Richard Curt Hottelet (September 22, 1917 – December 17, 2014) was an American broadcast journalist for the latter half of the twentieth century.
On Saturday, March 15, 1941, at 7 a.m., Richard C. Hottelet was confronted in his Berlin apartment by members of the German secret police.
As a guest Hottelet was finger printed, photographed and placed in a cell in the police prison in the same building.
That first evening, after a dinner of sauerkraut, Hottelet received some preliminary questioning and was denied being told the reason he was being held.
On Tuesday, March 18, the secret police finally revealed to Hottelet why he was being held, "suspicion of espionage," they told him.
After one session of questioning beneath the klieg lights a police officer leaned toward Hottelet and asked him if he had heard of a man named Tourou.
"He was one of the brutal specialists in third degree in the New York police, and we can use exactly the same methods he used on Johanna Hofmann," the interrogator responded.
At Alexanderplatz, Hottelet found himself amongst people of many nations and faiths, represented among the population were: Russians, Czechs, Poles, Japanese, Italians and Catholic priests.
The work consisted of "pasting tissue paper over the windows of doll houses and twirling little throwaways for the Reich lottery."
Twice a day the prisoners would receive half-gallon jugs of water, with which to wash themselves, their dishes and flush their toilets.
On D-Day he aired the first eyewitness account of the seaborne invasion of Normandy; Hottelet rode along in a bomber that attacked Utah Beach six minutes before H-Hour.
While working in Belgium, shortly after D-Day, Hottelet received a memo from then General Eisenhower that allowed reporters "to talk freely with officers and enlisted personnel and to see the machinery of war in operation in order to visualize and transmit to the public the conditions under which men from their countries are waging war against the enemy."
Under these conditions with what he called "fussy" censorship rules, but not crippling, Hottelet set out from the U.S. First Army press camp in Spa, Belgium for the Fourth Division headquarters in Hürtgen Forest.
He was surprised by commanders when he arrived telling him of a German paratrooper landing the night before and a big battle going on to the south.
[4] That same year the Soviet government applied a ban on all foreign radio broadcasts, despite an appeal sent to Joseph Stalin by Murrow, who at that time was a vice president at CBS.
He also appeared as a panelist on GW's Kalb Report forum series at The National Press Club.