Carl of Jordans

Carl Werner Paul Philipp Maria Joseph Hubert von Jordans (born August 23, 1884 in Lüftelberg , Rhine Province , † February 15, 1950 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German private scholar and politician . Even before 1933 he was against National Socialism .

Life and political activities

Carl von Jordans was born in 1884 as the eldest of five children of Karl Ferdinand von Jordans (1854-1897) and his wife Paula, née Baron Heereman von Zuydtwyck (1864-1940). His life up to the 1920s is almost completely in the dark. Even political companions later had little to say about Jordan's private person. The later President of the Federal Constitutional Court, Fabian von Schlabrendorff , attributed this in his memoirs to the fact that Jordans always kept a low profile and, above all, worked “in the background”. One of the few references to his work in his early years is a ten-volume edition of the works of Frederick the Great , which was published by GB Volz between 1912 and 1914 and among whose five editors a Carl Werner von Jordans is named.

Carl von Jordans was the brother of the ornithologist Adolf von Jordans .

German men's club

Since the 1920s, Jordans played an important role in the German men's club in Berlin , of which he was part of the five-member working committee. Through the gentlemen's club, Jordans came into contact with numerous influential political personalities, including the conservative center politician Franz von Papen .

Jordan district

Around 1931, von Jordans began to gather a group of politically interested, mostly Catholic , young men who were primarily averse to National Socialism , which was on the rise at the time . The members of this "Jordan Circle", in which Jordans took on the role of a mentor , included the two Wilhelm Freiherr von Ketteler and Nikolaus Christoph von Halem , who were later killed as resistance fighters against the Nazi regime, as well as Hubert Graf von Ballestrem , Ulrich Graf von Finckenstein and Hans Graf von Lehndorff . The latter later reported on the political objectives of the group: “[Jordans] considered his actual task: to be the focal point for a political will-formation with the aim of realizing a conservative state idea. He was one of the few who were not deceived about where Hitler was headed and who saw him from the start as a great danger to Germany. In the face of this danger he felt called to open the eyes of his fellow men and to mobilize all conservative forces. "

Lehndorff described the special fascination that Jordans radiated on his young followers and that shaped their political activity:

“On the weekends I was often the guest of my cousin Gerd Finckenstein in Trossin in Bärwalde in the Neumark . It was there that I met Carl von Jordans, a man who set the trend for my life in Berlin and the years that followed. He was about fifty years old, of medium height, very pale, thin, bald, had a thin, transparent skin in which the veins were clearly visible and which was so little padded that it made his temples appear like flat plates. His movements were slow and angular, when walking he needed a stick and dragged one leg a little. The most striking thing about him were his large, astonished eyes, whose brightness was underlined by an early arcus senilis on the edge of the light brown iris. They were always wide open and their gaze seemed far away. One felt more mirrored than seen through by them. There was as much of the wisdom of an old man in it as of the helplessness of a child. And that was probably what challenged him to be both deferential and careful. "

Jordans also had the “special gift of opening up people and getting them to talk. Not that he used any tricks to do this - you would have noticed. Rather, it was because you felt completely taken by him, just as you were. He had no prejudice. You didn't need to hide yourself from him, you could go out of yourself, you could tell him things that you normally wouldn't talk about, perhaps that you didn't even know yourself, but that only took shape in front of this attentive counterpart. From him you discovered yourself to a certain extent. "

Support of Franz von Papen

When Jordan's gentlemen's club friend Franz von Papen was appointed new Chancellor by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg at the end of May 1932, after the resignation of the Brüning cabinet , Jordans held the event on the evening of May 30, 1932 - one day before the public announcement of Papen's appointment - a lecture evening in his Berlin apartment. As Kurt Georg Kiesinger , who attended this event, later reported, that evening Jordans had invited about thirty selected younger men, among whom Papen hoped to recruit employees for his government. After a brief introduction by Jordans, Papen gave a lecture on the topic of the conservative idea of ​​the state, in which he informed those present of his impending appointment as Chancellor - which the press had not yet known -, outlined his political goals and asked them to participate in his government prompted. According to Kiesinger's memories, his colleague at the Berlin district court (and Jordans supporter) Wilhelm Freiherr von Ketteler made himself available to the designated chancellor that evening .

Lehndorff also reports that on the evening of January 29, 1933, the day before Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor , the Jordanskreis sent him and his brother Heinfried to be Reich President von Hindenburg (a close friend of their grandfather Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau ) to request in a personal audience not to hand over power to Hitler. In the Reich President's Palace , however, both were only admitted to Hindenburg's personal advisor, who had put them off with assurances that power was in good hands.

After the seizure of power

After Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933 and the establishment of the National Socialist terror apparatus in the weeks that followed, Jordans soon came under the regime's sights as a “gathering point of reactionary forces”. Nevertheless, he used his extensive relationships in the first months of National Socialist rule to help various people persecuted by the regime - for whom his Berlin apartment served as a contact point - to flee abroad. For the renegade former SA leader from Berlin Walther Stennes and his wife, Jordans managed to get a passage on a ship going from Bremerhaven to Portugal . A "rather scary looking man named Bell" (this is almost certainly Georg Bell ), who appeared at Jordans a few days after the Reichstag fire of February 28, 1933 and said that he feared his life because of him The details of the circumstances of the fire were known, Jordan was also given an opportunity to escape. Bell escaped to Austria , where he was killed by members of the SA in an inn.

In 1933 and 1934, through Wilhelm von Ketteler and Friedrich Carl von Savigny (whose sister was married to a younger brother of Jordans), Jordans was in close contact with the office of the Deputy Chancellor , who at the time were planning a conservative coup against the National Socialist part of the government and the military organization of the NSDAP ( SA and SS ) were forged. When the group in the vice chancellery was broken up in the course of the Röhm affair on June 30, 1934, according to Zeller, Jordans is also said to have been targeted by the SS and only got away because of a stroke of luck. According to Steinbach and Tuchel, Nikolaus Christoph von Halem - who was later executed for attempting to prepare for an assassination attempt on Hitler - came under the influence of Jordans that year to the view that Hitler's death was a political necessity if one was to face a disaster want to prevent. Wilhelm Schmidt made the line of continuity between the circle around Jordans in the early 1930s and the prospective assassins around Jordans recognizable in his Chronicle of the German Resistance by combining both groups as the "Jordans-Halem group" into one meaningful unit.

When Berlin was bombed during World War II , Jordans moved to Freiburg im Breisgau in 1944, where he died at the age of 66.

literature

• Adalbert Erler : Memories of Carl Werner von Jordans - A Fragment , 1981.
• Rainer Orth : "Carl von Jordans", in: Ders .: "The official seat of the opposition"? Politics and state redevelopment plans in the office of the Deputy Chancellor 1933/1934 , Cologne 2016, pp. 163–180, 599f. and passim.

Web links

• Gustav Berthold Volz (ed.): The works of Frederick the Great. In German translation. Ten volumes . Translator: Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski , Willy Rath , Carl Werner von Jordans, Illustrator: Adolph von Menzel . Berlin 1913/1914

Individual evidence

1. ^ Deutsche Adelsgesellschaft: Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels .
2. ↑ Gerlind Schwöbel (Ed.): Only hope held me. Women report from the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Lembeck, Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 98.
3. ^ Fabian von Schlabrendorff: Officers against Hitler , Munich 1951, p. 36.
4. ↑ Carl von Jordan's participation in the edition of Frederick the Great
5. ↑ Since the family trees do not name any other Carl Werner, it can be assumed with reasonable certainty that both are identical.
6. ↑ Herbert Frank: Mysterious cross connections across Germany. The German men's club and other clubs . Ludendorffs Volkswarte-Verlag, Munich 1932, p. 27.
7. ^ ^{A b} Hans Graf von Lehndorff: People, Horses, Weites Land , 2001, p. 254.
8. ^ Hans Graf von Lehndorff: People, Horses, Weites Land , 2001, p. 253f.
9. ^ Kurt Georg Kiesinger: Dark and Light Years , 1989, p. 153.
10. ^ Hans Graf von Lehndorff: People, Horses, Weites Land , 2001, p. 255.
11. ^ Hans Graf von Lehndorff: People, Horses, Weites Land , 2001, p. 258.
12. ^ Peter Steinbach / Johannes Tuchel: Lexicon of Resistance 1933–1945 , 1998, p. 82
13. ^ Wilhelm Schmidt: Rassen and Völker in Prehistory and History of the Occident , Vol. 3, 1949, p. 124.
14. ↑ Lehndorff: Menschen, Pferde, weites Land , 2001, p. 268.