Gareth Vaughan Jones Archive
The archive was donated to the National Library of Wales by members of Gareth Jones’s family; Miss G. V. Vaughan Jones; Dr Margaret Siriol Colley; and Mr Nigel Colley; with material also donated by Dr Prys. Morgan and purchased from Dylans Bookstore, Swansea. The Library acknowledges the generosity of the family and their continued support in making Gareth’s archive available to the public.
The collection includes the famous ‘Hitler diary’ kept by Jones during his visit to Germany in the spring of 1933 and describes conditions and various events in Nazi Germany shortly after the Fuehrer had come to power there and presents uncannily perceptive pen-portraits of Hitler himself and Goebbels. In February 1933, Gareth became the first foreign journalist to fly with Adolf Hitler after his appointment as Chancellor just one month earlier to a rally at Frankfurt-am-Main.
A further group of six pocket diaries describe in some detail Jones’s visits to the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1933, especially his travels, the people whom he meets and graphic accounts of the severe famine conditions which he encountered. The great Soviet famine accounted for millions of deaths particularly in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and Gareth Jones was almost alone in reporting on this in British newspapers and journals at the time. Gareth Jones’s diaries, perhaps represent the only independent verification of arguably Stalin’s greatest atrocity.