Alfred Gerigk

Alfred Emil Gerigk (born December 14, 1896 in Danzig ; † August 18, 1983 in Konstanz ) was a German journalist .

Live and act

After graduating from high school, Gerigk studied history and economics in Berlin. From 1918 to 1920 he was an editor for the Vossische Zeitung . In 1920 he married Héléne Fuhrmann, with whom he had a child. In 1924 he started his own business with the Gerigk editorial office . In the following years he made a name for himself as a journalist.

From 1934 to 1945 Gerigk acted as political advisor to the editorial team of the German publishing house (formerly Ullstein). He was selected for this task after he had prevented a smaller publishing house in the spring and early summer of 1934 from starting the project of a biography of the SA chief of staff Ernst Röhm , who fell out of favor a few weeks later and was liquidated. Gerigk's advice - which was based on tips from informants in the state apparatus - accordingly spared the publisher concerned the difficulties that would have arisen for the project after Röhm's fall if it had continued to grow. This earned Gerigk the reputation of an instinctive political observer with a sure sense of danger. In his capacity as political advisor to Ullstein, Gerigk succeeded, among other things, in persuading the Reich Ministry of Propaganda to lift the work ban on the former social democratic cartoonist Erich Ohser, who from then on was allowed to draw non-political picture stories under the pseudonym eoplauen . In 1938 he also supported Sebastian Haffner , editor of the magazine Die Dame, with his emigration to Great Britain, which the editors disguised as a professional trip.

During the Second World War Gerigk visited numerous theaters of war as a correspondent. In the east he witnessed mass shootings, among other things.

In 1945 Gerigk participated in the founding of the CDU in Berlin and in the Soviet zone. In the following years he acted as a foreign policy advisor to the politician Jakob Kaiser . He also worked as a member of the chief editor in building up the newspapers Neue Zeit , Der Abend and Der Tag . From 1951 to 1966, Gerigk finally took over the post of editor-in-chief of the Südkurier .

Fonts

• 500 years of German Reich reform, 1934.
• Haunted Balkans. A king, a colonel, a general, 1943.
• Germany and world events in 1961, 1962.
• The state we live with. How Germany is governed, 1972.
• Advice and warning in the dictatorship, in: W. Joachim Freyburg / Hans Wallenberg [Hrsg.]: Hundert Jahre Ullstein, 1977, vol. 3, pp. 531–555.