Carltheo Zeitschel

Carltheo Zeitschel , also Carl-Theodor Zeitschel or Carl Theo Zeitschel , (born March 13, 1893 in Augsburg ; died April 21, 1945 in Schmölln ) was a German doctor , National Socialist and diplomat who was deported to the German embassy in France as a Jewish advisor organized and promoted the Jews.

Life

As the son of the pharmacy owner Franz Zeitschel and Ella van Hees, he studied medicine at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau from 1911 and worked as an assistant doctor in the Freiburg reserve hospital from 1914 to 1917 during the First World War . After the state examination in 1918 and his discharge from army service, he was a member of the Reinhard Freikorps in Berlin from 1919 to 1920 , at the same time an assistant doctor in the Friedrichshain clinic and later a doctor in sanatoriums in the Black Forest. Since August 6, 1923 he was a member of the NSDAP .

Between 1925 and 1935 he worked as a ship's doctor and between 1930 and 1931 as personal physician to Wilhelm II in Doorn . In 1933 he became a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer .

1935–1937 he was head of division for colonial issues and for the Far East in the Reich Propaganda Ministry , since 1936 head of the NSDAP's colonial policy office .

In November 1937, before Hitler's reorganization of the Reich government , the armed forces leadership and the appointment of Joachim von Ribbentrop as Reich Foreign Minister on February 4, 1938, he came to the Foreign Office . There he became legation counselor and clerk in the colonial department of the AA . In June 1939 he was briefly the German consul in Lagos in the British colony of Nigeria ( Federation of Nigeria ).

On April 20, 1939, he joined the SS as SS-Hauptsturmführer and at the same time was appointed SS-Führer to the staff of the SS-Hauptamt .

At the beginning of November 1939 Zeitschel was the representative of the Foreign Office at the military commander in Warsaw and special representative of this office for the winding up of the Warsaw Diplomatic Corps . Then in 1940 he followed the German troops to Brussels as a member of the special command Eberhard von Künsberg , which organized the art theft .

Zeitschel and Dannecker organized the traveling exhibition Le Juif et la France in occupied France in 1941 .

Jewish advisor in Paris

Zeitschel had been working in Paris since June 1940. First in the office of the authorized representative of the AA at the military commander in France (together with Rudolf Rahn , who began his Paris assignment there as head of propaganda, press and radio work). Then he was brought to the German embassy by Ambassador Otto Abetz , again as he was in Warsaw to carry out the foreign missions, and among other organizational tasks he was still involved in the robbery of Jewish art, which was "brought into the custody of the German embassy". As of September 1940, as a representative for Jewish and Freemason matters , he became the liaison to the Commander of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) and was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer parallel to his career in the diplomatic service . With Dannecker he carried out the exhibition “The Jew and France”, which opened in Paris on September 5, 1941. As a “Judenreferent” he was one of the engines of the “ Final Solution in France”, ie the deportation and murder of the Jews. The participation of the German ambassador in the Jewish measures was necessary both in the unoccupied France of the Vichy government and in occupied France. In a document submitted in the Eichmann trial , the close cooperation between the German security service (SD) in France with the BdS Helmut Bone at the head and Theodor Dannecker as his representative in Paris on the one hand and the German embassy on the other is expressed (also Ernst Achenbach , later FDP foreign politician and almost German EEC commissioner, participates here):

"State Attorney Bach: The next document is our No. 442, the description of a meeting in Paris with the participation of Ambassador Abetz, Obersturmfuehrer Dannecker, and Counselors Achenbach and Zeitschel. The subjects of the discussion were mainly an expose by Herr Dannecker on what had so far been done about the Jewish Question in France, and proposals by the Ambassador concerning important French personalities who might be considered for setting up "the Jewish Office" in France. On that occasion it transpired that an exemplary card index of all the Jews of Paris, in four types of listing, was almost completed, thanks to the preparatory work of the SD headed by Herr Dannecker, who had years of experience in Jewish affairs, starting back in Austria and Czechoslovakia. "

“Dannecker now quotes statistical figures for the Jews in Paris and France. And it says further: "Herr Dannecker made the most interesting disclosure that, on the basis of the Jewish laws of October 4 in the unoccupied sector, over 40,000 Jews are already in concentration camps and further arrests are taking place all the time."

In August 1941 Zeitschel put pressure on Abetz, so that he obtained a promise from Heinrich Himmler "personally" that "the Jews in the concentration camp can be deported to the east as soon as the means of transport allow it" and from then on gave the pressure to Dannecker further.

Zeitschel was sufficiently privy to top-secret processes and therefore knew that the Wannsee Conference had taken place on January 20, 1942 . He now tried to obtain the protocol about their "course" from Undersecretary Woermann in order to apply this to the deportation of the French Jews.

On February 5, 1946, a letter from Zeitschel was read out at the Nuremberg Trials :

“I am now submitting Document RF-1220. It is a letter from the German Embassy in Paris from Dr. Zeitschel, dated June 27, 1942. I would like to read this letter; It reads as follows: 'On the basis of the meeting with Hauptsturmführer Dannecker on June 27, 1942, in which he explained to me that he needed 50,000 Jews from the unoccupied area as soon as possible for the purpose of transporting them to the East, and also stated that due to the Note from the General Commissioner for the Jewish Question , Darquier de Pellepoix , that something must absolutely be done for him, I presented the matter to Ambassador Abetz and Envoy Rahn immediately after the meeting. Envoy Rahn is meeting President Laval this afternoon and has promised me that he will discuss the matter of the transfer of 50,000 Jews with him immediately and will also insist that Darquier de Pellepoix perfect the laws that have already been passed He is given freedom of action and receives the loans he has promised immediately. Unfortunately, since I am absent from Paris for eight days, because of the urgency of the matter, I ask that Hauptsturmführer Dannecker contact Mr. Envoy Rahn directly on Monday 29th or Tuesday 30th June to find out about him as Laval's answer was. '"

In “Das Amt” 2010 and in response to the book, the Independent Commission of Historians - Foreign Office made it clear that the role of the Paris Embassy and the Foreign Office in promoting the Shoah has so far been underestimated. Already in the late summer of 1941 Zeitschel gave Abetz a memorandum on his way to Berlin, in which he proposed

to exterminate or sterilize European Jews with the aim of making them over 33 BC. H. lose their misboche through these measures.

In Berlin, Abetz met Ribbentrop and Hitler with this memorandum immediately before Hitler's decision to deport Jews from Germany .

Jewish advisor in Tunis

Almost at the same time, Zeitschel and Rudolf Rahn, who was the Foreign Office's representative at the German Africa Corps from November 15, 1942 to May 10, 1943 , arrived at the Tunis bridgehead on November 13, 1942 , after Erwin Rommel's defeat and surrender left the Italian and German divisions in May 1943. In Tunisia, which came SWAT team of Walter Rauff from 24 November 1942 applications. On December 6th, in a meeting with General Walther Nehring and Rahn , Rauff agreed on the use of Jewish forced laborers and set up a system of labor camps organized by Theo Saevecke . However, there were no mass murders because of the different interests of Vichy France, Italy and the leadership of the Africa Corps, between which the "zbV envoy" Rahn had to mediate, who, according to his own statement, rejected the demands of the SS men, because otherwise also Italian Jews in Tunisia would have been affected. That was not opportune at the time.

Until July 1944 Zeitschel was back at the German embassy in Paris. He also worked on a project to reorganize the Paris police in the service of the occupier and was responsible for the organized looting of Parisian works of art from galleries.

After the dissolution of the embassy in Paris on August 1, 1944, he became a leader in the staff of the SS-Oberabschnitt Spree, the head of which was SS-Obergruppenführer August Heißmeyer .

Further fate was unclear in the literature until the Federal Foreign Office issued files in 2014, after which he died in April 1945 in Schmölln, although there are several places with this name. Ernst Klee wrote in the personal encyclopedia about the Third Reich : "... Zeitschel is said to have died in a bomb attack in Berlin in 1945". The French judiciary sentenced him in absentia to life in forced labor for his crimes in 1954.

In the trial against Abetz and in the judicial prosecution of the deportations of Jews from France, which began much later, the name Zeitschel was repeatedly mentioned by the accused and their witnesses to hold one of the main perpetrators responsible and thereby exonerate themselves.

literature

• Johannes Hürter (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. 5. T - Z, supplements. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 5: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: Schöningh, Paderborn a. a. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-71844-0 , p. 361 f.
• Léon Poliakov , Joseph Wulf : The Third Reich and its servants , Fourier, Wiesbaden 1989, ISBN 3-925037-45-4 , u. a. expenditure
• Roland Ray: Approaching France in the Service of Hitler? Otto Abetz and the German policy on France 1930–1942. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-486-56495-1 , biographical data on Zeitschel there p. 371
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945? S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
• Christopher Browning , Unleashing the "Final Solution". National Socialist Jewish Policy 1939–1942. Propylaea, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-549-07187-6
• Michael Mayer : States as perpetrators. Ministerial bureaucracy and “Jewish policy” in Nazi Germany and Vichy France. A comparison. Series: Studies on Contemporary History, 80th Oldenbourg, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-58945-0 (also Diss. Munich 2007)
• Serge Klarsfeld : Vichy - Auschwitz , from the Franz. Von Ahlrich Meyer , Nördlingen 1989; New edition 2007 by WBG , Darmstadt, ISBN 978-3-534-20793-0

References and comments

1. ↑ see letter from Abetz to the military commander in Paris, in: Poliakov, p. 118
2. ↑ Poliakov, pp. 123, 124f, 126; Ray p. 371
3. ^ Rita Thalmann : Gleichschaltung in France 1940–1944 From the Franz. By Eva Groepler. European Publishing House, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-434-50062-6 , p. 213 (Original: La mise au pas )
4. ^ Bernhard Brunner, The France Complex: The National Socialist Crimes in France and the Justice in the Federal Republic of Germany , Frankfurt 2008, p. 42 f.
5. ↑ nizkor.org - Eichmann trial
6. ↑ Record, August 22, 1941 for Mr. Ambassador , in: Serge Klarsfeld: Vichy - Auschwitz , new edition 2007, p. 390f (CDJC V-15)
7. ↑ document VEJ 5/285 and Poliakov, p 120; Browning p. 466. Zeitschel to Dannecker, October 8, 1941, in: Serge Klarsfeld: Vichy - Auschwitz , new edition 2007, p. 390 (CDJC V-16)
8. ↑ Poliakov, p. 121 (after 1945 his superiors Ribbentrop, Weizsäcker , Woermann and Abetz (Ray, p. 372) denied knowledge of it)
9. ↑ Nuremberg Trial February 5, 1946 at zeno.org. The document is also in Poliakov, p. 122
10. ↑ Record, August 21, 1941 for Mr. Ambassador , in: Serge Klarsfeld: Vichy - Auschwitz , new edition 2007, p. 390 (CDJC V-8)
11. ↑ Conze u. a .: Our book hit a nerve. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 10, 2010, p. 13
12. ↑ Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Martin Cüppers : Half moon and swastika. The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine . WBG, Darmstadt 2006, 2011, ISBN 978-3-534-19729-3
13. ^ Paul Seabury: The Wilhelmstrasse. The history of German diplomacy 1930–1945 . Nest, Frankfurt 1956 (English 1954), p. 247 dnb
14. ^ Rudolf Rahn : restless life: records and memories . Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1949, p. 301. What is remarkable about his book of memories is that Rahn does not mention the name Zeitschel, although he worked with him in Berlin, Paris and Tunis.
15. ^ Structure , New York, Vol. 12, No. 3, Jan 18, 1946, pp. 1f.
16. ↑ Bernhard Brunner, p. 43.
17. ↑ Bernhard Brunner, p. 43; Ray, p. 373.
18. ↑ On page 692 there is an anecdote about Zeitschel's “Aryan understanding of art” and the “Jewish” performance of Richard Strauss' Die Schweigsame Frau .
19. ↑ Readable in Google books online; Zeitschel passim