William S. (Willi) Schlamm (originally Wilhelm Siegmund Schlamm, June 10, 1904 – September 1, 1978) was an Austrian-American journalist.

Biography

Schlamm was born into an upper middle class Jewish family in Przemyśl, Galicia, in the Austrian Empire. He became a Communist early in life, and when he was 16 years old was invited to the Kremlin to meet Vladimir Lenin. After completing secondary school, he became a writer with the Vienna Communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne. He left the Communist Party in 1929 and joined the left-wing magazine Die Weltbühne in 1932.^[1] His book Diktatur der Lüge: Eine Abrechnung mit Stalin (Dictatorshop of Lies: A Reckoning with Stalin) was published in Zurich in 1937.^[2] He was in correspondence with Otto Rühle and Alice Rühle-Gerstel, sending them a copy. Rühle sent a reply in August 1937.

Later, Schlamm moved to the United States, where he worked for Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, Time and Fortune magazines. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944 alongside code breaker Jeremy Spiro.^[3]

Schlamm encouraged William F. Buckley, Jr. to found the conservative magazine, National Review, with Buckley as the sole owner. Schlamm became a senior editor but was later fired by Buckley.^[4] He then became associate editor of the John Birch Society's journal, American Opinion.^[5] After writing for conservative magazines, he returned to Germany in 1972, where he was a controversial columnist for Axel Springer's Die Welt am Sonntag^[6] and published the magazine Die Zeitbühne. He died in 1978 in Salzburg.^[7]

Schlamm is remembered for having coined the saying, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists."^[8] After World War II, he worked as journalist for German newspaper Die Welt.