Thaddäus Troll

Hans Bayer, known by the pseudonym Thaddäus Troll, (18 March 1914 – 5 July 1980) was a German journalist and writer and one of the most prominent modern poets in the Swabian German dialect. In his later years he was also an active campaigner for libraries and for support, pension rights and fair publishing contracts for writers. He was born in Cannstatt, a suburb of Stuttgart and committed suicide there at the age of 66. The literary award, Thaddäus-Troll-Preis, is named in his honour.

Thaddäus Troll was born Hans Bayer in Cannstatt, a suburb of Stuttgart. His family had a soap-making business in the town. After he finished his secondary education at the Johannes-Kepler-Gymnasium, he worked briefly as a volunteer at a newspaper in Cannstatt. He then studied German, art history, comparative literature, theater, and journalism at the universities of Tübingen, Munich, Halle, and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate in 1938 from Leipzig University.

Bayer served as a reserve lieutenant in the German army, the Wehrmacht, from 1938. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, in the autumn of 1939, he applied to, and eventually, in the autumn of 1940, was accepted into the army's propaganda troops, the PK (Propagandakompanien), which were under the command of the Wehrmachtpropaganda department of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (the army's supreme command), and politically controlled by the Reichs Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. At their peak the PK comprised some 30 companies and 15,000 soldiers with backgrounds as journalists, photographers, artists, and film and radio personnel, who were charged with the task of recording their experiences and observations on the front in a form suitable for dissemination in the Nazi-controlled media.

After a three-month training period, in Potsdam, Bayer served as a PK reporter from 1941 to 1945. He was stationed at first in Poland, in January 1941, and in June his unit moved to the Soviet Union, on the Eastern Front. A report he wrote on the Warsaw Ghetto, which he visited a number of times, was used as the text for a photo essay published in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. Much of his work was published in military newspapers, including reports from the Soviet Union about the daily life of the German soldiers, and the impoverished condition of the Russian population. He also wrote feature articles, including humorous and satirical pieces. After a sojourn in southern Germany and Berlin from the end of 1942 to August 1943, he was assigned to a different PK unit and served as editor of the army newspaper Der Sieg (The Victory) through its closure in early 1945, part of the time while based in Warsaw.

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