Nazis Go Underground
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Curt Riess, originally Curt Martin Steinam, was born of Jewish-German origin on 21 June 1902 in Wurzburg, Germany, the son of Bernhard Steinam, proprietor of a clothes shop, and his wife Jenny Straus. As a young man, Riess studied in Paris, Munich, and Heidelberg, and spent time working as a merchant in both New York and Berlin. On a business trip to the USA he discovered his talent for journalism and decided to pursue a career in the industry. Riess' first journalistic position was for a liberal 12 o'clock worksheet in Berlin, for which he also edited the sports section. In 1933, Riess was forced into exile and emigrated to Paris via Prague and Vienna. A year later, he became the European correspondent for the French newspaper Paris-Soir, a position that entailed travelling between New York, Paris, London, and Los Angeles, which enabled him to forge close friendships in Britain and the USA. Having officially become a US citizen in 1938, Riess settled in Manhattan in 1941 at the age of thirty-nine. From there he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, and contributed articles for Collier's Weekly and H. L. Mencken's American Mercury. Throughout the Second World War, he was heavily engaged in anti-Nazi activity, serving as a spy, and then, once the USA had joined the Allies, as a specialist in the United States Navy. At the end of the war in 1945, Riess returned to Germany and began work on his biography of Joseph Goebbels, minister of Nazi propaganda; it would consume him for three years. The discovery, in late 1946, of Goebbels' diaries from 1942-43 was of significant benefit to Riess, whose biography is based chiefly on detailed first-hand information. The diaries were edited by Riess' friend Louis Lochner, who wrote the original preface for this book. Riess' prolificacy has rarely been matched among twentieth century authors. In addition to his biography on Goebbels, he also wrote acclaimed books and articles on various prominent contemporaries, including composers Rolf Liebermann and Wilhelm Furtwangler, comic actor and director Charlie Chaplin, and Austrian actress Romy Schneider. In 1952, he settled down in Switzerland and married the Austrian actress Heather Marie Hathaway. Curt Riess died in 1993, at the age of ninety.