Gerlach, Hellmut von

(1866-1935)

   jurist and journalist; renowned interwar pacifist. Scion of a Junker* family, he was born on a Silesian estate at Monchmotzelnitz and raised in a rigidly conservative milieu. When he was a young bureaucrat, his violent anti-Semitism* led him to abandon his career and join Adolf Stocker's Christian Social Movement. After he broke with the au-tocratic Stocker, he and Friedrich Naumann* instituted the National Social Union (Nationalsozialer Verein) in 1897. Elected to the Reichstag* in 1903, he joined Naumann's Liberal Alliance (Freisinnige Vereinigung) when the Verein was dissolved. Although he was still an ardent nationalist when he became editor in 1904 of the Berliner Zeitung, his outlook rapidly changed. He became in-creasingly aligned with leftist members of the Liberal Alliance, and his com-mitment to expanded suffrage led him to leave Naumann's group in 1907; he was defeated in that year's Reichstag elections. In 1908 he founded, with Theo-dor Barth and Rudolf Breitscheid,* the left-liberal Democratic Alliance (Demo-kratische Vereinigung). An opponent of Bismarck's political system, he matured into an outspoken pacifist. So radical was the conversion that in 1913 he ap-peared in Who's Who of the Peace Movement. His belief that Germany was responsible for the outbreak of World War I led him first to favor a peace of understanding and then to become a leader in the peace movement. He turned the newspaper* Die Welt am Montag into a mouthpiece of that movement, successfully keeping it just out of reach of the military censor.

   A founder of the DDP, Gerlach became Undersecretary in charge of Polish affairs in Prussia's* Interior Ministry in November 1918. But his plans for set-tling the border dispute in Upper Silesia* were deemed so radical that he was forced to resign in March 1919. His public commitment to Polish-German rec-onciliation drew frequent threats, and he narrowly escaped an assassination* attempt in February 1920. He was soon deemed a liability by the DDP and left the Party in 1922. In numerous essays and public addresses he upheld German-French understanding, fulfillment of the Versailles Treaty,* and defense of the Republic against militarism; his charges against the Black Reichswehr* resulted in his own indictment in 1924. A council member of the Bureau of International Peace since 1919, he worked with the Carnegie Foundation during 1922-1930. When the DDP chose to unite in 1930 with the anti-Semitic Jungdo,* he founded the Radical Democratic Party; the organization remained a splinter group.

   The imprisonment of Carl von Ossietzky* in May 1932 led Gerlach to assume direction of Die Weltbuhne.* But in early March 1933 he fled to Paris and began warning of the threat Germany posed to peace. Before his own death he crusaded on Ossietzky's behalf with the Nobel Peace Prize committee.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Chickering, Imperial Germany; Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals; Eksteins, Limits of Reason.