Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow

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Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow

Bernhard Wilhelm Otto Viktor von Bülow (born June 19, 1885 in Potsdam , † June 21, 1936 in Berlin ) was a German diplomat . He was best known as State Secretary in the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1936.

Live and act

Youth and early career (1885-1919)

Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow came from the Mecklenburg noble family von Bülow . He was born in 1885 as the son of the Prussian major general Adolf von Bülow and his wife Carola, a daughter of the royal Prussian master of ceremonies Otto Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt . The father, who died in 1897, had been the personal adjutant of Kaiser Wilhelm II . One of Bülow's uncle was Bernhard von Bülow , the fourth Chancellor of the German Reich. Both he and his grandfather, Bernhard Ernst von Bülow, had served as state secretaries in the Foreign Office; They were, however, head of the office under the Reich Chancellor, while a State Secretary worked under a Reich Minister during the Weimar period.

Bülow attended high schools in Magdeburg , Frankfurt am Main , Potsdam and Goslar . In 1904 he passed the Abitur. From 1904 to 1909 he studied law and economics in Lausanne , Munich and Berlin. In July 1908 he passed the legal traineeship and went briefly to the judiciary. In February 1909 he was with a dissertation on "the challenge errors as Reurecht" to Dr. jur. PhD .

After a private trip around the world between 1909 and 1911, Bülow joined the Foreign Service of the German Empire on January 1, 1912 . Bülow belonged to this until 1919 , interrupted by his participation in the First World War as Rittmeister of the Reserve from August 1914 to August 1915. From January 1912 to April 1913 he was employed as an attaché at the German Embassy in Washington, DC and then in the Foreign Office in Berlin from April in Department II “Trade Policy”, from October in Department IA “Politics”. After he returned to civilian life wounded and awarded the Iron Cross first and second class, he was deployed as legation secretary at the German missions in Constantinople (November 1915 to May 1916) and Athens (June to November 1916) in 1915/1916 , before joining in December 1916 returned to the Department of IA "Politics" of the AA. From December 1917 to March 1918 he was a member of the German delegation to the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk . In 1919 he took part in the peace negotiations in Versailles as a member of the political commission of the German delegation . There, as head of the 12th sub-commission of the German delegation, he was particularly concerned with the issues arising in connection with the so-called war guilt question. Because he refused to accept the Allied ultimatum to sign the treaty, he resigned from the Foreign Service on June 30, 1919 after the negotiations were over.

Career in the Weimar Republic

Opponent of Stresemann's policy of understanding

In the following years , Bülow wrote books on the prehistory of the World War and the League of Nations as a freelance writer and was co-editor of the magazine Die Deutsche Nation , whose editor-in-chief was taken over by Theodor Heuss in 1923 . Although Bülow was initially also close to the left-wing liberal German Democratic Party , he advocated a revision of the peace treaty, which he perceived as a shame and dictate. In his opinion, the revision of the treaty had to be a prerequisite - and not a consequence - of the integration of the German Reich into the post-war order.

In February 1923, Bülow returned to the Foreign Service and, with the rank of lecturing council, became head of the special department for League of Nations, which initially gained in importance after the German Reich joined the world organization in 1926. Here Bülow did not advise constructive cooperation, but always with an "unctuous tone" to disguise the true intentions of German politics, namely the revision of the Versailles Treaty. The strong opposition of the Secretary of the League of Nations to Gustav Stresemann's policy of understanding threatened to jeopardize the possibilities of small, pragmatic advances, for example in minority policy, which the Foreign Minister tried to achieve at the regular meetings of the League of Nations. Therefore, State Secretary Schubert soon curtailed Bülow's influence in the Foreign Office. In January 1928 he therefore lost his responsibility for the League of Nations and became the conductor of Department II, the "West and Southeast Europe" Department. There he ensured a clear tightening of the tone towards France. In August 1929, for example, he presented a collection of arguments against the plan of the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand to found a “European federal union” , which the latter only published the following month. Instead of closer cooperation with its western neighbor, Bülow relied on a free hand policy and cooperation with the Soviet Union . From this he hoped for the prospect of an expansion of the German position in the Danube region, a connection to Austria and a revision of the border with Poland .

State Secretary in the presidential cabinet

Precisely because of his increasingly critical attitude towards the understanding policy of Stresemann, who died on October 3, 1929, Bülow was appointed State Secretary on June 2, 1930 as successor to Carl von Schubert . The practical takeover of the business took place on June 18th. This was preceded by the overthrow of Hermann Müller's government , the last fully parliamentary government of the Weimar Republic, on March 27, 1930. The overthrow of the Social Democrat Hermann Müller and the rapid installation of his successor Heinrich Brüning from the center meant a clear shift to the right in domestic politics and the end in foreign politics the Locarno era, for which Bülow's promotion to the head of the Foreign Office was not the cause, but an important symptom.

After Reich President Paul von Hindenburg had campaigned for Bülow's promotion even before the Brüning government took office, the new Chancellor decided after a personal meeting in Darmstadt to entrust him with the management of the Foreign Office. After his grandfather Bernhard Ernst von Bülow and his uncle Bernhard von Bülow, who had exercised this office under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst , Bülow was the third representative of his family in this office.

In his capacity as State Secretary, he seconded the respective Foreign Minister in the management of foreign affairs. He was also responsible for the practical management of the Foreign Office. The foreign ministers under whom Bülow exercised his office were Julius Curtius ( DVP ), Brüning, who held the office from October 1931 in personal union with that of the chancellor, and Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath , who was close to the DNVP . Since after Stresemann's death foreign policy was very much determined by the respective chancellors, the Foreign Office lost much of its previous autonomy during Bülow's tenure. During this time in the presidential cabinet, German foreign policy tightened considerably. In rapid succession, the German Reich demanded a customs union with Austria, a reduction, and soon also a cancellation of reparations, and military equality with the victorious powers. Bülow set the tone when, shortly after his promotion to the head of the Foreign Office, he wrote that Germany had other interests than just the elimination of all possibilities of war , such as Briand was striving for. For example, he wanted to make a waiver of war, which Germany itself had already made in 1928 by signing the Briand-Kellogg Pact , on the condition that other paths to a peaceful reconciliation of interests, i.e. a revision of the peace treaty, would be opened up for him.

Bülow in the Nazi dictatorship (1933-1936)

Although he had a rather liberal attitude and was an opponent of National Socialism , Bülow remained in office even after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the National Socialists came to power in 1933 - a step he justified with his sense of duty (“You don't let your country down because it has bad government. ”). Bülow felt committed to the model of the apolitical, exclusively professional judging official. But as early as March 1933 he said that in conversations with diplomats he had always referred to the "strong influx of Eastern Jews" who had been naturalized en masse in the 1920s and also the "advance of Jews into the judiciary, universities, schools, etc." a. more since 1918 ”, was obvious. On March 13, 1933, he then issued the instruction to collect material on the alleged "disproportionate advance of Jews in public life in Germany" as an aid to argumentation to justify German policy towards the Jews abroad. This instruction from the State Secretary, which his nephew Vicco von Bülow-Schwante put into practice within the office , "marks", in the opinion of the Independent Commission of Historians around Eckart Conze , "to a certain extent the beginning [...] on the way to the final solution." Jewish question ". Johannes Hürter from the Institute for Contemporary History contradicts this view of the Historians' Commission . He considers their evaluation to be “a completely incomprehensible overestimation” of the Bülow directive, which suggests “a linear development” to the “final solution” that does not do justice to the state of research.

In the early summer of 1934, Bülow was scheduled to be murdered as part of the wave of political cleansing known as the " Röhm Putsch ". However, he survived because Hermann Göring struck him off the death list, which the SS and Gestapo units that carried out the murders used for orientation. The loss of influence that the Federal Foreign Office and its chief state secretary had suffered since 1930 continued after the seizure of power. It aroused the astonishment of the officials that Hitler did not participate in his talks with the British Foreign Minister John Simon Bülow during the crisis over German rearmament in March 1935 .

death

Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow died in 1936, just two days after his 51st birthday, of an embolism caused by pneumonia. He found his final resting place in the hereditary burial of the Bülow family in the Old Twelve Apostles Cemetery in Berlin-Schöneberg .

Bülow's successor as State Secretary of the Foreign Office was Hans Georg von Mackensen .

Evaluation by contemporaries and posterity

In retrospect, Bülow's work was rated largely positively by his contemporaries: the diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker called him in "next to Maltzahn the best horse in our stable between the two world wars" [d. H. in the Foreign Office]. André François-Poncet , French ambassador to Germany from 1931 to 1937, later noted with appreciation that although Bülow had always remained polite and amiable during negotiations, he was at the same time factually imperturbable in the implementation of his course. Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk , German finance minister from 1932 to 1945, considered it to be the most remarkable move of Bülow that he “kept the smiling composure even in the most difficult situations”.

Although Bülow did not prevent the Foreign Office from being sworn in on Hitler in August 1934, the historians Erich Kordt and Karl-Heinz Abshagen judged in 1948 that Hitler had not "succeeded in submitting the Foreign Office until Bülow's death." They also attest Bülow said he was " lacking in factual aptitude and moral courage " to "oppose Hitler when his sense of duty was required". In addition, he said "after the upheaval in 1933 [...] he quickly recognized the deficiencies and failures of the regime and undoubtedly criticized them sharply inwardly" and "behind the scenes [...] he still knew how to prevent some disasters or at least how to mitigate the effects." In his biographical sketch in the German Biographical Encyclopedia , Friedrich Schönborn emphasizes that Bülow's most striking feature was the “sense of duty of the old Prussian aristocracy”. He describes Bülow as a man who, despite his Prussian sobriety, was filled with lofty ideals. Although Bülow was “not a man of the public” ”, those who got to know him would soon have felt“ the importance of his personality. ”On June 18, 1985, the Foreign Office held a commemoration on the occasion of Bülow's 100th birthday which the Foreign Service of the Bonn Republic demonstratively placed itself in the tradition of Bülow, whose estate is now stored in the Political Archives of the Foreign Office in Berlin.

Fonts

  • The contestation of errors as a right to repudiate , 1909. (Dissertation)
  • The crisis. The basics of diplomatic negotiations at the outbreak of war , 1920.
  • The first chimes of the world war. A time table of the important events at the outbreak of war with references to the relevant documents , de Gruyter & Co. , Berlin and Leipzig 1922.
  • The Versailles League of Nations: A Preliminary Balance Sheet , 1923.
  • Germany and the powers that be before the war in the Prince's official writings , 1929.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwentker : On the new order of Germany . 1991, p. 212.
  2. ^ Peter Krüger, The Foreign Policy of the Republic of Weimar , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1985, p. 89
  3. ↑ Hermann Graml , Between Stresemann and Hitler. The foreign policy of the presidential cabinets Brüning, Papen and Schleicher. Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, p. 43
  4. ^ Peter Krüger, The Foreign Policy of the Republic of Weimar , Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1985, p. 355
  5. ↑ Peter Krüger, The Foreign Policy of the Republic of Weimar , Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1985, p. 494
  6. ↑ Gottfried Treviranus , The End of Weimar. Heinrich Brüning and his time , Düsseldorf and Vienna 1968, p. 147; Heinrich Brüning: Memoirs 1918–1932 , Stuttgart 1970, p. 167; Philipp Heyde: The end of the reparations. Germany, France and the Youngplan , Paderborn 1998, p. 86
  7. ^ Karl Bosl: Balance, Revision, Restoration , 1976, p. 244.
  8. ^ Peter Krüger: The foreign policy of the republic of Weimar. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1985, pp. 512-515.
  9. ↑ Ludwig Biewer and Rainer Blasius: In the files, in the world. A foray through the political archive of the Federal Foreign Office , 2007, p. 65.
  10. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich 2010, p. 42.
  11. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich 2010, p. 46.
  12. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich 2010, p. 46.
  13. ↑ Johannes Hürter: The Foreign Office, the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust. Critical comments on a Commission report . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 59, issue 2 (2011), pp. 167–192, here p. 176.
  14. ↑ Der Spiegel 26/1984, p. 122 ff.
  15. ^ Paul Schmidt, extra on the diplomatic stage 1923–1945. Experiences of the chief interpreter in the Foreign Office with the statesmen of Europe. From Stresemann and Briand to Hitler, Chamberlain and Molotow , Athenaeum Verlag, Bonn 1949, p. 296.
  16. ^ Hermann Graml: Bernhard von Bülow and German foreign policy: hubris and a sense of proportion . 2012. page 11
  17. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 750.
  18. ^ Ernst von Weizsäcker: Memories , 1950, p. 128.
  19. ^ André Francois-Poncet: As Ambassador in Berlin , 1947, p. 97.
  20. ^ Lutz von Schwerin and Krosigk: Es Geschah in Deutschland , 1951, p. 307ff.
  21. ↑ Erich Kordt and Karl Heinz Abshagen: Madness and Reality. The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich , 1948, p. 97.
  22. ↑ Erich Kordt and Karl Heinz Abshagen: Madness and Reality. The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich , 1948, p. 99.
personal data
SURNAME Bülow, Bernhard Wilhelm von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bülow, Bernhard Wilhelm Otto Viktor von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH June 19, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Potsdam
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 1936
Place of death Berlin