Konrad Heiden

Who was Konrad Heiden?

Konrad Heiden was an influential Jewish journalist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi eras, most noted for the first influential biographies of German dictator Adolf Hitler. Often, he wrote under the pseudonym "Klaus Bredow."

Heiden was born in Munich, Germany, on 7 August 1901, and graduated from the University of Munich in 1923. His father was a union organizer, while his mother had a Jewish background. At the university, he organized a republican and democratic student body and became a member of the Social Democratic Party.

Heiden was one of the first critical observers of the rise of National Socialism in Germany after he attended a party's meeting in 1920. He worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Vossischen Zeitung, but became a freelancer in 1932. A year later, he went into exile; first to Saarland, then to Switzerland, then to France, and finally to the United States.

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 an eerie and accurate prediction of the Final Solution planned by the Nazi regime: