Building a Red Church: Over 50 Years of Storytelling

In 1946 the eccentric Ed Tkach changed his name to von Rothkirch, which means "redchurch" in German.

The 1949 Drew Pearson column The Washington Merry-Go-Round featured the headline "Mysterious American Heads Anti-Russian Underground in Germany; 'Baron X' uses American money to smuggle arms behind the Iron Curtain."

The feature went on to detail the heroic anti-Soviet exploits of Ed von Rothkirch as Baron X, making incredible claims that he was the head of an anti-Russian underground called the Frei Corps of Barbarossa terrorizing Soviet leaders in Poland and East Germany.

The Merry-Go-Round story made several other amazing statements: That the "Baron" served in the German Luftwaffe in Spain during the Spanish Revolution, served as Chief Bosun's Mate in the U.S. Coast Guard, and has the "best intelligence inside Russian areas despite the U.S. government's large spending towards intelligence." There was only one problem with these claims;

All of them were false.

In reality Ed von Rothkirch was a one-time journalist with a penchant for storytelling. What appeared to be something out of the 1968 film Where Eagles Dare was closer in truth to the whoppers and tall tales of the yarn-spinning father in 2003's Big Fish.

Ed's son Greg von Rothkirch was born in 1945. As a child of the 1950s Greg would spend his weekly allowance of ten cents on comic books and check out sci-fi novels from the library. In his early twenties Greg rose to Staff Seargent in Company B, 2/60, 9th Infantry Division of the Army and survived Vietnam.

After Vietnam Greg continued to read fiction and history, assembling a vast collection of knowledge and facts from books and experiences which he shared with his son Eric via storytelling.

Eric von Rothkirch began using redchurch as a nickname in the mid 1990s and registered redchurch.com in 1998 to represent his work in the entertainment field. Eric continues his family's long tradition of storytelling today under the name redchurch.