George Eric Rowe Gedye (1890–1970)

George "Eric" Rowe Gedye fought in World War I, first as a simple infantryman on the Western front, and then as an officer in British military intelligence. In 1922, he chose journalism as a career and worked more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent for major British and American newspapers in Central Europe. Even before the start of World War II, Gedye was committed to fighting Nazism and sharply attacked the British appeasement policy toward Hitler's Germany. Three days after the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, Gedye was deported from his base in Vienna by the Gestapo as an undesirable alien. After a short stay in London, he went to Prague and there completed his best-known book, Fallen Bastions. The Central European Tragedy. After the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Gedye was forced to hide from the Nazis in the British Embassy in Prague for 10 days until he obtained safe passage out of the country. Gedye secretly began to work for the SOE (Special Operations Executive) during his assignments in Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine, and was a friend of Kim Philby. In 1942, he was arrested by the Turkish police but released, and spent the rest of the war in the Middle East. He retired after the war and went to live in the city of Bath, England. In 1947, Gedye married Alice "Litzi" Mehler, who had worked as his secretary and served with him in the SOE in Europe and Turkey; their son Robin Gedye became a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph in Germany.