Edmund Schechter papers

Edmund Schechter was born on April 22, 1908 in Vienna, Austria. He joined the Jewish fraternity Masada while in high school and the Kadimah while at the University of Vienna. In February 1938, he published a book, Kampf um Zion: Die Freiheitsbewegung Israels und der Völker, promoting militancy in the quest for a Jewish state. In March 1938, after the Anschluss, Schechter fled to Trieste, Italy and then to Paris, France in April 1938. He was inducted into an auxiliary unit of the French military in the spring of 1940, taken prisoner by the Germans, and escaped to Marseille and then to Casablanca. He left Casablanca for Lisbon in May 1941 and then sailed to New York. From 1941‐1943 he lived in New York, writing articles and lecturing on Morocco and North Africa. In March 1943, he started work at the Office of War Information (OWI), first monitoring outgoing broadcast for conformity and then as chief of the Italian control desk where he voiced a broadcast under the name Edward Herman to German soldiers in Italy. In the spring of 1944, he was transferred to London on assignment from OWI to the American Broadcasting Service in Europe (ABSIE), where he wrote memoranda providing guidance on how to treat various news subjects. At the end of 1944, he was transferred to Radio Luxembourg where he supervised foreign language broadcasts directed to foreign slave laborers and then to displaced persons. He also made reporting trips to German cities as they were occupied by the Allies and visited the concentration camps at Mauthausen and Dachau. When Radio Luxembourg was returned to Luxembourger authorities in November 1945, Schechter was sent to Berlin to set up an American‐ controlled radio station in Germany, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS). He returned to the United States briefly in 1946 and obtained his American citizenship. From 1947 to 1950 he served in Munich as Chief of the Radio Control Branch of the Information Control Division of the Military Government for Bavaria. His assignment was to prepare Radio München for transfer to Germany responsibility. He appointed Rudolf von Scholtz Chief of Radio München in December 1947, and the broadcast station was transferred to Germany in January 1949 and became Bayrischer Rundfunk. In 1950 Schechter took charge of the German Radio Operations of the United States High Commissioner in Germany (HICOG). He served as Chief of the Radio Branch of the Information Division in the Office of Public Affairs where he supervised the five radio stations in the American zone: Bremen, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, and RIAS. In 1955, he returned to the United States, where he worked for the United States Information Agency in Washington, DC as a policy officer for Western Europe. He continued his career in the Foreign Service, with assignments to Rome, La Paz, and Caracas. After his retirement, he lived with his wife, Gerda, and his son, Peter, in Washington DC where he wrote and lectured on international affairs and the history of Israel and Zionism. His memoir, Viennese Vignettes: Personal Recollections, was published in 1983. He died on September 11, 1998.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Funding Note: The cataloging of this collection has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received these papers from Gerda Schechter on December 10, 1999. Gerda Schechter is Edmund Schechter's widow.