Theodor Wolff

Independent activity Liberalism and republicanism 1868–1943 ○ Died of illness in Nazi custody

Liberal journalist who edited the Berliner Tageblatt for twenty-seven years and helped found the German Democratic Party

Journalist and writer, born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1868. In 1887 his cousin Rudolf Mosse took him into his publishing business, and as Paris correspondent he made his name covering the Dreyfus affair. As editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt from 1906 to 1933 he made it one of Germany's most influential newspapers. He was a founder of the German Democratic Party in 1918 but left it in 1926. On the night of the Reichstag fire in February 1933 he fled Berlin into exile. At the book burnings that May the Fire Oaths gave his writings to the flames together with Georg Bernhard's, "against alien journalism of a democratic-Jewish stamp". He was stripped of his German citizenship in 1937. Arrested in Nice in 1943 and handed over to the Gestapo, he died, ill with phlegmon, in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin.