By Alex GordonHAIFA, Israel –The German writer Emil Ludwig (real name Emil Cohn) was born on January 25, 1881, in Breslau, Prussia, into an assimilated Jewish family of the renowned ophthalmologist Hermann Ludwig Cohn, who changed his surname to Ludwig in 1883. The change of his father’s Jewish surname Cohn to the German surname Ludwig was, in his father’s opinion, to protect his children from antisemitism. Ludwig recalled that his parents did not observe the commandments of the Jewish religion. In 1930, in the article Ludwig on Hitler, published in The Financial Times and Sunday Times newspapers, he criticized National Socialism. In 1934, Ludwig published the book Leaders of Europe.