Konrad Heiden

Konrad Heiden (7 August 1901 – 18 June 1966) was a German-American journalist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi eras, most noted for the first influential biographies of Adolf Hitler.

Having obtained his high school Abitur, he returned to Munich to study law and economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University.

In the political turmoils of the Weimar Republic, Heiden was one of the first critical observers of the rise of Nazism in Germany after he attended a party's meeting in Munich in 1921.

Upon his flight to France, he worked as editor in chief of the German-language exile magazine Das Neue Tage-Buch published by Leopold Schwarzschild.

During the German occupation of France in 1940, he managed to escape to the United States via Lisbon with the help of Varian Fry and the International Rescue Committee.

He died at the Beth Abraham Hospital in New York City on 18 June 1966, having resided in the United States for 26 years after fleeing from Germany.