Part 1: Early Life 1901-1939
She had seen the fighting in China between the Japanese and Chinese forces, she had been on the battlefields of France: fear had been part of her profession as a journalist for years. But now Lily Abegg was ‘a bit nervous,’ reported an employee of the Swiss Embassy when he visited the 44-year-old woman who had been arrested by the Americans in Japan – as a war criminal. At least that’s what it read on the front page of The New York Times on 12 September, 1945. Among the others arrested were the Japanese Prime Minister Tojo Hideki who had ordered the attack on Pearl Harbour, and Josef A. Meisinger, the German liaison officer to the Japanese secret service, later to be put on trial as the Butcher of Warsaw. Lily Abegg was the only woman among the 39 suspects arrested in the first wave, all of whom were sent initially to Yokohama Prison. She had something to be nervous about.
Much of Abegg’s life has been shrouded in mystery and some confusion but, with the help of declassified British intelligence files and other records, it has been possible to at least begin separating fact from fiction from misinformation.
Even her date of birth had been open to question. The British thought she was born on 11 October 1910 but the true date was earlier. Likewise, where was she born? Some files suggest Switzerland, others Hamburg, and there is the possibility she was born in Japan. What we do know is that she came from a wealthy Swiss family. Her father was named by the British as Gottfried Abegg, a merchant specializing in the silk trade but they had got the name wrong. In fact her father was Swiss born Hans Abegg, and her mother, Elsa Clara Voigt, was from a German family.
As a young man aged 23, Hans Abegg first arrived in Japan in 1879 to work for a Swiss trading company called Siber & Brennwald as their Yokohama representative; one of the goods they traded was silk. In 1897, he married Elsa Voigt in Yokohama at the German Evangelical Protestant Church. Elsa had been born in Kobe but her father Oscar Voight had later moved to Yokohama.
Their eldest child was Hans, born in Yokohama in 1898 but when Elizabeth was born it would seem likely that Elsa had returned temporarily to Hamburg. This was 1901, and her confirmed date of birth is 7 December 1901; the family then returned to Yokohama in 1902. Elizabeth was the eldest daughter among (possibly) five siblings which included twins but this too has a mystery attached to it as she claimed she had seven siblings. Certainly, she and a younger sister later attended the Deutsche Schule Tokyo Yokohama, as they are listed in a pupil directory from 1912. Of her time at the school, she was to later say the teachers taught her nothing about Japan.
Over the next decade her father Hans was a regular traveller between Japan and Switzerland where the company’s HQ was located. These were long journeys made by ship and so he would have been absent from the family for extended periods of time.
In 1916, the family decided to return to Switzerland for reasons unknown. Possibly this was because of Elsa’s German nationality. Japan was then an ally of the British and Germany was the enemy. Switzerland of course was neutral but there must have been a compelling reason for the family to leave and undertake a hazardous journey. They had to travel east: first to San Francisco, across the U.S. before sailing to Norway and then travelling by train through Germany. This at the height of the war. Sadly Hans Abegg died in Offenburg in southern Germany, just hours before they were due to cross into Switzerland.
In Zurich Elizabeth was sent to the Freie Gymnasium; a school roll records she was in the fourth grade in 1918. The school was co-educational and was known for the quality of its education and she was then able to further study at the universities of Geneva, and Hamburg. Here she read economics and political science before obtaining a doctorate after writing a thesis on the French iron industry.
Earlir, after the end of the 1st World War her mother and the other siblings returned to Yokohama and, in 1920, entered a contract with the British consulate in Yokohama whereby the family house at 18 The Bluff became the residence of the consul-general while they moved into a smaller house.
Abegg finished her studies in the mid 1920s after which she became an assistant at the Institut für Zeitungswissenschaften, Heidelberg. From 1930 to 1933, she worked as a newspaper correspondent in Berlin for the Berliner Zeitung.
In a letter she wrote in June 1932, it says that she wanted to enter politics. She read the Nationalsozialistischen Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly Bulletin),and also Angriff the newspaper of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the Nazi Party) – to the horror of the Swiss author Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who was decidely anti-Nazi, and who briefly shared an apartment with Abegg in Berlin. Both women were unmarried, Schwarzenbach was gay but there is no evidence that the two had a relationship.
In 1933, while retaining her Swiss nationality, she became a naturalised German citizen at the same time as the Nazi regime came to power. Having pledged an allegiance to Germany, this gave her the possibility to take a more trusted position within the media.
Around this time she was known to have worked briefly in London for the Frankfurter Zeitung before, from 1934, becoming their correspondent for the Far East, based in Tokyo. The paper was the most highly regarded in Germany, conservative, and when she was dispatched overseas she was only one of a handful of women journalists who were handed this opportunity.
Her rise within the newspaper world should not be under-estimated. At this time, women journalists were a rare occurrence in Germany, and when they were employed it was often to cover home and domestic topics and not serious news. While the newspapers were independent businesses they were overseen by the Nazi Party and were part of Goebell’s propaganda machine. Her rise could neither have been accidental nor unapproved.
A posting in Japan for such a highly regarded newspaper was also an important role with political implications in the 1930s. Hitler sought a close relationship with Japan and the country became a critical ally to Germany in 1936—the year Abegg became the Frankfurter Zeitung’s Far East correspondent.
She quickly became known for her highly regarded analysis of Japan and German relations, and she argued too that the West should not judge Japan as if it was a Western country. It was clear that she was a Nipponphile, and her view was that the Japanese Government believed that since the Meiji revolution, Western countries had tried to coerce Japan to adopt a political and economic structure that was to their benefit and not the Japanese. Now Japan was attempting to reverse that as they had seen how China had suffered at the hands of Western powers from the 19th century onwards. There is a clear sense that she was sympathetic with Japan’s desire to create a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that would dispossess the region of its Western overseers, and that she saw that Japan’s fight was to free East Asia from the materialistic culture of the West.
Her first book to be published was in 1936, Yamato. Der Sendungsglaube des japanischen Volkes, which tried to explain the nature of the Japanese people and what they were striving to achieve as a country.
That same year she wrote in a Japanese propaganda sheet that ‘There is nothing to criticise Hitler. When our government officials came to power earlier, it was found that they were buying one or two new, large houses. But Hitler lives an exemplary life. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t play around, he doesn’t even eat meat.’
Wenn früher ein Regierungsvertreter an die Macht kam, stellte man fest, dass er ein oder zwei neue, grosse Häuser kaufte. Aber Hitler lebt ein beispielhaftes Leben. Er trinkt nicht, er raucht nicht, er spielt nicht rum, er isst noch nicht mal Fleisch.
Abegg certainly held a belief though, something she would write about twenty years later, that the Japanese while aligning with Germany, had no interest in National Socialism. She thought they viewed the ideal of a Furher, as ‘an abomination…an excess of Western individualism.’
During this time she also reported on Japan’s military operations in China and, in 1937, she was in Nanking shortly before the massacre took place. She was regarded as being honest and objective in her reporting. In one article she wrote, ‘Rickshaws and automobiles were piled high with packing crates, bundles, furniture and humanity. Crowds of departing residents were on the move at all hours of the day and night. One by one, the shops closed down. Since the electricity in most houses had already been turned off, merchants were selling off their remaining stock by candlelight. It was impossible to find packing crates or brown paper anywhere – the shops were all sold out.’
In her book Chinas Erneuerung: Der Raum als Waffe she further wrote,
‘Shortly before the fall of Nanking, thousands of wounded came into the city, but there they could not count on the ruling KMT to take care of them any longer. Once, two thousand wounded from the Shanghai front arrived in the city in medical train cars, and lay there for two days. There, in the station, the patients who had died in the meantime were laid, and the wagons were needed for other uses. The dead fouled the air. Refugees from the city ran and jumped over the wounded and stole away with their packs. Members of the international aid committees went to the ostensible Chinese leaders and demanded a single ambulance, but there was no money with which to purchase gasoline for the vehicle. Finally one brought an automobile….But no one foreigner was left to move all the wounded. Chinese observers stood by and watched. They wanted the foreigners to do it themselves, but then a brave policeman emerged and declared that this would not do. Finally… the leaderless people began to move themselves.’
In another of her articles Abegg painted a relentless picture of the conditions caused by the Japanese. ‘Wagons with two thousand wounded had arrived at Nanking station. Nobody cared about them. After two days they were unloaded, together with those who had since died, and placed on the platforms. The dead polluted the air. Refugee Chinese jumped over the wounded and dead bodies.’
Earlier in 1937, she wrote a piece for Die Weltwoche, that described the Japanese as weak and prone to suffer from tuberculosis and rheumatism with bad teeth and eyes, and with a willingness to commit suicide due to their inner imbalance.
She also spent time in Shanghai during this period but was there too late to meet one of the Soviet’s most successful spies, Ursula Kuczynski, a lover of both Richard Sorge (who we will meet in Part 2) and Agnes Smedley (but Abegg might have met her).
So she was certainly being critical of the Japanese but was Abegg a staunch Nazi? She was certainly sympathetic to the cause but staunch possibly not. In January 1938, she wrote a report on the political situation in Japan for the Auswärtige Amt (Federal Foreign Office) in Berlin. This did not go down well, and officials were to say that her views were largely incorrect, she had failed to adopt the right political tone, and she seemed to be unable to understand a government strategy based on ethnicity. In short, she was not being a good Nazi.
That same year the Franfurter Zeitung had been sold by its owners to the Nazi publishing organ, Eher Verlag, so she was now a fulltime employee of the Party.
She also fell out with the Japanese authorities probably because of her honest reporting of the situation in Nanking. Yamato. Der Sendungsglaube des japanischen Volkes had disappeared from Tokyo bookstores; an article was published on the first page of a local newspaper stating that the Japanese authorities and the military had wanted her ‘to be expelled from Japan.’ When she contacted the Federal Foreign Office, she was informed that the article was a mistake but understandably Abegg saw it as a warning shot that she was only being tolerated in Japan.
[Continues with Lily Abegg Part 2 and 3)
The author can be found on social media @japanauthor
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Graham Thomas 
[…] What was not talked about was another spy, the Swiss journalist Lily Abegg, who was a friend of Sorge, drank in Ketel’s and was at Geneva University albeit a few years earlier than Fleming. Her fascinating story can be read here: Lily Abegg. […]