Bernhard Lippert (diplomat)

Bernhard Gustav Lippert (born October 7, 1904 in Salzburg ; † October 10, 1946 in a car accident) was a German diplomat .

Live and act

Lippert was born in Salzburg in 1904 as the son of the Austrian court and forest councilor Adolf Lippert and his wife Meta Eleonore Sofie Lippert (née Röhm) from Bavaria. His older brother was the lawyer Robert Lippert , his younger brother Otto Lippert. One of Lippert's uncle was the politician Ernst Röhm , a brother of his mother's.

After attending high school in Salzburg ( Matura 1923), the Protestant Lippert studied engineering at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna from 1923 to 1927 . After taking the three state exams, he worked from 1927 to 1929 as a graduate engineer in agriculture. From October 1 to January 31, 1930 he worked for the Forest Inspectorate of the Lower Austrian provincial government in Vienna. From May 14, 1930 to October 31, 1933 he was forester in the Dutch forest service in Soekaboemi on West Java .

On May 1, 1933 , Lippert joined the NSDAP . After acquiring German citizenship, he was accepted into the Foreign Service of the German Reich on May 8, 1934 through the mediation of his uncle Ernst Röhm - as Chief of Staff of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the National Socialist Party Army, at that time the second most powerful man in Germany after Hitler on June 1, 1934). In the Foreign Office , Lippert was initially employed with the rank of attaché in Department IV (Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, East Asia). From May 8th he worked temporarily at the German consulate in Geneva .

On June 30, 1934, Lippert was arrested by the Gestapo in the course of the " Röhm Affair " and held in a concentration camp for two weeks. The main aim of the National Socialist purge was to break the power of Lippert's uncle Röhm, whom Hitler had arrested and shot on the pretext that he had planned a coup (" Röhm Putsch "). Lippert appears to have been classified by the Gestapo as a potential co-conspirator due to his close relationship and his role as Röhm's protégé.

According to Lippert's diplomatic colleague Hans-Otto Meissner , he escaped execution because, unlike many other people arrested at the time, he had been subjected to a thorough interrogation after his arrest and was not simply brought before a firing squad unheard. After Lippert had shown complete ignorance of any coup plans during the interrogations by the Gestapo, he was released again after a few days of “intimidation”.

After two more years in the foreign service - including from 1935 to 1936 at the German consulate in Brussels - Lippert passed the diplomatic-consular examination on June 24, 1936. From August 1, 1936, he was the German consul general in New York . On July 4, 1938, he received the title of Vice Consul. After the closure of all German consular offices in the United States in June 1941, he returned to Germany on July 16, 1941.

From July 29, 1941 he was employed in the political department of the Foreign Office in Berlin, where he mainly found tasks in Section IX / America, most recently in the Information Office IXa / North America Service of the Foreign Information Service. On June 22, 1942, he was promoted to Legation Council . In the meantime (1943/1944) he was a member of the Wehrmacht. From July 30, 1944 to October 6, 1944 he was employed at the Legation in Tirana under the title of Legation Councilor , and from November 15, 1944 he was employed in the Political Department of the Foreign Office (Section IV B / Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia among others).

In December 1944, in view of the increasing air raids on Salzburg, Lippert and his family moved to Eugendorf near Salzburg.

Marriage and offspring

On October 20, 1930, Lippert married Charlotte Taege (* 1910) from Munich in Salzburg. On June 10, 1939, he married the American-born Luise Bernstorff (or Aloisia Aman) in New York. The marriage resulted in a daughter, Diana Lippert (born November 24, 1940).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The overview register of the personal files in the Political Archive of the Foreign Office notes in the entry on the Lippert files in the column "Remarks" an information from Hans-Otto Meissner from the year 1984, according to which Meissner told the archive that he had heard that Lippert had an accident at the end of 1947.