Louis Edmund Hagen (1916–2000)

Louis Hagen was born Louis Levy to a wealthy German Jewish family in Potsdam. His father was a banker and the family was a member of the social elite. He was privately educated and later attended high school. In 1934, as a teenager, his idyllic childhood was shattered when he was arrested for an anti-Nazi joke he had written on a postcard and sent to the concentration camp of Schloss Lichtenburg at Torgau. The influential Nazi father of a friend obtained his release four months later, after he had been tortured and starved. After this episode, his entire nuclear family began leaving Germany. Louis escaped to England, where he enlisted in the British Army. Like many other Jewish soldiers of German and Austrian origin, he used a pseudonym -- Louis Haig -- to conceal his identity in the event of capture. At the 1944 Battle of Arnhem in the Netherlands, his first action, he served as a glider pilot and interpreter and was awarded the Military Medal. After the war, Louis Hagen, as he became known, wrote a book with his friend Dido Milroy about his experiences, Arnhem Lift (later subtitled A German Jew in the Glider Pilot Regiment), which became a bestseller. He worked as a journalist for Phoenix, an Allied Command newspaper in Southeast Asia, traveling, reporting and taking photos in India, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Siam, and Indochina. His second book, Indian Route March, was published in 1946. He returned to England and got a job with the Sunday Express working in its Berlin bureau; there he also wrote for Country Life and John Bull. His 1951 book Ein Volk, Ein Reich: Nine Lives Under the Nazis (also published as The Mark of the Swastika and as Follow My Leader) was followed by biographies of Joseph Goebbels (1953) and of Walter Schellenberg (1956). Other works included The Secret War for Europe: A Dossier of Espionage (1969). Louis also translated four German books about World War II into English. In 1950, he married Anne Mie, a Norwegian artist, with whom he had two daughters, and the family divided their time between north London and Norway. He established Primrose Productions, which made 25 children's films with director and film pioneer Lotte Reiniger, who had been his childhood art teacher.

Louis Hagen served in the British Army during World War II under the name Lewis Haig, it being the Army practice at that time for Jewish refugees to serve under names that would conceal their identity in the event of capture by German forces.