Antonius Raab

Antonius Raab, 1921

Antonius Raab (born April 30, 1897 in Neuss , † March 13, 1985 in Genoa ) was a German pilot , aircraft manufacturer and entrepreneur .

Youth and First World War

Antonius Raab grew up in Rösrath near Cologne near the Wahner Heide airfield , which later became Cologne / Bonn Airport . During the First World War , he experienced the constant take-offs and landings of airplanes, which made him want to become a pilot himself. In 1914, at the age of 17, he volunteered as a soldier. At the beginning of 1918 he was trained as an infantry pilot with the air force and deployed with the 4th Army to clear up enemy artillery positions and trenches. Shortly before the end of the war, he was transferred to the fighter pilot school in Valenciennes , the head of which was later General Inspector of the Nazi Air Force Erhard Milch .

Weimar Republic

Traffic pilot

After the war, Raab became one of ten pilots for the Deutsche Luft-Reederei , initially at the Johannisthal airfield near Berlin , and from 1922 on the site of the former Zeppelin factory in Berlin-Staaken . He was primarily responsible for the airmail routes . He worked as a flight instructor and taught a. a. a group of Chinese , including later Prime Minister Zhou Enlai . In addition, the planes were chartered for filming and other activities such as advertising flights. Since air traffic largely ceased in winter, he studied law in Berlin from 1920 onwards . During his studies he became a member of the Neo-Suevia Berlin armed forces .

At the beginning of September 1921 Raab faked an emergency landing together with a passenger, the US journalist Siegfried Dunbar Weyer, in the park of Saabor Castle near Grünberg in Silesia . With this deception, Weyer - he was a correspondent for the International News Service  - wanted to find out whether the rumors that the abdicated Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to marry the castle mistress Hermine Princess Reuss were true. Hermine Reuss asked the two men into the house, as she had hoped, where Weyer discovered a photo of Wilhelm II on the piano. He felt his suspicions were confirmed and published the report that the couple were planning their wedding. This press release is said to have put pressure on the former emperor, who then became engaged to Princess Reuss four weeks later. S. Dunbar Weyer committed suicide in April 1927 by shooting himself in a compartment of the train from Bremen to Berlin. In a suicide note, he cited a nervous breakdown as the reason for his suicide after he had not been on vacation for seven years.

In the same year Raab was transferred to Deruluft for the Königsberg - Moscow route .

Flight instructor

In 1923 Raab moved to the Mark steelworks in Breslau , which manufactured sport aircraft and ran a flight school, but made his appointment conditional on not training aviators for the military. At the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1923, he made a highly regarded advertising flight for Odol .

Reich President Friedrich Ebert planned to entrust Antonius Raab, who was a member of the SPD and was considered one of the best aerobatic pilots of his time, with the development of German sport aviation . After the Peace Treaty of Versailles , Germany was forbidden to develop aircraft for military purposes and now there was concern about Germany's aviation future:

“The Reich President feared that the victorious powers could develop their aircraft designs further and further, in some cases even with the unhindered exploitation of German patents, and that they could gain such a head start in recreational aviation that they could never catch up, both in terms of commercial aircraft and those of them future pilots. "

- Antonius Raab

Raab promised Ebert to support this project with a spectacular action, for which he landed on the street Unter den Linden in a Rieseler R III / 22 in the morning of July 8, 1923 at 5 a.m. in Berlin and caused a lot of attention and advertising. However, when Raab found out at a memorial service for Manfred von Richthofen that the vast majority of his flight students were illegally officers of the Reichswehr , he felt betrayed and resigned from Mark.

In 1924 Raab went to Dietrich-Gobiet Flugzeugbau AG as chief pilot and completed numerous advertising flights and aerobatics . His aerobatic student Kurt Katzenstein and he won numerous aerobatic competitions, including a. 1925 in Prague and Munich. Nevertheless, the company went bankrupt in 1925 . In his memoirs, Raab writes that co-owner Dietrich “discovered his sympathies for the Nazi party” in 1925 and tried to get rid of the not “purely Aryan” Kurt Katzenstein and Gobiet (his partner), who had brought him money and fame. In 1942 Dietrich himself wrote in his book Im Flug over half a century that “the Jews” had destroyed his company. The industrialist Willy Rudolf Foerster , who later worked in Japan, was one of Raab's flight students . He had taken over the representation of AEKKEA-RAAB in Tokyo . I.a. However, at the instigation of the air attaché Wolfgang von Gronau , the Gestapo forced him to give up his business relations.

Entrepreneur

In the same year Raab, Katzenstein and Gobiet founded Raab-Katzenstein-Flugzeugwerke GmbH (RaKa) in Kassel and took over numerous employees from Dietrich-Gobiet-Flugzeugbau. The RaKa, "where there was no 'racial prejudice'", did pioneering work in many areas, for example it decisively developed the tow plow for gliders . The motorized planes built there had bird names such as " swallow ", " pelican ", " crane " and " warbler ", the glider produced by the company was called " butterfly ". According to Raab, the National Socialists later attributed the RaKa am Schleppflug patent in their propaganda to the politically more agreeable Gerhard Fieseler , who was a shareholder in RaKa. Raab also reports in his memoir that RaKa introduced employee participation and co-determination as early as 1926 .

Despite successful business, including exports all over the world, RaKa went bankrupt in 1930 after other banks canceled her loans in the wake of the bankruptcy of the house bank. As a very last step, the company moved to Krefeld , which was financially supported by the city of Krefeld. For this, Raab gave the city aircraft as security, which the company no longer owned. Finally, from November 7th to 11th, 1932, Raab had to answer in Krefeld for a series of criminal offenses and was sentenced to ten months in prison for bankruptcy offenses, embezzlement, fraud and breach of trust. He was arrested immediately because of the risk of fleeing and was conditionally released on January 17, 1933 with suspension of his sentence.

Raab suspected that the Reichswehr had "turned around" this development, since the RaKa was an "unpleasant" company that had refused to take part in military rearmament (see armament of the Wehrmacht ). According to Raab, Raab had already been exposed to harassment from the Reichswehr in previous years, as the company not only did not want to participate in rearmament, but reported violations of the Versailles Peace Treaty. In March 1929, the journalist Walter Kreiser published in the magazine Die Weltbühne by Carl von Ossietzky in an article details about the secret armament, on which he published material a. a. received from Raab. At the end of 1931, Ossietzky and Kreiser were sentenced to 18 months in prison for betraying military secrets in the so-called Weltbühne trial .

Raab was subsequently arrested several times on the basis of absurd accusations. During one of these prison stays he was slapped so badly by an SA man that from then on he suffered from a disturbance of his sense of balance, which in later years cost him his pilot's license.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the “ seizure of power ”, Raab's new company - “Raab Flugzeugbau” with around ten employees in Berlin - was occupied by the SA ; an employee who opposed this was arrested. According to Raab, the company later developed into the first SA Fliegerstaffel.

In April 1933, Raab's father-in-law from his first marriage, Hermann Kalkoff, was beaten to death by SA men. He had Hermann Goering previously borrowed money and year end 1932 made a vain attempt to let Goering pledge.

Escape

Antonius Raab then fled to Estonia , where he supervised the construction of aircraft; when the Nazi regime demanded his extradition to Latvia , from there to Lithuania and finally to Greece . There he founded a new company in 1935, A. G. Flugzeugbau Raab (AEKKEA) in Athens , which, in addition to aircraft, also manufactured fire extinguishers, motorcycle sidecars and other technical devices. In the same year he was hired by the Negus Haile Selassie to repair its fleet of 20 aircraft for the Italian-Ethiopian War , but before Raab arrived in Abyssinia , the Negus was already on the run.

In 1936 Flugzeugbau Raab developed two new types, the "Tigerschwalbe 33" and the "Raab 29", for use in the Spanish Civil War against the armed forces of General Franco . The parts were made in Athens and shipped to Spain to be assembled in Sabadell . Shortly before completion, the planes were confiscated by Russian “advisors” to the Republic of Spain , and Raab and his staff were mistreated, imprisoned and accused of being spies for Hitler's Germany. He was imprisoned in various monasteries for over a year. During a mission to build trenches, he and two other prisoners managed to escape to France and return to Greece from there.

In 1938 Antonius Raab was expatriated from Germany . However, his family and company in Athens continued to be persecuted and spied on, according to the information in his memoir. His daughter Gisela, who was housed in the Greek province, came under the control of the German authorities during the occupation of Greece by the Wehrmacht and was brought to Germany.

During the occupation of Greece in World War II , Raab and his wife were arrested again, but released again. In April 1941 they managed to emigrate to Egypt by ship . In Cairo Raab began producing fire extinguishers and worked as a flight instructor. He also wrote articles directed against Hitler on behalf of Randolph Churchill for British newspapers in Egypt and made a film in order to win over the mostly Hitler-friendly Egyptians for the Allies .

In December 1941, when Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's armed forces were approaching Cairo, Raab was brought to India by ship from the British, along with his wife and several hundred other refugees . There he founded an airline, but although he was expatriated as a German, he was interned as an enemy foreigner by the British security service there , but then appointed as a technical advisor. He founded a craft school and a glider workshop.

After the Second World War

After India's independence in 1947, Antonius Raab founded the first Indian aircraft factory with the support of Jawaharlal Nehru . At the instigation of the British who were still active in India, however, he had to leave the country and, like all other former "enemy foreigners", was banned from entering the country for five years. An attempt by the Maharajas of Baroda to declare Raab and his wife citizens of his country failed.

On January 1, 1949, the Raabs arrived in Genoa . In Turin , Antonius Raab founded the "Industrial & Technical Advisory Service" for the export of Italian goods to India and Pakistan . He stopped his attempts to get another German passport, "because it was clear to me that a kind of Third Reich had taken over the regiment in the second edition of the Foreign Office ". His expatriation was signed by Hans Globke , who was now State Secretary under Konrad Adenauer . He sued the Federal Republic of Germany for reparation because u. a. In April 1933 an attempted murder was carried out on him by sabotaging his plane, the Nazi regime persecuted him from country to country with extradition procedures and there were multiple kidnapping and other murder attempts abroad. He also asserted the seizure of his Berlin company, his private property and construction plans for his aircraft. His lawsuits were largely unsuccessful. Raab lived in Italy until his death.

Honors

The city of Kassel named a street after him in the industrial area on the site of the former Kassel-Waldau airfield .

Fonts

• Antonius Raab: Raab flies - memories of an aviation pioneer . Konkret Literatur Verlag, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-922144-32-2 (autobiography).

literature

• Easter Monday at the Kassel airfield . In: Kassel Latest News . April 20, 1927, p. 2. Supplement .
• Rolf Nagel, Thorsten Bauer: Kassel and the aviation industry since 1923. History (s), people, technology . A. Bernecker Verlag, Melsungen 2015, ISBN 978-3-87064-147-4 .

Web links

Commons : Antonius Raab  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

References and comments

1. ^ Kassel and the aviation industry since 1923 , p. 389
2. ^ Willi Jacob (ed.): Address directory of the German armed forces for 1928/29. Reutlingen, 1928, p. 39.
3. ↑ Christine von Brühl: Grace in the Brandenburg sand. Structure Digital, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8412-0879-8 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
4. ↑ Borger Daily Herald (Borger, Tex.), Vol. 1, No. 127, Ed. 1, Wednesday April 20, 1927
5. ↑ Stahlwerk Mark III on histaviation.com
6. ↑ Raab flies , p. 43
7. ↑ Hans Aschenbrenner: Emergency landing or film recording? In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 7, 1997, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 95-97 ( luise-berlin.de ).
8. ↑ Dietrich-Gobiet Flugzeugwerke AG on histaviation.com
9. ↑ According to Der Spiegel , the Jewish Kurt Katzenstein was a pilot in Jagdstaffel 11 under Manfred von Richthofen during the First World War and trained a. a. Hermann Göring as an aviator. After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists, he emigrated to Palestine and worked as a test pilot in South Africa (together with Willy Rosenstein ). In 1948 he was appointed chief pilot of the newly formed Israeli airline. Kurt Katzenstein . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1948 ( online ).
10. ↑ Raab flies , p. 67
11. ↑ Clemens Jochem: The Foerster Case: The German-Japanese Machine Factory in Tokyo and the Jewish Aid Committee Hentrich and Hentrich, Berlin 2017, pp. 14–15, ISBN 978-3-95565-225-8 .
12. ↑ Raab flies , p. 69
13. ↑ Raab flies , p. 69
14. ↑ Memories. In: erinnerungen-im-netz.de. Accessed January 31, 2019 . 
15. ↑ Raab flies , p. 90
16. ↑ lehre.hki.uni-koeln.de ( Memento of the original from January 29, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
17. ↑ ^{a b} Kassel and the aviation industry since 1923 , p. 394 ff.
18. ↑ Raab flies , pp. 101, 109.
19. ↑ Raab wrote in his memoir "SA", but it must have been an SS squadron .
20. ↑ AEKKEA-RAAB in the English language Wikipedia
21. ^ Kassel and the aviation industry since 1923 , p. 401
22. ↑ indiankanoon.org
23. ↑ Raab flies , p. 160