Frederick Augustus Voigt

Frederick Augustus Voigt (9 May 1892 – 8 January 1957) was a British journalist and author of German descent, most famous for his work with the Manchester Guardian and his opposition to dictatorship and totalitarianism on the European continent.

Voigt was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School and Birkbeck College, London, where he at first studied biology before abandoning the natural sciences for literature and modern languages.

Voigt was transferred from Berlin to Paris in the first months of 1933 and then moved back to London in September 1934 where he took up the position of diplomatic correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, a post specially created for him.

However, he continued to write on Central and Eastern Europe throughout the 1930s and with the help of German émigrés and a Swiss agent named Wolf he built up a confidential news network that made him one of the few reliable sources of information about what was really happening within Germany under the Nazi regime.

At that time, Voigt used his contacts in the Secret Intelligence Service to help his Polish friend Krystyna Skarbek (subsequently also known by the nom de guerre, Christine Granville) overcome British official skepticism about her wish to help the war effort.

He worked closely with many on the left of German and Eastern European politics in the 1920s and 1930s, was a supporter of the Weimar Republic and broadly opposed to the post-war peace settlement, which he regarded as unfair and too harsh.

After World War II he became a leading exponent of what George Orwell termed “neo-toryism”, regarding the maintenance of British imperial power as an invaluable bulwark against Communism and as being indispensable to the creation and continuation of international peace and political stability.

In addition to his prolific journalism during the interwar years, Voigt published a number of books, including a volume of war memoirs, translations of works on German politics and foreign affairs and The Greek Sedition, a study of the international situation based on the visits he made to post-war Greece between 1946 and 1950.

The central thesis of Unto Caesar is that Communism and National Socialism were "revolutionary secular religions arising from the arrogant endeavour of man to transform religious promises directly into worldly reality" (Markus Huttner).