Konrad Heiden
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (September 2016) |
Konrad Heiden (7 August 1901 – 18 June 1966) was a German-American journalist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi eras, most noted for the first influential biographies of Adolf Hitler. Often, he wrote under the pseudonym "Klaus Bredow."
Life
Heiden was born in Munich, Bavaria. He spent his youth in Frankfurt, where his father worked as a union organizer and member of the municipal council, while his mother was a homemaker. Having obtained his high school Abitur, he returned to Munich to study law and economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University. At the university, he organized a republican and democratic student body and, like his father, became a member of the Social 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 of
In Zürich, Heiden published his book Birth of the
Upon the outbreak of
After the war, Heiden travelled back to West Germany from December 1951 to May 1952. He published several articles and contributions in Süddeutscher Rundfunk and Radio Bremen broadcasts and continued to write for Life magazine. He finally received US citizenship.
Heiden's last years were affected by deteriorating Parkinson's disease. He died at the Beth Abraham Hospital in New York City on 18 June 1966, having resided in the United States for 26 years after fleeing from Germany.
Work
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 by Heinz 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 the Final 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 since
Mithridates. 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 at
Selected works
- History of National Socialism (Berlin, 1932)
- Birth of the Third Reich (Zürich, 1934)
- Hitler: A Biography (Zürich, appeared in two volumes, 1936–1937)
- The New Inquisition (New York City, 1939)
- Der Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power (Boston, 1944)
See also
- List of Adolf Hitler books
References
- ^ Freund, Charles Paul (February 2000), "Forging Protocols", Reason Magazine.
