×

Warning

JUser: :_load: Unable to load user with ID: 63

Reporter’s Grandfather Could have Stopped World War 2.

Press Gallery member Tony Haas (centre) is pictured in Parliament with former New Zealand Herald proprietor Michael Horton and Judith Tizard MP at the opening ceremony under National Press Club auspices of the Triangle Stratos television channel.Foreign correspondent and National Press Club member Tony Haas recently assigned himself to Germany in order to research his German forebears and especially his grandfather Ludwig Haas, one of the very few who could have prevented the Second World War.

His grandfather was the Democratic Party leader during the era of the Weimar Republic. Ludwig Haas’ reputation had been established immediately after World War 1 when he had actively campaigned against accepting the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He argued that the punitive reparations would inevitably detonate further conflict, which they did.

Ludwig Haas died in 1930. Before he died he urged his son, Tony Haas’ father, to put as much distance as he could between himself and Germany.

This Karl Haas quickly did. He settled in Pahiatua, New Zealand, and began a new life as a farmer.

In Germany Tony Haas met civic officials in Karlsruhe, part of his grandfather’s old electorate. They urged him to produce a book entitled Ludwig Haas: Active Citizen. So called because of Ludwig’s active civic conscience which might have averted World War 2.

In the meantime Tony Haas will include the episode in his own autobiography centred on his long-time reportorial beat. It will be entitled Being Palangi: My Pacific Journey.

In the photograph, and back on his home turf, Press Gallery member Tony Haas (centre) is pictured in Parliament with former New Zealand Herald proprietor Michael Horton and Judith Tizard MP at the opening ceremony under National Press Club auspices of the Triangle Stratos television channel.