Carl Brinitzer and Berthe Grossbard Brinitzer Papers

Carl Brinitzer was born in Riga, Latvia on January 30, 1907, the oldest child to Jenny Kaplan and Eugen Jacob Brinitzer, both medical doctors. The family moved from Riga to Hamburg, Germany the same year Carl was born. While trying his hand at journalism Brinitzer earned a doctorate in law from the University of Kiel in 1933 and worked for the Hamburg court as a prosecutor. Being Jewish he was dismissed in 1933 and emigrated to Rome, where he worked as a journalist and met his future wife Berthe Grossbard. Together they emigrated to the UK in 1936 where they married in 1939. Brinitzer was one of the first members of the new German department at BBC radio, working as a translator and editor, eventually becoming Head of the Department. Brinitzer remained at the BBC until his retirement in 1967, covering the Nuremberg trials and broadcasting on cultural and social matters to both East and West Germany. Brinitzer was author of several books including biographies on Heinrich Heine and JuliusCampe. Brinitzer died in 1974.

Berthe Grossbard was born in Vienna in 1902 to Juda Grossbard (who committed suicide in Vienna in 1939) and his wife Sara Haber. Grossbard studied modern languages at the Vienna University and secretly trained as an actress with Friedrich Rosenthal. She started her first post in 1927 in Freiberg, Saxony. After engagements in Münster and in Berlin, Grossbard moved to Rome in 1934 and began work in radio, first as a presenter and later in radio journalism. Grossbard moved to London in 1936, where she worked for the BBC and as London correspondent for several Austrian newspapers until 1938. In London in 1939 she married Carl Brinitzer, who she had met in Rome. During the war Grossbard worked for the Fleet Street monitoring service, gave lectures across Britain for the Ministry of Information, and from 1944 she worked for ABSIE – the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. Grossbard covered several important international conferences including the first session of the United Nations General Assembly and the Paris Peace Conference, both in 1946. From 1947 to 1949 she worked for the United Nations at Lake Success, including managing the radio station for the UN Appeal for the Children campaign. After her return to London Grossbard continued to work for the BBC on a free-lance basis, gave lectures about her time at the U.N. and wrote for mainly Austrian newspapers. Grossbard died in 1975.