Axel de Vries

Axel de Vries (born June 4 ^{. Jul} / 16th June  1892 ^greg. In Wrede seat , Governorate of Estonia , Russian Empire ; † 24. January 1963 in Bonn ) was a German politician and journalist. As a representative of the German-speaking minority, De Vries was a member of the Estonian parliament from 1924 to 1926. During the Second World War he was a member of the German military administration in occupied Belarus. After the end of the war he was briefly a member of the Bundestag for the FDP and spokesman for the German-Baltic Landsmannschaft .

Life

After taking home lessons, the son of a farmer attended the Russian Nikolai grammar school and from 1906 the knight and cathedral school in Reval , where he graduated from high school in 1910. He then took up medicine at the University of Dorpat , but switched to law in 1912. De Vries remained enrolled at the university until 1918; at the same time he worked as a journalist ; so in the summer of 1914 for the Nordlivländische Zeitung in Dorpat . In December 1918 he married Else Zoege von Manteuffel ; the marriage resulted in a daughter.

Politician in Estonia

During the First World War , de Vries went via Finland and Sweden to Germany in the fall of 1917 to join the German army as a volunteer . Given his knowledge of the situation in the Baltic States , the German General Staff decided to send him back to Tallinn. His job there is described differently as a military spy and as a liaison to Estonian and German-Baltic circles. One of his tasks was to assemble an Estonian delegation for the negotiations on the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty . On the way to the negotiations, de Vries was captured by Bolshevik troops and held in Petrograd in February and March 1918 . In his possession were secret documents that contributed to the crackdown on the Bolsheviks against the predominantly German-speaking Baltic nobility. From 1918 to 1920, de Vries was an intelligence officer in a regiment of a German Freikorps that fought in the Baltic States. Then he was 1920-1921 as head of Saatzuchtstation Kedder / county Jerwen the Estonian Agricultural Association operates. His family property was expropriated after the end of the war as part of an agricultural reform .

From 1921 to 1940 de Vries was editor-in-chief of the German-language “ Revalschen Zeitung ”, which initially appeared under the name “Revaler Bote”. In 1925 he published The Soviet Union after Lenin's death , in which he summarized his findings from a study trip through the Soviet Union . At the same time, the Revalsche Zeitung began to publish a weekly Russian supplement, which was considered a reliable source for internal Russian events.

De Vries was politically active in the German Baltic Party (DbPE), which saw itself as a representative of the German-speaking minority, who made up 1.7% of the total population of Estonia in 1922. Within the party, de Vries is assigned to the "group of the long-established intelligentsia "; other party groups were the landed aristocracy, big industry and trade, as well as a tendency described as democratic. From 1921 to 1923 de Vries was parliamentary group leader of his party in the Tallinn city council. From 1924 to 1926 he was a member of the Estonian Parliament . There he was a member of the Defense Committee. In 1925 he took over the chairmanship of the German Baltic Party, which he held until 1933.

After the coup on March 12, 1934 , he was briefly imprisoned for political reasons. The DbPE was banned. In the official representation of the German minority, the German cultural administration, he played no role and was rejected by the leadership of the ethnic group around Wilhelm von Wrangell . According to an internal Nazi report, the reason was that he was accused of being pro-Estonian and the liberal-democratic system.

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1939 the Soviet Union occupied Estonia due to the secret agreement on the Hitler-Stalin Pact . The German minority, including de Vries, had the Baltic leave . He was assigned a farm in the "Warthegau" , an area that became part of the German Empire after the German invasion of Poland . An application for further land allocation was rejected due to the National Socialist ideas of hereditary health (the wife's mother suffered from schizophrenia ).

He was later drafted into the Wehrmacht and worked in the military administration in occupied Belarus after the German attack on the Soviet Union . From September 1941 he was a member of the Bobruisk Economic Command and was a district agricultural leader in Gomel . In February 1942, he moved to the head of agriculture at the Central Economic Inspectorate under Richard Wagner , where he earned the reputation of a “thought leader”.

De Vries was questioned in the early 1960s as part of an investigation into Nazi crimes. He stated that he was present at the execution of Jews by Belarusian police forces. His request not to carry out the execution cruelly was not granted, so de Vries. De Vries' presentation contradicts the "Proposals [s] for combating the partisan threat," which he wrote between December 1941 and March 1942. In the text de Vries referred to the Jews as “our mortal enemies. There can be no question of a compromise with them. They have to be destroyed because the P. [artisan] mischief can otherwise last for years. "De Vries suggested the use of local or Baltic police formations, which are motivated by the prospect of loot and anti-Semitic :" It takes my experience As a rule, not an order, but only an allowance. ”He also advocated that all former members and candidates of the CPSU and“ the communist village intelligentsia, e. B. teachers etc. "to kill. De Vries' suggestions were passed on from his superior Wagner to the commander of the rear Central Army Area , General Max von Schenckendorff . After a lecture by de Vries at Schenckendorff, a corresponding service instruction was issued.

From January 1944, de Vries looked after three regiments of Cossacks and Caucasians who were settled in the Novogrodek area as military farmers and were supposed to support the German side in the fight against the partisans in Belarus. After the reconquest of Belarus by the Red Army , de Vries returned to his farm in the Warthegau in 1944, from where he fled to Ohr in January 1945 from the approaching Red Army .

Member of the Bundestag and spokesman for the displaced

From 1948 de Vries was editor-in-chief of the Stuttgart magazine “Dein Weg”. In 1949 he moved - also as editor-in-chief - to the "Ostdeutsche Zeitung, the voice of the expellees" in Hamburg. In the Federal Republic of Germany , de Vries joined the FDP . He had been a member of the German Bundestag since January 5, 1953, as a replacement for his late Stuttgart party friend Ernst Mayer . In the second Bundestag, elected in September 1953 , de Vries was no longer represented.

In parallel to his journalistic and political activities, de Vries was involved in organizations of the displaced. In 1948 he was a co-founder of the German-Baltic Landsmannschaft in Baden-Württemberg. He later became the spokesman and deputy chairman of the Landsmannschaft, before taking over its chairmanship in 1962. De Vries is one of the main authors of the charter of German expellees from August 5, 1950. As an observer of the expellees, he was present at foreign ministers and summit conferences in Berlin, Geneva and Paris in the 1950s. Unlike the majority of the displaced de Vries wanted together with his party colleagues Josef Trischler in advising the Federal Law already let the expulsion as proof of the necessary avowal of German ethnic in the old country sufficient because the mentioned in the legal text "objective characteristics" often are provable.

Fonts

• David Shub: Lenin. (German by Margret Zedtwitz and Axel de Vries). Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden 1957.

literature

• Mads Ole Balling: From Reval to Bucharest. Statistical-biographical handbook of the parliamentarians of the German minorities in East Central and Southeastern Europe 1919–1945. Volume 1: Introduction, systematics, sources and methods, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia. 1st – 2nd Edition. Documentation Publishing House, Copenhagen 1991, ISBN 87-983829-3-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Axel de Vries in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry in the baptismal register of the parish of St. Marien-Magdalenen (Estonian: Koeru kogudus).
2. ^ ^{A b} Christian Gerlach : Calculated murders. The German economic and annihilation policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-930908-54-9 , p. 686.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Michael Garleff : German Baltic politics between the world wars. The parliamentary activity of the Baltic German parties in Latvia and Estonia (= sources and studies on Baltic history. Vol. 2, ISSN  0930-9020 ). Verlag Wissenschaftliches Archiv, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1976, p. 53.
4. ↑ This assessment by Michael Garleff: German Baltic Policy between the World Wars. The parliamentary activities of the Baltic German parties in Latvia and Estonia . Verlag Wissenschaftliches Archiv, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1976, p. 54.
5. ↑ Figures from Michael Garleff: German Baltic Policy between the World Wars. The parliamentary activities of the Baltic German parties in Latvia and Estonia . Verlag Wissenschaftliches Archiv, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1976, p. 163.
6. ↑ Michael Garleff: German Baltic Policy between the World Wars. The parliamentary activities of the Baltic German parties in Latvia and Estonia . Verlag Wissenschaftliches Archiv, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1976, p. 18.
7. ^ Balling: From Reval to Bucharest. 1991, p. 126.
8. ↑ This assessment by Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, p. 686.
9. ^ Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, p. 687.
10. ↑ ^{a b c} Sonderführer de Vries: Proposals for combating the partisan threat. quoted by Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and annihilation policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-930908-54-9 , p. 686 f.