Friedrich Hielscher

Friedrich Hielscher (31 May 1902, Plauen, Vogtland – 6 March 1990, Furtwangen) was a German intellectual involved in the Conservative Revolutionary movement during the Weimar Republic and in the German resistance during the Nazi era. He was the founder of an esoteric or Neopagan movement, the Unabhängige Freikirche (UFK, "Independent Free Church"), which he headed from 1933 until his death.

Hielscher was born to Fritz Hielscher and Gertrud Hielscher née Erdmenger in Plauen, Vogtland, at the time part of the Kingdom of Saxony. Baptized Fritz Johannes, he later changed his name to Hans Friedrich and finally to Friedrich.

Hielscher joined a Freikorps in 1919. He left his unit in 1920 due to his refusal to participate in the 1920 Kapp-Putsch. From 1920 he studied law in Berlin, where he joined the schlagende Corps Normania Berlin and became politically active in the German People's Party.

Hielscher's first publication was a 1926 essay in Ernst Jünger's nationalist journal Standarte-Arminius. His dissertation in law was about the term in German legal tradition, accepted in 1928. Impressed by The Decline of the West, he contacted Oswald Spengler but was rejected. Beginning in 1928, Hielscher gathered a circle of followers around his person. He took over the editorship of Der Vormarsch from Jünger in 1928, a post he abandoned in the summer of 1929 in order to launch a journal of his own, titled Das Reich, which appeared from 1930 until 1933.

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