Robert Albert Bauer (Austrian born, US citizen, 1910 – September 27, 2003), was a US Foreign Service Officer, an anti-Nazi radio broadcaster, Voice of America (VOA) announcer and international affairs author and editor, whose diplomatic career spanned from World War II to the Cold War.
His father was an officer in the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army and was killed in the final days of World War I, when Bauer was eight years old.
He fled to Czechoslovakia and joined the Free Austria Movement in Prague, where he worked as a New York Times reporter from 1938 to 1939, covering the Sudetenland and Carpatho-Ukraine regions.
The Bauers and von Kahlers fled France ahead of the German army after the Maginot Line failed in June 1940, joining the same exodus route to Bayonne used by an estimated four million people in cars, bicycles and on foot.
Bauer and Maria von Kahler were married in Portugal in August, 1940 and sailed on the Portuguese steamer SS Quanza immediately afterward to immigrate to the United States.
After Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, Bauer was one of several WLWO staff members who took the night train to New York, joining the Voice of America as a broadcaster on the opening day of its operation on Feb. 24, 1942.³ Programming at WLWO was taken over in February, 1942 by the Office of War Information.² Bauer was German language writer, announcer and producer for the Voice of America from 1942 to 1944.
Bauer was the first announcer in the rotation, so he was the first broadcaster to tell the Germans—in tolkienesque German—that "Der Sturm aus dem Westen hat begonnen" (The storm from the West has begun).4 The D-Day invasion was the largest land, sea and air invasion in the history of the world, and the Allied victory broke the back of the Nazi regime.
He faced Sen. Joseph McCarthy prosecutor Roy Cohn on March 6, 1953, at a U.S. congressional hearing to successfully defend the VOA against accusations that its South American radio program, “Eye of the Eagle,” was Communist.
In 1972, after retirement, he became an adjunct professor of political science at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, until 1979, and at the American University in Washington, D.C. from 1980 to 1982.
Bauer’s wife, Maria (née von Kahler), is the author of Beyond the Chestnut Trees, a 1984 memoir of their lives together during World War II.