Gerhard Löwenthal (8 December 1922 in

Berlin Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...

– 6 December 2002 in

Wiesbaden Wiesbaden () is a city in central western Germany and the capital of the state of Hesse. , it had 290,955 inhabitants, plus approximately 21,000 United States citizens (mostly associated with the United States Army). The Wiesbaden urban area ...

) was a prominent German

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...

, human rights activist and author. He presented the ''

ZDF-Magazin ''ZDF-Magazin'' was a West German television news magazine, which ran on ZDF from 1969 to 1988. It was presented by Gerhard Löwenthal. It focused on communist-ruled Eastern Europe and was particularly known for reporting on human rights abuses t ...

'', a news magazine of ZDF which highlighted human rights abuses in communist-ruled Eastern Europe, from 1969 to 1987. Löwenthal, who was known as a staunch anticommunist, was president of the Germany Foundation from 1977 to 1994. He was Jewish and was deported to the

Sachsenhausen concentration camp Sachsenhausen () or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoner ...

during Nazi rule. After the war, he chose to remain in his native country and went on to study medicine. He also worked as a reporter for RIAS, before he became one of the first students at the

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public university, public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in poli ...

. He considered himself "a man of the center" ("ein Mann der Mitte") and lamented the ever increasing trend towards left in the West German political life, which made him look like an arch-conservative. His father-in-law was CDU politician and minister Ernst Lemmer. The

Gerhard Löwenthal Prize The Gerhard Löwenthal Prize (german: link=no, Gerhard-Löwenthal-Preis) is an award for "liberal-conservative journalism" () in Germany. Endowed by German "Foundation for Conservative Education and Research" (), it is awarded in cooperation with ...

, annually awarded by his widow Ingeborg Löwenthal, the conservative newspaper '' Junge Freiheit'' and the Foundation for Conservative Education and Research, is named in his honour. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery at Heerstraße in Berlin.

Publications

* * * *''Wir werden durch Atome leben''. Blanvalet, Berlin 1956 (with Josef Hausen) *''Die ungarische Revolution: Ein Weissbuch. Die Geschichte des Oktober-Aufstandes nach Dokumenten, Meldungen, Augenzeugenberichten und das Echo der Weltöffentlichkeit''. Colloquium Verlag, Berlin 1957 (with Melvin J. Lasky, Karl Jaspers)

Literature

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External links

Gerhard Löwenthal Preis
Journalists from Berlin German male journalists German television reporters and correspondents 20th-century German journalists German anti-communists 20th-century German Jews 1922 births 2002 deaths German male writers Jewish anti-communists Sachsenhausen concentration camp survivors ZDF people {{Germany-journalist-stub