Dietrich von Jagow

Dietrich von Jagow

Von Jagow and László Bárdossy (right) (1941)

Dietrich Wilhelm Bernhard von Jagow (born February 29, 1892 in Frankfurt (Oder) , German Empire , † April 26, 1945 in Meran , South Tyrol , Italy ) was a German naval officer and National Socialist politician. During the Weimar Republic he organized the Nazi movement in Württemberg and worked as a full-time SA leader ( SA Obergruppenführer ). From 1941 to 1944 he was the German envoy in Hungary .

Life

Naval officer

Dietrich von Jagow came from the Altmark noble family von Jagow . His uncles were Bernhard von Jagow and Ernst von Jagow . Hans-Georg von Jagow was his brother.

After attending school, he joined the Imperial Navy on April 1, 1912, and began an officer career. He attended the Mürwik naval school and served on the SMS Hansa . During the First World War he served on submarines, among other things . After the armistice , he commanded a minesweeper . In 1920 he refused to take the oath on the Weimar Constitution and retired from active service with the rank of first lieutenant in the sea .

Nazi politician in the Weimar Republic

In September 1919, von Jagow joined the Ehrhardt Brigade , with which he took part in the Kapp Putsch . He was a member of the management committee of the terrorist organization Organization Consul and was also active in its successor organization, the Bund Wiking (district leader in Württemberg and Baden from 1922 to 1928). In autumn 1920 he became a member of the NSDAP and in winter 1920/1 also of the SA . During this time he worked as a forest and agricultural worker at a front company of the Consul organization, the Bavarian wood processing company AG. In 1921 he took part for a short time in the fight against the 3rd Polish uprising as a platoon leader in the storm company Koppe under Manfred von Killinger .

In January 1922, Adolf Hitler sent von Jagow to Tübingen as an instructor for the Nazi movement and inspector of the Württemberg SA . At the same time he was supposed to set up the Consul organization there, whose country leader he said he remained until 1927, and to train the Tübingen student battalion. To camouflage himself, von Jagow enrolled as a guest student at the Eberhard Karls University , worked as a volunteer in the Osiander bookstore and was a traveling sales representative . In doing so, he established contacts with numerous ethnic and nationalist organizations, founded several local NSDAP groups and other NS formations. After the murder of Walther Rathenau , an investigation was carried out against him without result.

After the failed Hitler putsch , von Jagow resigned from the now dissolved NSDAP in autumn 1923, but apparently continued his organizational activities. In 1927 he joined the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten , in 1928 the Württemberg Homeland Security and on January 1, 1929 again the NSDAP ( membership number 110.538). Between 1929 and 1930 he was a local group leader in Eßlingen am Neckar and Gau managing director of the NSDAP in Württemberg , until in 1931 he was appointed full-time SA group leader "Southwest". During this time he made a name for himself as an anti-Semite and a propagandist of the “Führer” principle and campaigned for the SA. From May 9, 1932, von Jagow was a member of the Reichstag as a successor and remained so until 1945, initially for constituency 31 (Württemberg) and from 1936 for constituency 3 (East Berlin).

During the National Socialism

In March 1933 von Jagow was briefly Reich Commissioner for the Württemberg police. He had a concentration camp built on the Heuberg and organized the boycott of Jewish shops on April 1, 1933. In the course of disputes between Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr and his competitor Christian Mergenthaler , von Jagow was transferred to Frankfurt am Main as leader of the SA group V. His successor was Hanns Elard Ludin .

In June 1933 he also received the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer and in September 1933 was appointed Prussian State Councilor. After the murder of Ernst Röhm during the so-called Röhm Putsch , Jagow was transferred to the SA group Berlin-Brandenburg , which he headed from July 1934 to January 1942. In 1934 he also became a member of the People's Court . In addition, in 1934 he became the Prussian Provincial Councilor of the Hesse-Nassau Province and then of the Brandenburg Province. From 1935 he was a councilor in Berlin and was a member of the board of directors of German aristocratic cooperatives. From April 1936 he was an honorary judge at the highest honor and disciplinary court of the DAF .

Von Jagow reactivated his connections to the Navy, took part in military exercises as a reserve officer and observed the Spanish Civil War as an intelligence officer on the ironclad Admiral Graf Spee . On his mediation, the naval officer Walther Rauff , who retired from active service in 1937, immediately found employment with the SD main office .

From 1939 to 1941 he took part in the Second World War as a naval officer in minesweeping and outpost associations . From September 1939 to May 1940 he commanded the mine ship Tannenberg in the Baltic Sea , was then employed at the Baltic Sea naval station and from October 1940 to the end of April 1941 as corvette captain, chief of the 18th outpost flotilla in the English Channel . After a stay at the High Command of the Navy, von Jagow was appointed German envoy in Hungary in the summer of 1941 . In Budapest he endeavored to encourage the Hungarian war effort and urged the Hungarian government to support the German " final solution to the Jewish question ". He returned to Berlin in March 1944 and was drafted into the Foreign Office in May 1944 . In September 1944 he became leader of the Volkssturmbataillon 35 (Silesia) and suffered serious wounds on January 20, 1945 that caused him to lose an eye. This was followed by a hospital stay in Leipzig until March 1945 . When the war ended, he as NS-Kurier in South Tyrol experienced, he committed on 26 April 1945 in the Merano residence of the German ambassador to the fascist Italian Social Republic , Rudolf Rahn , suicide . In a not unprejudiced " denazification procedure " in mid-February 1950, the Spruchkammer in Freiburg im Breisgau found that von Jagow was a "minor offender" and "did not come forward" as a propagandist.

literature

• Heinz-Ludger Borgert: Jagow, Dietrich von. In: Maria Magdalena Rückert (Ed.): Württembergische biographies including Hohenzollern personalities. Volume I. On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-17-018500-4 , pp. 118-121.
• Barbara Hachmann: The sword. Dietrich von Jagow, SA-Obergruppenführer. In: Michael Kießener, Joachim Scholtyseck (ed.): The leaders of the province. Nazi biographies from Baden and Württemberg . Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz, 1997, ISBN 3-87940-679-0 , pp. 267–287.

Web links

Commons : Dietrich von Jagow  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Dietrich von Jagow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Dietrich von Jagow in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Entry on Dietrich von Jagow in the Rhineland-Palatinate personal database

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 , Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 282.