Figure 1.--

We have a little information about Colin Ross. We know he was a German explorer of some prominance before World War II. Today he is little remembered. He is of interest to us here because his son was in the Hitler Youth and wrote a book before he was killed on the Eastern Front in 1941.

Basic Information

We have at this time only limited information on Colin Ross. As the name suggests, he descended from Scottish ancestors. He was born 1885 in Vienna. Possibly one of those Austrians, like Hitler. who considered themselves more German than the Germans.

Family

A family member in Britain, also named Colin Ross, tells us, "He was a direct descendant of James Clark Ross and John Ross the Scottish explorers who discovered the Ross Sea in the Antarctic. James Clark Ross was originally from Wigtownshire on the West Coast of Scotland and I believe there is a small museum about his life in the town of Stranraer." [C. Ross] His father Friedrich was a civil engineer. His mother's name was Charlotte Christiansen. On his father's side he descends from the famous south pole explorers James (1800-1862) and John Ross (1777-1856).

Childhood

Education

Colin Ross studied at the Technical College in Berlin (engine building and metallurgical engineering), then in Munich (under Prof Karl Haushofer) and in Heidelberg studying national economy and history. Hauuhofer was a professor of considerable importance in German history. Hauuhofer's writings had a great impact on the NAZIs and Hitler, initially through Hess. It is thought that Hess's flight to Scotland (1941) was an effort to seek peace with Britain before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Hess apparentely feared the invasion--in part because of Hauuhofer's teachings. (In the end Hauuhofer's son was executed by the NAZIs and after the NAZI collapse, Hauuhofer and his wife committed syiside. Colin Ross was awarded a Ph. D. from Heidelberg.

Career

"Colin Ross worked as an editor on the Illustrierten Technischen Woerterbuch in 6 Sprachen and was co-author of the Huttenkunde (Metallurgy). After this joined the engineering office of Oskar von Miller (founder of the German Museum) in Munich, but resigned following the outbreak of the war in the Balkans in 1912 to become a war correspondent and then editorial leader of Zeit im Bild (Munich). In 1914 he took part, as a war correspondent, in the Mexican revolutionary war." [C. Ross]

World War I

"Ross returned to Germany to fight in World War I as an officer during which he also wrote war reports from the front line. He won the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class. On being wounded in 1916 he was transferred to the German High Command." [C. ROss]

Inter-war era

"After the war he undertook long trips abroad to "study the structure changes of the world picture". This would link closely to his studies under Prof Haushofer in Munich who is sometimes referred to as the father of geopolitics. Geopolitics would be a strong influence on Nazi territorial thinking. Rudolf Hess was also a student of Haushofer. From 1918-30 he made a series of 5-year-long journeys around the world, mostly by car and wrote a considerable number of books about his experiences and the countries in which he stayed. He was a member of the prestigious PEN-Club, an international guild of writers." [C. Ross]

Marriage

Colin Ross married Lisa Peter, daughter of a bank director, and they had two children, Renate (1915- ) and Ralph (1923-42).

NAZI era

We do not have details at this time on Ross's activities after the NAZIs seized power. He joined the NAZI Party, but I am not sure when. A family member writes, "I did not know of Colin Ross's membership of the Nazi Party, which is regrettable. That said, one of the great deceits of the Nazi doctrine was that you could take out of it what suited you personally and leave the other bits behind. It is quite possible that he was not anti-semitic and was incapable of believing that the Nazi system would organise industrial murder. As a geopolitical analyst he was probably spellbound by Germany's new position and influence in the world and while his brain raced ahead to fathom the new possibilities this offered, he left reality behind." [C. Ross] It is quite possible that Ross was not anti-Semitic. Many joined the NAZI Party primarily out of nationalistic beliefs and after 1933 hope for professioinal advancement. Here we just do not know.

World War II

A family member writes, "The Avalon Project (Harvard or Yale, I can't recall which) details the hearings of the Nazi war criminals as Nuremberg and there are references to Colin Ross - in particular the letter he had written in the hours before his death. Baldur von Schirach sought to use this in his own defence. It is believed that Colin Ross and von Schirach were opposed to the Holocaust, but apart from von Schirach's challenge to Hitler on the subject they were powerless. Colin Ross also gets a damning mention in High Trevor-Roper's 'Hitler's Table Talk' where Hitler praises him for his insights and his grassroots grasp of the psyche of foreign peoples and their lands. He cites Ross as being infinitely preferable to the German Foreign Office whose officials only ever talked to other diplomats and not 'der mann auf der strasse'..." [C. Ross] Here HBU is un sure about von Schirach's opposition to the Holocaust. It should be remembered that many in Germany, including NAZI officials like von Schirach and Speer, after the War tried to paint their activities in the best available light. This lead us to treat von Schirach's claims of confronting Hitler with some scepticism. In particular we find it questionable that Hitler would have made von Schirach the Gauleiter and Governor of Vienna if he thought von Schirach questioned his policies. Nor do we see anything in von Schirach's behavior in Vienna that suggests aany sympathy with the Jews. We know nothing about Ross's behavior during the War.

George Bailey

The little we know about Ross comes from an American, George Bailey. Bailey was a graduate of Columbia College in New York City and Magdalen College, Oxford. He has spent almost 30 years in Europe, most of them in Germany and Austria. During World War II he served as an American army intelligence and liaison officer and as an escort officer for German generals. He was interpreter-translator in Russian and German at the surrender negotiations. He became husband, son-in- law, grandson-in-law, brother-in-law, and finally a father in a German-Jewish-Austrian publishing family (the Ullstein family of Berlin and Vienna). He was widely traveled, having gained his postwar livelihood as a liaison officer with the German police, as a literary agent, and as a journalist covering Germany and Eastern Europe for The Reporter and the American Broadcasting Company. In 1959 he received the Overseas Press Club's award for the best magazine reporting on foreign affairs.

George Bailey's wife was related to Ralph's father, Colin Ross. Bailey says that his wife's uncle was a friend of the gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, formerly the head of the Hitler Youth. Bailey in his book The Germans tells us a great deal about Ralph's father Colin Ross.

Passage about Colin Ross from the Baily Book

George Bailey in his book The Germans tells us a great deal about Ralph's father Colin Ross: In the girl's school a classmate of my wife's was the daughter of the horselike hereditary prince, zu Waldeck- Pyrmont, whom I had met in Rosenhof in 1945. In the school the daughter had the reputation of a Nazi; small wonder with a father who was an SS general. But my wife remembers the daughter's telling how furious her grandfather was with his son for throwing in with the NAZIs: they had not been on speaking terms for years.

Colin Ross's family had been wiped out except for his daughter. He had entered a suicide pact with his wife and shot her and himself shortly before American troops overran the residential area near Munich where they lived. Their son Ralph had been killed in a freak accident on the Eastern front in 1942. .... So went the family legend.

The position of the Colin Rosses within the family reminiscence was draped in myth. Everything about it was strange. At the Thorhof, the country place of the Ross family in the valley of the Traisen, there are seven tall pillars of granite standing like sentinels in formation on a knoll overlooking the bend in the river. They are all that is left of the block-house father Ross had built for Colin as a wedding present in 1911. The house burned down in 1932 when Colin's younger sister hung her washing over the stove. A piece of clothing fell onto the stove and caught fire. Everything about Colin Ross--excepting the one daughter-seemed to have ended in disaster. There was also the family's reticence in talking about Colin. This was not pronounced but it was persistent. But the most important deterrent to finding out anything about Colin was my own disinclination to do so. For I could not explain the man to myself or anyone else.

At that time I attributed the conduct of the Germans in general to their extraordinary provincialism. But Colin Ross had known the world at large as few people in our time. He was by profession a foreign correspondent and perhaps the best in Germany. He had written some twenty books, all but one of them about foreign countries. (Two of them went through more than twenty editions.) He had not only traveled all over the world but lived abroad for lengthy periods. He spent 4 years in South America in the early 1920s, some eight years in Asia, and 4 or 5 years in the United States. How could just such a man have chosen to make common cause with the NAXIs? I still believed half consciously in the conspiracy theory propagated at Nuremberg. I [?text missing] How could the literate, cultivated professional traveler, foreign resident, [?p,outs], vengeance-ridden noncoms, and caricature career officers?

I hardly mollified when I discovered years later in some account of the NAZI period that Colin Ross had warned Hitler to his face that the United States was certain to enter the war on the side of England and this fact alone would spell disaster for Germany. In the course of my reading as the years went by I encountered the [?re] of Colin Ross again and again. In Hans Grimm's curious book [?ence and How-But Where To@ Colin is mentioned as an indoctrina- @ ] officer in the German army in World War I, who ranged far and [?e] in German-occupied territory, apparently on secret missions. His [?a] complicated role in a confused situation: in family albums I had rid a good many photographs of Colin in which he appeared to be a [?nber] of the soldiers' councils. This the family dismissed casually with [?iarks] like "Oh yes, always the madcap," "Colin was a real go-getter," "He was a man who acted on his convictions." Toward the end of World War I Colin Ross's specific mission was to gather information on morale of the German troops on the western front. He was a cross [?,veen] an intelligence officer and a public relations officer. Grimm, who worked directly under Colin, was thoroughly shocked at what he heard [?ng] the fourth year of the war. He was shocked, again, at Colin's [?tion] when he reported his findings. "Yes-they too want the war to [?11] said Colin, "at least, as it is being conducted now. Does it surprise that they say such things among themselves?" Grimm reports that [?-- - - - .] [?I them.] These included (as Grimm also notes) Rathenau's The Kaiser with its "god-forsaken" comment: "If the Kaiser should ride through the Brandenburg Gate on a white charger as victor, then world history would no longer make any sense." As one of the leaders of the soldiers' councils it is a matter of record that Colin personally prevented a good deal of bloodshed during those weeks in 1918-1919 when two pathetic revolutionary innocents, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, tried to make and control a revolution. According to his daughter, Colin never talked within his own family of his role in the soldiers' councils except to say, in later years, [?[ 217 ] that Wilhelm ?II, as "supreme warlord," was responsible for that had gone wrong. Grimm also notes that Colin carried a [? ].

Other Information about Colin Ross

We have veen able to find very little information about Colin Ross, other than he was apparently a close friend of Baldur von Schirach. In fact Ross and his wife killed themselves in a small house in Upper Bavaria in Urfeld on the Walchen Lake which Schirach owned and un which they were livung. In fact Schirach introduce Ross' suicide note in evidence in his trial in Nurremberg. Accoding to his lawyer, Dr Sauter "Now, the prosecution asks: What has that farewell letter by Dr. Colin Ross to do with the charges against Schirach? I ask the Tribunal to recall that the name of Dr. Colin Ross has been mentioned here repeatedly. He is the explorer - I believe an American by birth, but I am not certain. He is the man who for many years was not only a close friend of Schirach's but one whom the defendant von Schirach used again and again in order to prevent the outbreak of a war with the United States, and later, to terminate the war and to bring about peace with the United States. When the evidence is presented, these points will be clarified in detail, I believe. I now submit the last letter of Dr. Colin Ross ..." The Presudent of the court asked, "When was it dated?" Sauter replied: " One moment please. The date is 30 April, 1945. I consider the letter - it is only one page - important for the reason that in it a man, at a moment before he commits suicide with his wife because he is desperate about the future of Germany, at this moment - in the face of death, he again confirms that he, together with the defendant von Schirach, has continuously endeavoured to maintain peace in particular with the United States. I believe, gentlemen, that such a man ..." [The Trial of German Major War Criminals, transcript, April 30, 1946, p. 358.]

Sources

Bailey, George. The Germans (N.Y. World Publ. Times-Mirror, 1972).

Ross, Colin. E-mail message, March 14, 2004. Colin is a British member of the Ross family. Much of the information he has provided us here is from the Arctic & Antarctic Advice Agency Austria.

Ross, Ralph. From Chicago to Chungking (1943). This book is a very fascinating account of his travels through the United States as a young German and NAZI as he describes himself.

Nizkor Project. The Trial of German Major War Criminals, transcript, April 30, 1946, the Nizkor Project.