20 Facts About Emery Reves

Emery Reves was a writer, publisher and successful press and literary agent most notably for Winston Churchill and other prominent European statesmen who were predominantly antifascist and held democratic ideals.

Emery Reves advocated that world federalism might bring peace to a post-war world.

Emery Reves received a doctorate in Economics from the University of Zurich in 1926 and wrote on the economic theories of Walther Rathenau, a German politician and successful industrialist of Jewish ancestry who served as foreign minister.

In Zurich, Emery Reves wrote his first articles and conducted his first interviews with politicians.

Churchill's writing had cast a limited global presence, but by 1939, Emery Reves had helped place Churchill's work on the front pages of thirty newspapers, with 750 different outlets annually, representing approximately 15 to 20 million readers in 25 languages.

Outside Europe, Emery Reves published the same articles in cities as distant as Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Perth, Sydney, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Cairo and Jerusalem.

Emery Reves described his mission as convincing the West that Nazi aggression seen in Europe would continue in the Americas and that the principles of non-intervention were "principles of a lost world, which lead every nation to the abyss".

Emery Reves made significant personal contributions to Churchill's highly-successful six volume Memoirs of the Second World War, and the exceptional international network that he had developed since the 1930s was the key to the book's outstanding success.

Emery Reves commissioned Conversations with Hitler by Hitler's aide Hermann Rauschning.

Around 1941, Emery Reves published Between Hitler and Mussolini, by Prince Ernst Rudiger Starhemberg, a right-wing Austrian nationalist who after the Nazi invasion of Austria fought for the Free French and the British.

In 1941, Emery Reves published I Paid Hitler, by Fritz Thyssen, writing that he considered the German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen to be "one of the men most responsible for the rise of Hitler and for the seeking of power by the National Socialists in Germany" and attributed Hitler's rise in part to the support of leading industrialists.

The book had actually been written by Emery Reves, based on the stenographs of the interviews Thyssen and Emery Reves had in France in the spring of 1940, and only a small number of chapters had been reviewed and approved by Thyssen.

In 1944, Emery Reves was the publishing agent of Jan Karski's book Story of a Secret State.

Emery Reves forbade Karski any criticism of the USSR, arrogated the right to make the text more attractive and demanded half of the copyright.

Emery Reves's best known work, The Anatomy of Peace, which he wrote and published in 1945 while in New York, helped popularise the cause of world federalism.

Emery Reves argued for a federation of nations that relinquished to the federal authority only the powers to manage and regulate intergovernmental relationships but still retained sovereignty for each of the independent nations.

Emery Reves argued that world law was the only way to prevent war and that the fledgling United Nations Security Council would be inadequate to preserve peace because it was an instrument of power, rather than an instrument of law.

Emery Reves withdrew from his life at La Pausa in his late years as his health declined.

Emery Reves died at his chalet in Montreux, Switzerland on October 4,1981, and his ashes were later interred at his wife Wendy's request at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Emery Reves began art collecting as early as the 1930s and 1940s.