 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Konrad Heiden" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(September 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Konrad Heiden (7 August 1901 – 18 June 1966) was aGerman-American journalist and historian of theWeimar Republic andNazi eras, most noted for the first influential biographies ofAdolf Hitler. Often, he wrote under thepseudonym "Klaus Bredow."
Heiden was born inMunich,Bavaria. He spent his youth inFrankfurt, where his father worked as a union organizer and member of the municipal council, while his mother was a homemaker. His mother was of Jewish origin. Having obtained his high schoolAbitur, he returned to Munich to study law and economics at theLudwig Maximilian University. At the university, he organized a republican and democratic student body and, like his father, became a member of theSocial Democratic Party (SPD). He graduated in 1923 and began his career as a journalist.
In the political turmoils of the Weimar Republic, Heiden was one of the first critical observers of the rise ofNazism in Germany after he attended a party's meeting in Munich in 1921. He worked for theFrankfurter Zeitung and theVossische Zeitung, from 1930 as a correspondent inBerlin, but became a freelancer in 1932. In the same year, he published his first bookHistory of National Socialism, released byRowohlt Verlag with a circulation of 5,000 copies. Upon theNazi seizure of power in January 1933, he fled into exile; first to theSaar territory, then moved toZürich inSwitzerland from June to December 1933, and again toSaarbrücken where he published two writings on the comingSaar status referendum. After the vote in favour ofNazi Germany in January 1935, he moved toFrance.
In Zürich, Heiden published his bookBirth of theThird Reich in 1934. He, together with other emigrants likeAlbert Einstein,Heinrich Mann andThomas Mann struggled for the liberation ofCarl von Ossietzky imprisoned atEsterwegen concentration camp and began a campaign for awarding him the 1935Nobel Peace Prize. Upon his flight to France, he worked as editor in chief of the German-language exile magazineDas Neue Tage-Buch published byLeopold Schwarzschild. In 1937, his German citizenship was withdrawn and his property confiscated.
Upon the outbreak ofWorld War II, Heiden was at first interned by the French authorities. During theGerman occupation of France in 1940, he managed to escape to theUnited States viaLisbon with the help ofVarian Fry and theInternational Rescue Committee. He arrived inNew York City in late October. In 1944, Heiden published his highly successful biographyDer Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power, released byHoughton Mifflin and reprinted by both the USBook of the Month Club and the UKLeft Book Club. In the same year, he identifiedMatvei Golovinski as an author of theProtocols of the Elders of Zion.[1]
After the war, Heiden travelled back toWest Germany from December 1951 to May 1952. He published several articles and contributions inSüddeutscher Rundfunk andRadio Bremen broadcasts and continued to write forLife magazine. He finally received US citizenship.
Heiden's last years were affected by deterioratingParkinson's disease. He died at theBeth Abraham Hospital in New York City on 18 June 1966, having resided in the United States for 26 years after fleeing from Germany.
Heiden's book,The New Inquisition, published jointly by Modern Age Books, Inc. and Alliance Book Corporation, in New York in 1939, with a translation from German byHeinz Norden, includes a series of personal, but necessarily anonymous accounts by German Jews of violent persecution under the Nazi regime accelerating from the time of the fall of 1938 and a prediction of theFinal Solution planned by the Nazi regime:
To drive 600,000 people by robbery into hunger, by hunger into desperation, by desperation into wild outbreaks, and by such outbreaks into the waiting knife—such is the coolly calculated plan. Mass murder is the goal, a massacre such as history has not seen—certainly not sinceTamerlane andMithridates. We can only venture guesses as to the technical forms these mass executions are to take.
Heiden's book includes some of the earliest firsthand reports popularly read in America from Jews who fell victim to torture and internment atDachau near Munich,Sachsenhausen or Oranienburg nearBerlin, orBuchenwald nearWeimar following the mass arrests of 1938.
