Karlheinz Deschner died in 2014, a year after he published the tenth volume of his Criminal History of Christianity, which he had begun more than twenty-five years before, after seventeen other preparatory studies.
Throughout the nearly five thousand pages of the German edition translated into several languages—but curiously not into English except for the abridged translations in this site!—, Deschner somewhat resembles Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn’s second non-fiction work, his study of Jewry in Russia, has not been translated into English either, except for a few sections in The Occidental Observer.
Since the early 1960s Deschner wrote about the early days of the Church. Supported by an overwhelming textual apparatus, his previous books were his letter of introduction when, in 1970, he proposed to the German publishing house Rowohlt the colossal project of writing the true history of the Church in ten volumes. In 1986 the first volume of his Criminal History appeared, covering everything from the brutalities of the Old Testament to the time of Saint Augustine.
Born in a Catholic family (his mother, of Protestant family, had converted to Catholicism before getting married), Deschner studied in religious institutions. In 1942 he joined the ranks of the Wehrmacht. He was wounded several times and when the Third Reich collapsed he was a parachutist.
After the war, in his native city Würzburg Deschner got his doctorate in 1951. That same year he married the one that would be a companion of his life, Elfi Tuch. Tuch was separated and the couple was excommunicated by the then Bishop of Würzburg, Julius Dörpfner, who would play a leading role in the Second Vatican Council. Until the moment of his excommunication, Deschner had not published a single line against the Church.
Unlike Solzhenitsyn Deschner never got good money from, for example, a Nobel prize. His main economic support were the various sponsors who supported him throughout his life; something similar to how a few white nationalists are able to make a living.
Yesterday, my translation of what is now the first abridged volume of Deschner’s ten books came to me through Fedex. Unfortunately, also this week my laptop’s hard disk broke down together with the motherboard (apparently, an electric discharge). Had it not been for the generous donations I received when I announced the publication of this first volume, it would have been impossible for me to repair the machine that allows me to bring this site to life.
