Karl Freiherr von Vogelsang

[1] He was born in Liegnitz in the Silesia Province of Prussia (present-day Legnica, Poland), studied jurisprudence at Bonn, Rostock and Berlin, and settled at his family's estate Alt-Guthendorf near Marlow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

Vogelsang then worked as a journalist in Catholic Southern Germany and spent several years in Munich, where he wrote for periodical publications established by the circles around Guido Görres.

This conservative publication was highly influential on Catholic social teaching, helping to establish the 40-hour work week and national health insurance for workers under the government of Minister-President Eduard Taaffe.

However, some of Vogelsang's pronouncedly disfavourable remarks about Jews related to his anti-liberal and anti-capitalist views were included by his admirer, the once Austrofascist and later European federalist who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, Eugen Kogon, in a volume entitled "Catholic-Conservative Heritage" which called for the establishment of a Catholic Third Reich and was edited by the Benedictine abbot of Maria Laach, Ildefons Herwegen [de], in 1934, to be distributed to a large share of Catholic households in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by the Herder publishing house.

Many of the people who gathered into Vogelsang's movement, established the Christian Social Party in 1893, and some successors like Anton Orel [de] developed strong antisemitic views.