The straight way

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The straight way (edition of April 24, 1932)

The straight way was a Catholic-Conservative magazine from Munich during the Weimar Republic , which warned urgently against Adolf Hitler and National Socialism .

Foundation, forerunner

At the beginning of January 1932, the Natur-Verlag in Munich, which published the weekly Illustrierter Sonntag , was renamed Naturrechts -Verlag and the weekly was renamed The Straight Way with the subtitle Deutsche Zeitung für Truth and Law . With this naming, the publisher and editor-in-chief Fritz Gerlich made clear his goal of honoring current affairs "purely under Catholic principles" (December 4, 1931). The straight path that Erich von Waldburg-Zeil financed, where he lost a fortune, moved in February from the Munich book trade house M. Müller & Son to the publishing and printing company GJ Manz in Hofstatt 5–7. Because Hitler had threatened Müller that otherwise he would withdraw the more lucrative assignment for the Volkischer Beobachter . Instead of Josef Hell, Gerlich also took responsibility for the content of the Straight Path .

Fight against National Socialism

Gerlich continued his fight against Hitler and National Socialism with the Straight Path , supported by contributions from Ingbert Naab and Franz Wutz as well as constant encouragement from Therese Neumann in Konnersreuth . On February 14, 1932, he warned of the “intellectual plague of National Socialism”, which meant “ mass murder and blood”. An article by Ingbert Naab, “Who voted for Hitler?” On March 20, 1932, the day of the presidential election, was distributed in 20 million leaflets, but did not lead to an increase in the circulation of the Straight Path to over 40,000 copies.

On July 17, 1932, Gerlich published a satire entitled "Has Hitler Mongolian Blood?" In it, using the racist criteria of the National Socialists Hans F. K. Günther and Alfred Rosenberg , he emphasized in pseudoscientific language that Hitler had a Slavic-Mongolian appearance and therefore an Asian-despotic racial character, so that corresponding policies could be expected from him. Here he predicted later National Socialist concentration camps and genocides . In his basic attitude, Gerlich knew that Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber supported him. When he demanded the removal of Paul von Hindenburg after Prussia was brought into line on July 20, 1932 , The Straight Way was banned for four weeks. In November 1932, Gerlich again prophesied that Hitler would plunge the German people into disaster with his "mass delusion" and ridiculed the Nazi racial doctrine : If it were to be applied, "Hitler himself and about three-quarters of his own parliamentary group" would have to retire from German politics.

"Secret reports" published by Gerlich from meetings of Soviet leadership bodies in Moscow with the tendency to promote National Socialism as the pacemaker of the world revolution remained ineffective. It is not clear to what extent these were counterfeits. Information from the Berlin NSDAP, which the double agent Georg Bell supplied in the winter of 1932/33, was unproductive. From mid-December 1932 onwards, The Straight Way appeared twice a week. After Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, Gerlich was arrested on March 9, 1933, his newspaper banned four days later and he was murdered on June 30, 1934 in the Dachau concentration camp in connection with the alleged Roman coup .

After 1945

The title “The Straight Path” was claimed by a publication of the Pius Brotherhood after the war . The German Patent and Trademark Office confirmed this in a 2008 decision.

swell

literature

  • Erwein Freiherr von Aretin: Fritz Michael Gerlich. Prophet and martyr. His source of strength (second edition with a commentary on contemporary history by Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin). Publishing house Dr. Schnell & Dr. Steiner, Munich, Zurich 1983, ISBN 3-7954-0099-6 .
  • Rudolf Morsey (arr.): Fritz Gerlich - a publicist against Hitler. Files and letters 1930–1934. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-77012-7 .
  • Rudolf Morsey : Effects of Censorship Policy in the US Zone of Occupation. How newspaper articles by Fritz Gerlich and Ingbert Naab from the years 1931-1933 were changed in a reprint from 1946. In: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen 17, pp. 269–277. Verlag Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20515-7 .
  • Hans-Günter Richardi, Klaus Schumann: Gerlich / Bell secret files. Röhm's plans for a Reich without Hitler. Verlag W. Ludwig, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-7787-2135-6 .
  • Michael Schäfer: Fritz Gerlich (1883-1934). Journalism as an examination of the “political religions” of the 20th century. Munich 1998 (dissertation)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mit dem Heiland gegen Hitler Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 1, 2013, accessed on February 25, 2020
  2. ^ In The Straight Path of February 14, 1932 ( digitized version of the Bavarian State Library )
  3. ^ In The Straight Path of March 20, 1932 ( digitized version of the Bavarian State Library )
  4. ^ Ron Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. Faber Finds, TB 2011, ISBN 0571276857 , p. 148
  5. ↑ Insult to the Reich government in the Munich weekly newspaper “The Straight Path”. In: bundesarchiv.de. Retrieved February 15, 2019 .
  6. ^ In The Straight Path of November 13, 1932 ( digitized version of the Bavarian State Library )
  7. ↑ KJB magazine "The Straight Path": About our magazine , accessed on: July 18, 2018