Werth, Alexander
WERTH, ALEXANDER
WERTH, ALEXANDER (1901–1969), British journalist and author. Born in St. Petersburg and educated in Glasgow, Werth started his career on Glasgow papers and became Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (1932). He went to Moscow as Sunday Times and bbc correspondent in 1940, and from 1949 was Paris correspondent of New Statesman and New York Nation. He wrote mainly on France and Russia, including The Destiny of France (1937), France and Munich (1939), Leningrad (1944), The De Gaulle Revolution (1960), The Khrushchev Phase (1961), De Gaulle (1965), and Russia at Peace (1968). His Russia at War, 1941 – 1945 (1964), based in part on his experiences as a correspondent there, remains one of best and most vigorous accounts of the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Werth entered the Majdanek death camp with Soviet forces in July 1944 and was one of the first Western correspondents to report in detail on a Nazi extermination camp, nine or ten months before the more famous accounts of the liberation of German concentration camps like Buchenwald.