ABSTRACT
Franz Josef Ehrlich (1907–1984) was a German architect, one of the most distinguished in the now-defunct German Democratic Republic. He was also a communist and anti-fascist from his youth. He joined the Socialist Workers’ Youth already as an apprentice and studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1927 to 1930. After his diploma in 1930, he joined the Communist Party of Germany. He worked in Berlin in the studios of Walter Gropius and Hans Poelzig. For a short time, he ran his own studio together with two fellow students from the Bauhaus. In 1934 he was arrested as the editor of an illegal communist magazine and imprisoned first in the Zwickau penitentiary, then in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the construction office there he designed, among other things, representative villas and residential buildings, a casino and other buildings for the concentration camp and the associated settlements for the SS; all in the nationalist architectural language of the Nazi regime. Together with other communists, he organized the camp resistance.
