German-English Society
The German-English Society (DEG) was a German organization for German-British understanding during the National Socialist era . It was the German sister organization of the British Anglo-German Fellowship . It was founded on December 2, 1935 by Joachim von Ribbentrop and dissolved in 1939.
organization
The society only became really active in mid-1937, when a close collaboration with the Anglo-German Fellowship developed. DEG developed the peak of its activities in 1938.
The DEG was composed almost exclusively of leading party and government members and members of the executive board of business. The members of the economy came mainly from the companies IG Farben , AEG , Siemens , Metallgesellschaft , ESSO , Wintershall , C. Lorenz and the Kalisyndikats .
The membership fee was 20 Reichsmarks. The company and the Ribbentrop office were responsible for the financing .
The head office was in Berlin at Bendlerstrasse 30. There were 11 branches in Hamburg , Bremen , Essen , Cologne , Wiesbaden , Frankfurt am Main , Heidelberg , Stuttgart , Munich , Vienna , Dresden .
The main activity was political lectures and cultural events.
As a newsletter, the “German-English booklet” has been published six times a year since 1938.
The German-English Circle (DEK) was the youth organization of the DEG that organized German-English youth camps.
Members
From April 1937 to April 1938 the number of members rose from 176 to 560. In the spring of 1939 there were 700 and a ban on membership was imposed. Members were u. a .:
- Carl Eduard Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Honorary Chairman and President)
- Eugen Lehnkering (Chairman of the Board, Shipowner, Vice President of the Lower Rhine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Foreign Policy Advisor to Ribbentrops)
- Karl Haushofer (board member)
- Edmund von Sellner (President of the Reich Association for German Wholesale and Overseas Trade)
- Walter Hewel (temporarily treasurer)
- Walther Funk (board member)
- Hans Friedrich Blunck (board member)
- Joseph Goebbels (honorary member)
- Franz Seldte (honorary member)
- Nevile Henderson (Honorary Member, British Ambassador to Germany)
- Kurt Elfe (AEG)
- Albert Freiherr Dufour von Féronce (Lorenz AG and Dresdner Bank )
- Georg von Schnitzler (IG Farben)
- Max Ilgner (IG Farben)
- Kurt Freiherr von Schröder
- Fritz Rechberg
- Emil Helfferich ( Hapag and Esso)
- Karl Lindemann ( North German Lloyd and Dresdner Bank)
literature
- Ernst Ritter: The first German-English Society (1935–1939) . In: Friedrich Kahlenberg (Ed.): From the work of the archives . Boppard am Rhein 1989, pp. 811-826.
- Karlheinz Schädlich : Appeaser in action. Hitler's British friends in the Anglo-German Fellowship . Yearbook for History 1969, p. 228 f.
- Ralph Uhlig: The German-English Society 1949–1983. The contribution of their "Königswinter Conferences" to British-German understanding, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1986, ISBN 3-525-36192-0 .