Karl Anders

Karl Anders (real name Karl Kurt Wilhelm Anders-Naumann) (24 January 1907 – 27 February 1997) was a German political activist who was forced to emigrate during the Nazi period. After the war he became a print and broadcast journalist.

During the 1950s he became a publisher. Between 1953 and 1957 Karl Anders worked as the director of the publishing business of the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper group. As a publisher he devoted much effort to promoting Anglo-American criminal fiction in Germany. Between 1929 and 1931 he also served on the board of the Socialist Students' League.

In March 1934 Anders fled to Prague where until 1936 he was the exiled German Communist Party's leader for Agitation and Propaganda work. In 1940 the British identified him as an enemy alien and he was interned in June 1940, his detention continuing till the end of the year. It was from this time that he started to use the pseudonym "Karl Anders" in place of his birth name which had been Kurt Wilhelm Naumann. In London he joined the socialist New Beginning anti-Nazi opposition group and started working as a broadcaster with the Broadcaster of the European Revolution radio station which transmitted from London between 1940 and 1942, before being effectively subsumed into the more snappily named British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Between 1943 and 1945 Anders worked as chief editor for German language workers' broadcasts by the BBC. which was a re-working of some of his broadcast reports. Unusually, he was able to have his book published by his own publishing company, at this stage a small-scale operation called "Nest-Verlag" which with three colleagues he had set up locally in Nuremberg in 1946. He relocated permanently to Germany in 1949: after his three co-founders disappeared from the business his publishing house, which in 1955 relocated to Frankfurt am Main, became the focus of his career. He continued to write, also remaining active as a contributor to the party newspaper, Vorwärts.

Death Karl Anders died in 1997 at Dreieich, on the south side of Frankfurt am Main, and to the north of Darmstadt.

Honour 1967: Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany 1st class