Heiden, Conrad

Konrad Heyden was born in Munich in the family of the SPD professional party worker Johannes Heyden and his spouse Lina Deutschman, who is Jewish. He spent his youth in Frankfurt am Main , where his father worked as a trade union organizer and was a deputy in the city municipality. In May 1905, Hayden’s parents divorced. In 1906, his mother died. Konrad Heyden studied at a real school in Frankfurt in the years 1908-1910, then in 1911-1919 attended the city gymnasium named after Lessing. In January 1916, his father died, and from that moment on Konrad Heiden lived in foster families. In the summer of 1919, Konrad Heiden moved to his aunt in Munich and studied at the law faculty of the University of Munich . At the university in 1922, he organized a student union and was elected its chairman.

In 1923, Heiden, after graduating from the university, got a job as an assistant editor to Otto Grote , a Bavarian correspondent for the newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung , under whose guidance he mastered the basics of journalism. Heiden, like his chief, was interested in politics and soon became an expert on national socialism that was emerging at that time. In his reports, Heyden paid special attention to the leader of the movement, Adolf Hitler, whose oratorical performances in Munich beer houses he first saw in 1921, when he was a student. In 1929, Heiden joined the editorial Frankfurter Zeitung in Frankfurt. During this period, a newspaper close to the left-liberal German Democratic Party was in crisis, including because the NDP was losing its supporters. In 1932, the newspaper’s circulation was only half that of the 1919 circulation. The newspaper maintained high standards of journalism and contained a large staff, since 1926 it suffered losses of hundreds of thousands of Reichsmarks and was on the verge of bankruptcy. The only hope of saving the newspaper was placed on democratically-minded industrialists from the IG Farben range. Formally, the newspaper remained independent; nevertheless, some entrepreneurs tried to put pressure on the political and economic course of the newspaper and prevent the publication of critical materials regarding IG-Farben and major industrialists. IG-Farben’s support for the Frankfurter Zeitung was hushed up. Konrad Heyden was not allowed to write political articles, so he was in charge of an illustrated supplement and publication for women. In these difficult circumstances, Konrad Heyden in 1929 published a report on the trial in the Munich district court in the case of insults of Hitler in the newspaper Das Tage-Buch.

In March 1930, Heiden worked for some time as a correspondent in Berlin . Here he published a critical report on the elections to the Thuringian Landtag , which resulted in the National Socialists for the first time in Germany joining the Land Government, gaining more than half of the votes of local voters. Thanks to his connections in the Nazi Party, Heiden was well-versed in the activities of this party. Among his informants were the Strassers brothers, members of the Nazi Party who were critical of Hitler. The cash paid to Heiden by the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper was barely enough for life. Heiden did not receive an answer to his request for a salary increase and eventually left the newspaper on September 28, 1930, becoming unemployed when he was 29 years old.

On January 13, 1931, Heiden went to work as a political editor at Dummert’s publishing house, a conservative press service, but he quit at the end of the year. Since 1932, Heiden was forced to make a living as a freelance journalist and writer. On December 20, 1932, Heiden presented his first book, The History of National Socialism, in Berlin, which was published in a circulation of 5,000 copies and was a great success.

Shortly after the Nazis came to power, Heiden left the country and lived in an illegal situation mainly in the Saar . The second half of 1933, Heiden lived in Zurich , where his second book, The Birth of the Third Reich, was published. In Saarbrucken, Heiden worked as co-editor of the Deutsche Freiheit newspaper. On the eve of the plebiscite on the entry of the Saar into the German Empire, Heiden under the pseudonym Klaus Bredov published two pamphlets “Hitler in Fury: Bloody Tragedy of June 30, 1934” on the Night of Long Knives and “Nazis Socialists?”. After the Saarian plebiscite, on January 13, 1935, Heiden fled to France and until May 1940 resided in Paris , working as editor-in-chief at the emigrant newspaper Das Neue Tage-Buch, Leopold Schwarzschild .

In 1933–1936, Konrad Heiden, together with such prominent personalities as Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, was part of the “Circle of Karl Osetsky’s Friends” organization, demanding that Osetzky be released from the Esterwegen concentration camp and offered him the Nobel Peace Prize . As part of this campaign, Heyden released a special brochure. Konrad Heyden wrote for her the text “Peace Prize - Award for Character”.

In 1936–1937, the Zurich publishing house Europa Verlag released a two-volume biography of Hitler, written by Heyden. Simultaneously, the biography was published in the UK, USA and France. This work showed how thoroughly Heiden investigated Hitler's identity, despite the fact that the leader of the NSDAP was hiding his personal life. In the same year of 1937, the Heiden book “European destiny” was published in Amsterdam publishing house Querido Verlag. In 1937, Konrad Heyden was deprived of German citizenship, and his property in Germany was confiscated.

At the beginning of World War II, Hayden, who lived in France, was interned. In June 1940, during the French campaign of the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht, he was released, and Heyden fled to the US through Lisbon thanks to the help of Varian Fry and the International Rescue Committee. With the help of the committee, he acquired a false Czechoslovak passport and in the second half of October 1940, sailed by ship to the United States on a US visa. Lived in New York and San Francisco . In February 1942, he straightened the documents to his real name and received a residence permit. In 1944, he saw the light of his main and most famous work Der Führer - Hitler's Rise to Power , later recognized as the book of the month in the United States and reprinted in the British Club of Left Books.

After the war, Konrad Heiden remained in the United States and received citizenship in the 1950s. For the first time after 1933, he returned to his homeland in December 1952. Collaborated with German radio stations and continued to work in American periodicals. Heiden was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease , which gradually deprived him of his ability to work. He lived primarily in Massachusetts with his wife Margaret A. Van Wirth, who died in 1961. In 1962, Heiden carried out two brain surgeries, as a result of which he needed constant medical care. He died in a hospital in the Bronx . He was buried in the cemetery in Orleans, Massachusetts.

• Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus. Die Karriere einer Idee. Rowohlt, Berlin 1932.
• Geburt des Dritten Reiches. Die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus bis 1933. Europa Verlag, Zürich 1934.
• Hitler rast: Der 30. Juni: Ablauf, Vorgeschichte und Hintergründe. Volksstimme, Saarbrücken 1934 (under the pseudonym Klaus Bredow).
• Sind die Nazis Sozialisten? 100 Dokumente aus 14 Monaten. Volksstimme, Saarbrücken 1934 (under the pseudonym Klaus Bredow).
• Hitler biography:
  • (Band 1 :) Adolf Hitler. Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Eine Biographie. Europa Verlag, Zürich 1936, Neuausgabe ebenda 2007, ISBN 3-905811-02-2 .
  • (Band 2 :) Adolf Hitler. Eine Biographie. Ein Mann gegen Europa. Europa Verlag, Zürich 1937, Neuausgabe ebenda 2007, ISBN 3-905811-04-9 .
  • Adolf Hitler. Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Ein Mann gegen Europa. Die Biografie. Europa Verlag, Berlin / München / Zürich / Wien 2017, ISBN 978-3-95890-117-9 (überarbeitete Neuausgabe der Gesamtausgabe von Band 1 and 2).
• Europäisches Schicksal. Querido Verlag, Amsterdam 1937.
• (Hrsg.): Der Pogrom: Dokumente der braunen Barberei. Das Urteil der zivilisierten Welt . Zürich 1939.
  • The new Inquisition. . Starling Press, New York 1939.
  • Les Vêpres Hitlériennes. Nuits sanglantes en Allemagne . Paris 1939.
  • Eine Nacht im November 1938. Ein zeitgenössischer Bericht. Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1349-1 .
• Der Fuehrer. Hitler's Rise to Power. Haughton Mifflin, Boston 1944. Häufige Neuaufl., Zuletzt Castle, 2002, ISBN 0-7858-1551-1 .

• Lexikon deutsch-jüdischer Autoren . Band 10. Saur, Munich 2002, pp. 297-304.
• Stefan Aust: Hitlers erster Feind. Der Kampf des Konrad Heiden . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2016, ISBN 978-3-498-00090-5 .

• Heiden, Conrad at the German National Library .
• Biography (German)
• Biography (German)