Pierre van Paassen

Who was Pierre van Paassen?

Pierre van Paassen was a Dutch–Canadian-American journalist, writer, and Unitarian minister. He was born in Gorinchem, Netherlands, then emigrated with his parents to Canada in 1914. After entering a seminary, he served as a missionary to Ruthenian immigrants in the Alberta hinterland, where he helped with medical work. In 1917 he left theological school to serve with the Canadian army in France in World War I as an infantryman and sapper.

In 1921 he became a journalist with the Toronto Globe, and a year later moved to the U.S. and began writing a syndicated column for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. From 1924 to 1931, Van Paassen worked as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Evening World, based in Paris. After the World folded, he became a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.

Van Paassen spoke Dutch, French, English, and some Ruthenian, and later learned Hebrew.

He gained fame reporting on the conflicts among Arabs, British, Jews and French in the Middle East, as well as on the on-going African slave trade and colonial problems in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. He reported on Benito Mussolini's Italo-Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War and other European and colonial conflicts.