He also began to contribute political articles that were anti-socialist and national-conservative in the publications Süddeutsche Monatshefte, which was edited by Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, and Die Wirklichkeit (in 1917).

From 1920 to 1928, he was editor in chief of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (MNN), a predecessor to today's Süddeutsche Zeitung in that its circulation was one of the largest in southern Germany.

Initially, he wanted to expose her stigmata as a fraud, but Gerlich came back a changed man and later converted from Calvinism to Catholicism in 1931.

"[2] In 1932, Gerlich criticised and mocked the pseudoscientific Nazi racial theories when he published a satirical article titled "Does Hitler Have Mongolian Blood?"

[3] After the Nazis seized power on 30 January 1933, Gerlich was arrested on 9 March 1933 and held at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was shot on 30 June 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives.

[citation needed] Gerlich was portrayed in the TV movie Hitler: The Rise of Evil by actor Matthew Modine.

This line is inspired by a quote often incorrectly attributed to Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.