense that after all my father was not at all British in background or education. He arrived in Great Britain after the fall of France because he loathed fascism and so volunteered for the British army. A sense of common struggle against fascism in the Second World War was very important to this whole generation, which to some extent judged people according to and how they behaved in the war. The wartime experience created many friendships. My father knew Frank Roberts, who was the nearest British equivalent of George Kennan as well as John Lawrence, who was the head of the Great Britain USSR association. They all knew each other. Specifically there was that world which we've already mentioned beginning with BBC monitoring service. Like my father Hugh Seton-Watson was in British intelligence during the war. Hugh was my supervisor, Mary Seton-Watson, Hugh's sister, was my father's deputy as the head of Russian Service of the BBC. This was a narrow world in which everyone knew everyone else. It helped that my father was a very fine linguist. He spoke three languages in the age of three and English was his fourth, but he spoke it like Shakespeare.
A key contact for my father was Hugh Carleton Greene who was the director general of the BBC who appointed my father but had known him well through that old world of intelligence in South East Asia. I was born in Singapore because my father was in charge of intercepting and interpreting Chinese communist communications with Beijing during the Communist rebellion of 19481954. Hugh Carleton Greene worked in that same world in South East Asia in these years.
Source
Also telling still is the fact that Sir Hugh Greene was one of numerous entities and individuals that were named on a Namebase post about Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948 - 1977, that focuses on the Information Research Department, a now infamous propaganda organ of the British State (
HERE) that operated under the auspices of the Foreign Office, the ministry responsible for MI6/SIS. The Namebase entry link no longer works, but details of it can be found
HERE.
It therefore seems a reasonable conclusion from the foregoing that the North West German Radio was a psychological warfare arm of British intelligence. It is also not a stretch to assume that Adolf Berthold Ludwig Grimme later assumed a similar role after the network was handed over to him in some of the darkest days of the cold war.
Would it be a stretch to conclude that Grimme's-Institute would also be closely aligned to psychological warfare and propaganda? I think not, but reach your own conclusion on this. Meanwhile, the only time the Grimme-Institute has ever, in it'e entire history, has been gracious enough to make a personal award it was to the German journalist - the only journalist in fact - who was present at both the Nice and Munich terror events and apparently able to film both. And lucky for him he received a text telling him where to go in Munich and just happened to be on holiday in Nice.
How convenient.
