First thing we do, we kill all the reporters

by David Benjamin

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”
—Kash Patel, Trump campaign consultant

“The worst thing we can do, the absolute worst, is to do nothing.”
—Fritz Gerlich

MADISON, Wis.—They came after Fritz Gerlich on 9 March 1933.

Gerlich is one of the more obscure journalist heroes of the bloody twentieth century because he was one of the first murders on Adolf Hitler’s agenda.

On my last trip to Munich, I walked through the rain to visit the Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism or, simply, the Nazi Museum. To my gratification I found memorial displays of Fritz Gerlich’s photo and the front page of his anti-Hitler newspaper, Der gerade Weg (The Straight and Narrow). By the time he was arrested by Ernst Röhm’s storm troopers (Sturmabteilung), he had been a crusader against Nazism for a decade—in two publications and in public speeches—since Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Among his offenses against Germany’s great race purifier was a tongue-in-cheek 1932 article entitled “Does Hitler Have Mongolian Blood?”

By then, it was clear that Hitler was on the fast track to becoming chancellor, with a naked intention to seize absolute power. Aware of Hitler’s ambition and of the cowardice of his political enablers, the German media prudently retreated from any criticism of the incipient Führer. Self-censorship—if not outright obeisance—became the journalistic norm well before the official birth of the Third Reich.

Fritz Gerlich stuck out, as the exception. He was the nail.

The first name that came to my mind when I heard that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong had summarily yanked their newspapers’ already composed endorsements of presidential candidate Kamala Harris, I couldn’t help but think about Fritz Gerlich, and about all those other German journalists who curled up and fell silent in the face of threats that Röhm, the SA, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler would “come after” them.

David Maraniss, who works for the Post, said, “This is not an act of benign neutrality but of cowardice in the face of the biggest challenge to democracy in our post-WWII lifetimes.

Bezos strove to justify the Post’s abandonment of an election-year tradition by insisting, self-servingly and self-censoringly, that presidential endorsements 
“create a perception of bias, a perception of non-independence.” The Amazon tycoon said this despite a report that at least one of his companies, Blue Origin, had made overtures, seeking God-knows-what, to Bezos’ fellow billionaire and Harris’ opponent, Donald Trump. A member of the Post’s editorial board, David Hoffman. submitted his resignation with a statement reminiscent of the stakes faced 92 years earlier by Fritz Gerlich: “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”

Dan Morain, a former L.A. Times staffer and editorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee, suggested that the “financial interests” of Soon-Shiong, who had met and dined with Trump after the 2016 election, were central to the newspaper’s switcheroo. Soon-Shiong’s flaky daughter, Nika, in a sort of Eva Braun flourish, cryptically linked the spiking of the editorial board’s Harris endorsement to a Biden administration “war on children,” a war of which no one else seems aware.

Perhaps the most cogent insight on the surrender of the Post and Times to mercantile self-censorship was expressed by historian Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.”

From the beginning of his editorial opposition to National Socialism, Fritz Gerlich had identified the movement as a cult of personality with religious overtones that characterized Hitler as a sort of racial and national savior. Gerlich was perhaps more sensitive to this perception because he was a devout convert to charismatic Catholicism. He knew the feeling. Were he alive today, he would be alarmed at the racism of the MAGA movement, at its atavistic view of women as breeders and hausfraus, at its affiliation with a Christian nationalism that intimates the fanaticism and xenophobia of the Third Reich. He would almost certainly cringe at the preference of the movement’s Dear Leader for mass rallies, endless, rambling, self-glorifying speeches loaded with threats against his myriad enemies, and the rhythmic chanting of the worshipful mob.

Unquestionably, he would find terribly familiar the warning from the führer and his minions that retribution would land like a ton of God Bless the USA Bibles on anyone who spoke or wrote a blasphemous word against Saint Donald. Before Hitler became chancellor, the Nazi newspaper, Völkische Beobachter, a German equivalent to the Washington Post, with circulation in the millions, mounted a campaign of virulent slander against Fritz Gerlich. In one editorial, the Nazi paper promised that Gerlich “will come to [our Lord and Savior] one day for the last judgement with a rope around his neck.” By comparison. Gerlich’s Straight and Narrow was a hand-to-mouth weekly, recently transformed from a pictorial Sunday supplement. With a readership of only 40,000, Fritz was outgunned, outnumbered and vastly outhated by an opponent with unlimited resources and a private army of thugs and zealots.

On 30 January 1933, ex-chancellor and reluctant kingmaker Franz von Papen, under pressure from the richest businessmen in the country and fearing the mounting danger from the vigilante Brownshirts, conceded to Adolf Hitler the chancellorship of Germany. That was Day One. Gerlich saw this milestone as the beginning of “Germany’s via dolorosa.” On 23 February he wrote to a friend in Switzerland, “The situation here is dismal … We don’t know from today to tomorrow whether we have to flee the country or will be slain.”

Two weeks later, Fritz Gerlich was marched out of his office. Der gerade Weg—the last tinny voice of opposition to Hitler—ceased publication. Gerlich was held and, reportedly, tortured, for more than a year. His wife and family, his colleagues and friends had little idea where he had been imprisoned or even whether he was still alive.

On 30 June 1934, after sixteen months of “protective custody,” Carl Albert Fritz Michael Gerlich was shipped to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he was immediately killed. Six weeks passed before Gerlich’s wife received a package containing her husband’s ashes and a few uncremated effects. Among these were his glasses, spattered—spitefully—with blood.

The date of Gerlich’s murder came to be known as the Night of Long Knives, when—in a series of assassinations—Hitler eliminated everyone on an enemies list of generals, politicians and public who might conceivably doubt his genius or challenge his grip on power. Among the dead was a bullet-headed sadist whose usefulness had expired: Ernst Röhm.

The irony would not have been lost on Fritz.