George Eric Rowe Gedye

George Eric Rowe Gedye [geddi] (*27 May 1890 in Clevedon, Somerset, †21 March 1970; often cited as G. E. R. Gedye), was a British journalist, author and intelligence officer.

Gedye, the foreign correspondent for eminent British and American newspapers, was the son of grocer George Edward Gedye. He was an early proponent for democracy and against Nazism in Germany and Austria. Personally, he was described as reserved, cold, and distantly polite.

Gedye attended an officer's course at London University, but then fought in the First World War as a simple infantryman on the Western Front. After he was wounded in 1916, Gedye worked as an officer in the British Army Intelligence from 1917. He was first assigned to the staff of the British military governor of Cologne where, because of his excellent knowledge of German and French, was in charge of interrogating prisoners of war. Later he worked for the Allied High Commissioner for the Rhineland.

In 1922, Gedye chose a career in journalism. He spent almost two decades working as a reporter for leading British and American newspapers in Central Europe. Based out of Cologne, he was soon known and recognised for his investigative reporting. Gedye's reports for The Times about the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 were an indictment of the imperialist pursuits of Poincaré. Early on he recognised the severe economic restrictions on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles as providing fertile ground for the rise of National Socialism. Because of this reporting, he was recalled to London in 1924 to the foreign policy department of The Times.

1925, The Times sent him to Vienna. However, his reports did not toe the predetermined editorial line and he was fired. Soon after, he briefly worked for the Daily Express and then began his association with the Daily Telegraph. Gedye built an editorial office in Vienna that was soon responsible for covering several countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

In 1929 Gedye moved to New York Times, which in 1931 appointed him as head of the Office for Central and South Eastern Europe. He also wrote for other newspapers, including for The Nation and British newspapers, but kept a certain distance from the group of Anglo-Saxon correspondents that often gathered in Vienna's Café Louvre, including Marcel Fodor, John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson.

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