Fritz Gerlich

German journalist and historian, and one of the main journalistic resistors of Adolf Hitler. He was arrested and later killed at the Dachau concentration camp.

In 1919, he published the book Communism as the Theory of the Thousand Year Reich (Der Kommunismus als Lehre vom Tausendjährigen Reich), comparing communism with the phenomenon of redemption religion. A whole chapter in the work is devoted to denouncing antisemitism.

From 1920 to 1928 he was editor in chief of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (MNN), a predecessor to today’s Süddeutsche Zeitung in that its circulation was one of the largest in southern Germany. As editor, Dr. Gerlich opposed Nazism and Hitler's Nazi Party as "murderous". In the early 1920s, he had seen proof of Nazi tyranny already in Munich. Once a conservative nationalist, after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch Gerlich decisively turned against Hitler and became one of his fiercest critics.

By 1927, he had befriended Therese Neumann, a Catholic mystic from Konnersreuth, Bavaria, who supported Gerlich's resistance activities. Initially, he wanted to expose her stigmatism as a fraud, but Gerlich came back a changed man and later converted from Calvinism to Catholicism in 1931. From that year until his death, his resistance became inspired by the social teachings of the Catholic Church.

Supported by a wealthy patron, Prince Waldburg-Zeil, Gerlich was able to take over the weekly newspaper Sunday Illustrated (Der Illustrierte Sonntag), which was renamed The Straight Path (Der Gerade Weg) in 1932. In this newspaper, Dr. Gerlich opposed Communism, National Socialism and antisemitism. The dispute with the growing Nazi movement became the central focus of Gerlich and his later writing. At the end of 1932 the circulation of the weekly was over 40,000 readers.

After the Nazis seized power on 30 January 1933, Gerlich was arrested on 9 March 1933 and held at the Dachau concentration camp, where he died on 30 June 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives.