Fritz Gerlich

Carl Albert Fritz (Michael) Gerlich (15 February 1883 – 30 June 1934) was a 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.

Gerlich was born in Stettin, Pomerania, and grew up as the eldest of the three sons of wholesale and retail fishmonger Paul Gerlich and his wife Therese. In Autumn 1889, Gerlich was enrolled in the Marienstiftungymnasium (Our Lady's Grammar School) and graduated from his senior class there in 1901.

In 1902 he began his studies at the University of Munich, and first majored in mathematics and natural sciences before switching to history. At the university, he was an active member of the Free Student Union (or sometimes translated as Free Student Association from the German word Freistudentenschaft). He wrote his doctoral dissertation "The Testament of Henry VI" and completed it in 1907.

On 9 October 1920, he married Sophie Botzenhart, born Stempfle, in Munich.

After completing his studies with a doctorate, Dr. Gerlich became an archivist.

He also began to contribute political articles that were anti-socialist and national-conservative in the publications Süddeutsche Monatshefte, which was edited by Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, and Die Wirklichkeit (in 1917). In 1917, he also became active in the German Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei) and after it was dissolved in the Anti-Bolshevist League (Antibolschewistische Liga) (1918/19).

In 1919, he published the book Communism as the Theory of the Thousand Year Reich (Der Kommunismus als Lehre vom Tausendjährigen Reich), where Gerlich compared communism with the phenomenon of redemption religion. A whole chapter in the work is devoted to denouncing antisemitism, which had gained ground because of the leading positions of many Jews in the Revolution and founding of the Soviet Union and Bavarian Soviet Republic.

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