Artur Dinter

Vocation

German writer and Nazi politician. From 1906 to 1908 he worked as a director at the city theatre in Rostock and the Schillertheater in Berlin, founding at the same time the Federation of German Playwrights (Verband Deutscher Bühnenschriftsteller or VDB). As director he furthermore led the theatre publishing house from 1909 to 1914. Dinter took part in the First World War as an Oberleutnant in an Alsatian Infantry Regiment Number 136, and was quickly promoted to captain of the reserve and awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. In 1919 Dinter established himself as a writer in Weimar, after his 1917 anti-Semitic bestseller Die Sünde wider das Blut ("The Sin Against the Blood") came out, which was to sell more than 260,000 copies by 1934, and which vividly set forth in writing the stereotypes of the racial-völkisch perceptions of his time. Heartened as Dinter was by the great success, this novel became the first instalment in a trilogy later given the name "Die Sünden der Zeit" ("The Sins of the Time"). After the Beerhall Putsch in Munich in 1923, Dinter was elected in 1924 to the Thuringian Landtag as a representative of the electoral alliance Völkisch-Sozialer Block ("Peoples Social Bloc"), also becoming factional leader. He drew ever nearer the Nazi Party's position. Hitler appointed him NSDAP State Leader of Thuringia right after getting out of prison at Landsberg am Lech. At the same time, Dinter became publisher of the newspaper Der Nationalsozialist, which appeared in Weimar. It soon began to stand out quite clearly that Dinter's goals were not so much political as overridingly religious. In 1927 he founded the Geistchristliche Religionsgemeinschaft ("Spiritual Christian Religion Community"), which in 1934 was given the new name "Deutsche Volkskirche" (German People's Church). Its goal was to "de-Judaicize" Christian teaching. In 1945, he was sentenced by a Denazification court in Offenburg to a fine of 1000 Reichsmark. Dinter died on 21 May 1948 in Offenburg, Baden, at the age of 71. Link to Wikipedia biography