‘GUEST’ OF THE GESTAPO
Richard C. Hottelet was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1917, to German-immigrant parents who spoke no English at home. After he graduated from Brooklyn College in 1937, Hottelet, who was fluent in German but had no clear career plans, enrolled at the University of Berlin. But an encounter with a brownshirted professor led him to drop out of school, and in 1938, at age 23, he took a job in the Berlin bureau of United Press, the Associated Press’s scrappy competitor, where he, like other “Unipressers” of the era, toiled under the slogan “Get it first, but FIRST, get it RIGHT.”
One morning in 1941, the Gestapo arrested Hottelet on “suspicion of espionage” for allegedly passing information to his girlfriend, an employee of the British Embassy. He was imprisoned for four months and then released as part of a U.S.-German exchange.
“Despite my repeated questions they refused to say why I was wanted.”
On returning to the United States, Hottelet joined the newly created Office of War Information, but in 1944 Edward R. Murrow, the legendary broadcast journalist and war correspondent, recruited Hottelet for his team at CBS News. Hottelet would go on to broadcast the first eyewitness account of the Allied invasion of Normandy and to cover Operation Varsity, the huge Allied airborne offensive across the Rhine River, during which he was forced to parachute to safety out of a plane shot down by enemy fire. He was the first U.S. war correspondent to enter Germany and reported from the newly liberated Buchenwald death camp, which he described as “a striking catalogue of inhumanity.”
In 1960 Hottelet became CBS Evening News Face the Nation Christian Science Monitor
