Peter Blachstein

Peter Blachstein (30 April 1911 – 4 October 1977) was a German journalist who became a politician. During the middle 1930s he spent time in the Hohnstein Concentration Camp, but he was released and participated in the Spanish Civil War on the anti-fascist side. The rest of the Nazi years he spent outside Germany, mostly in Norway and Sweden. Following the restoration of diplomatic relations between West Germany and Yugoslavia, in 1968 he became West Germany's ambassador in Belgrade.

Life Family provenance, early years and education Peter Blachstein was born in Dresden. His father, Max Blachstein, was a businessman who worked in the textiles sector. His mother, Gertrud Blachstein (born Gertrud Welsch), worked as a librarian. Between 1917 and 1929 Blachstein attended the local junior and secondary schools ("Volksschulle" & "Gymnasium") but, unusually with this type of school, he left without passing his school leaving exams ("Abitur"). Blachstein was also affected more directly by the intense political tensions radiating out from Moscow, based on Stalin's suspicions - not entirely unfounded - that there might be comrades in the Soviet Union and further west in Europe who favoured an alternative Soviet leader. The POUM, of which Blachstein was a member, backed a broadly Trotskyist vision for a communist future and its members therefore became targets for Soviet agents. In June 1937 Blachstein was arrested in Barcelona by communist secret police and accused of spying for Franco and working for the Gestapo.

In France he met up with Walter Fabian and started working for Fabian's newspaper department. However, short of money and still in poor health, he quickly decided he would be better advised to return to Oslo. After a period recovering from an operation in connection with his Tuberculosis, he started working in the secretariat of the International Labour Front Against War which had been jointly created in September 1938 by the (Dutch) Revolutionary Socialist Party, the (British) Independent Labour Party, the (Spanish) POUM and the (exiled German) "Neuer Weg" group. The new organisation's purpose was to gather and disseminate information about the Spanish Civil War. he settled not in Dresden but in Hamburg, at that time administered as part of the British occupation zone. After this, until his death of 4 October 1977, he again worked as a free-lance journalist.

Personal Peter Blachstein seldom mentioned his family in public, or even privately with friends. He had a brother and a younger sister. Blachstein himself was a committed atheist who could never understand how a national government could simply decide who was Jewish and who was not: he robustly rejected the conflation of race and religion. He came from a humanist background. However, the German government under Adolf Hitler took a different view, and the identification of his family as Jewish placed them at increased risk when Nazi antisemitism became an underpinning of government policy. Blachstein's parents spotted the dangers in good time, and while Peter Blachstein remained in Europe his parents and his two siblings emigrated to the United States. From here they successfully rescued at least some of their assets from Germany, which a couple of years later would have been impossible. In the 1950s Blachstein began making regular visits across the Atlantic to see his family. His sister pursued a successful career as an academic. His brother took over the delicatessen that their parents had started. The brothers were not on particularly good terms: Peter Blachstein nevertheless liked to serve his friends "Blachstein delicacies" from the family shop, which he had brought back from his latest American trip ("Blachstein Gewürze, alle mitgebracht aus Amerika").

Peter Blachstein never married. His fiancée was killed, in barbaric circumstances under the Nazi régime.