Doug Zohrab

Who was Doug Zohrab?

Balfour Douglas "Doug" Zohrab was a New Zealand diplomat and public servant. He was a newspaper copyholder and junior reporter on Wellington's Evening Post newspaper from 1934, then graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with a masters degree in History in 1937 and became an assistant librarian at Parliament’s General Assembly Library. Apart from his native English, he knew French, Italian, German, some Japanese, some Malay, and taught himself Russian.

In World War II, he was a cipher clerk on General Freyberg’s staff, where his duties included interviewing Italian prisoners of war. He spent time recuperating from illness in Lebanon, then was invalided home from the Middle East. In 1944, he was appointed to the Ministry of Rehabilitation, then to the Prime Minister’s Department, in the section that became what is now known as the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He served in London, Moscow, Paris, then in Wellington and, overseas again, in Tokyo.