Emil Ludwig (originally named Emil Cohn) was born in
Breslau (now part of Poland) on 25 January 1881. Born into a
Jewish family, he was raised as a non-Jew but was not baptized. "Many persons have become Jews since
Hitler," he said. "I have been a Jew since the murder of
Walther Rathenau [in 1922], from which date I have emphasized that I am a Jew." Ludwig studied law but chose writing as a career. At first he wrote plays and novellas, also working as a journalist. In 1906, he moved to Switzerland, but, during
World War I, he worked as a foreign correspondent for the
Berliner Tageblatt in
Vienna and
Istanbul. He became a Swiss citizen in 1932, later emigrating to the United States in 1940. After the 1921 trial of
Soghomon Tehlirian for the
assassination of Talat Pasha, the main architect of the
Armenian genocide, Ludwig wrote, "Only when a society of nations has organized itself as the protector of international order will no Armenian killer remain unpunished, because no Turkish Pasha has the right to send a nation into the desert". During the 1920s, he achieved international fame for his popular biographies which combined historical fact and fiction with psychological analysis. After his biography of Goethe was published in 1920, he wrote several similar biographies, including one about
Bismarck (1922–24) and another about Jesus (1928). As Ludwig's biographies were popular outside of Germany and were widely translated, he was one of the fortunate émigrés who had an income while living in the United States. His writings were considered particularly dangerous by
Goebbels, who mentioned him in his journal. Ludwig interviewed
Benito Mussolini and on 1 December 1929
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. His interview with the founder of
the Republic of Turkey appeared in
Wiener Freie Presse in March 1930, addressing issues of religion and music. He also interviewed
Joseph Stalin in Moscow on 13 December 1931. An excerpt from this interview is included in Stalin's book on
Lenin. Ludwig describes this interview in his biography of Stalin. Ludwig's extended interviews with
T.G. Masaryk, founder and longtime president of
Czechoslovakia, appeared as
Defender of Democracy in 1936. At the end of the
Second World War, he went to Germany as a journalist, and it is to him that we owe the retrieving of
Goethe's and
Schiller's coffins, which had disappeared from
Weimar in 1943/44. He returned to Switzerland after the war and died in 1948, in
Moscia, a neighborhood, part of the commune of
Ascona, in the canton of Ticino, which is the Italian part of Switzerland. In 1944, Ludwig wrote a letter to
The New York Times where he urged that "Hitler’s fanaticism against the Jews could be exploited by the Allies. The Three Powers should send a proclamation to the German people through leaflets and to the German Government through neutral countries; threatening that further murdering of Jews would involve terrible retaliation after victory. This would drive a wedge into the already existing dissension of the generals and the Nazis, and also between ultra-Nazis and other Germans." In a May 1948
Tempo magazine article, Ludwig theorized that
Hitler could have survived by having
a body double killed and cremated in his place. The same year, presiding judge at the
Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg
Michael Musmanno dismissed Ludwig's theory in an article stating his own definitive view that
Hitler had died; Musmanno elaborated these opinions in a book two years later. Ludwig died in his sleep near Ascona on 17 September 1948. == French and English editions of works by Ludwig ==