Edgar Klaus

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edgar Klaus (* October 16 . Jul / 28. October  1879 greg. In Riga , Russian Empire , † 1945 or 1946 ) was an agent.

Life

The first six decades

Edgar Klaus grew up as the son of a Jewish family that had converted to the Lutheran Church. Klaus attended secondary school in Riga and then completed an apprenticeship at the local branch of the Russian-French commercial bank. From 1905 to 1907 he studied geology at the University of Dorpat , after which he worked for various banks in Russia. After returning to Latvia, he made a small fortune as a realtor.

During the First World War he was first deported to the Astrakhan governorate and then to Siberia , where he worked for the Russian Red Cross as an interpreter for prisoners of war. He came into contact with German and Austrian Social Democrats and - according to his own statements - with Josef Stalin .

During the Latvian War of Independence , he worked in the Danish consulate in Riga . An ID from the consulate enabled him to travel to Germany from April to October 1919, where he contacted the Foreign Ministry as a courier. At the end of 1919, faced with the political turmoil in his home country, he fled to Germany as the holder of a Danish passport. He worked as a real estate agent in Berlin. In 1924 he received German citizenship, according to other sources only in 1931. From 1935 to the beginning of 1939 he lived in Yugoslavia; in April 1939 he returned to his hometown Riga.

In World War II

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he worked in Lithuania as an informant for the Abwehr . A list from the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) from February 1940 identified him as a Jewish communist who worked for the French and Russian secret services. Nevertheless, the month before the German embassy had issued him a passport and in March Himmler's Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle had issued him with an identity card as a “resettler”. This enabled him to flee to the German Reich before the attack on the Soviet Union . On March 30, 1941 he left Kaunas and was received in Berlin by Hans-Ludwig von Lossow , an employee of Department I of the Abwehr, and a few days later as Prittwitz von Gaffron also by Wilhelm Canaris himself. Klaus warned von Lossow against the red Army underestimated and warned against an invasion of the Soviet Union. He repeated this assessment when, at Canaris' instigation, he was called in to a meeting with high military officials (including, so Klaus recalls, Walther von Brauchitsch and Erich von Manstein ), whose questions about the Red Army he answered. The RSHA had got wind of the generals' conversations with Klaus and his warnings; Canaris protected him from access by the Gestapo.

In May 1941 Canaris asked Klaus whether he would trust himself to establish contacts with representatives of the Soviet embassy in Stockholm, which was headed by Alexandra Michailowna Kollontai . Klaus agreed. He arrived in Stockholm a month before the attack on the Soviet Union. At first he did not succeed in making useful contacts with the embassy, ​​but from June 1941 he was able to obtain information about the formation of the Red Army divisions and their armament under the code name "General Schönemann" and forward them to Berlin via the defender Werner G. Boening - where no one believed his assessment of the fighting strength of the Red Army. In 1944, Walter Schellenberg , the head of the foreign intelligence service in Office VI of the RSHA, used Klaus's contacts to sound out, on behalf of Himmler, whether the Allies were willing to exchange objects with Himmler for the release of Jews as an object of exchange with Himmler about his fate after the foreseeable end of the Negotiating Third Reich.

Speculation about his death

The circumstances of Edgar Klaus's death are unclear; the information on this is contradictory. According to Jefferson Adams, he died on the day of the planned return trip to Germany, April 1, 1946. According to the memory of the neighbor's daughter, he had died the previous year, presumably by suicide. According to Boening, Klaus, like the other Germans, was interned in Sweden after the end of the war and was taken to Gävle Hospital , where he suddenly died on April 6, 1946. The Swedish defense had reliably informed him that Klaus had been murdered on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Aftermath

After Peter Kleist had published an article about Zeit, and in 1950 his memoir Between Hitler and Stalin 1939-45 , speculation arose again in the press about a planned peace between Germany and the Soviet Union around 1942. As a result, Helmut Heiber (IfZ) interviewed Werner G. Boening in November 1957 about his and Klaus' activities and the "Soviet peace feelers in Stockholm in 1942/43". Boening, who met Peter Kleist at Georg Cleinow's seminar in 1932 , led a.o. a. out:

Since the Legation Councilor Vladimir Semjonowitsch Semjonow appeared in Stockholm in the autumn of 1941 , the close relationship Kollontai-Klaus had been broken, but a friendly relationship developed between Semyonov and Klaus. Boening corrected some of Kleist's remarks about the first Kleist-Klaus meeting on December 14, 1942 in his Solsidan log cabin . Klaus is said to have made clear suggestions and drew a “future German-Soviet interest line” on a card with a thick line. Since everything indicated that the Russians “the National Socialist system was still more sympathetic than the western democratic one”, one could easily have talked to the Russians. Boening justified the fact that no conversation with Wladimir Georgijewitsch Dekanosow and Andrei Alexandrow in Stockholm was possible with the fact that Kleist, as a civil servant ministerial conductor, was too careful with his wife and children in Berlin.

The historian Bernd Martin denied such "explorations" in 1970 after an interview with Boening, during which he received the Klauss papers . Ingeborg Fleischhauer recalled in 1986 in Die Chance des Sonderfriedens that the German files cannot be trusted . In 1995, Semjenov mentioned in his memoirs that Klaus was recruited in Kaunas in 1939 or 1940 for the Soviet defense.

literature

  • Klaus, Edgar (1879-1946). In: Jefferson Adams: Historical dictionary of German intelligence . Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2009, ISBN 978-0-8108-5543-4 , p. 233.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Memorandum from Helmut Heiber about his conversation with Peter Kleist on November 14, 1957 in the archive of the Institute for Contemporary History Munich - Berlin (IfZ) , accessed on April 23, 2014.
  2. ↑ a b c d Jefferson Adams: Historical dictionary of German intelligence . Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2009, p. 233.
  3. ↑ a b Michael Mueller: Canaris. Hitler's chief of defense . Propylaeen, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-549-07202-3 , p. 363.
  4. ↑ Reinhard R. Doerries: Hitler's last chief of foreign intelligence. Allied interrogations of Walter Schellenberg . Frank Cass, London 2003, ISBN 0-7146-5400-0 , p. 160.
  5. ↑ Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The chance of a separate peace. German-Soviet secret talks 1941–1945 . Siedler, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-88680-247-7 . In it chapter 3: Canaris' secret peace mission in Sweden - the dispatch of Edgar Klaus. Pp. 30-50.
  6. ↑ Eleonora Storch Schwab: A Daughter Remembers. In: Gertrude Schneider (Ed.): The unfinished road. Jewish survivors of Latvia look back . Praeger, New York 1991, ISBN 0-275-94093-4 , p. 177, limited preview .
  7. ↑ Peter Kleist: Hammer, Sichel und Hakenkreuz ( Memento from April 19, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ). In: The time. October 20, 1949.
  8. ↑ Bernd Martin: German-Soviet explorations about a separate peace treaty in World War II. at: freidok.uni-freiburg.de
  9. ^ Vladimir S. Semjonow: From Stalin to Gorbachev. Half a century on a diplomatic mission, 1939–1991 . Nicolai, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-87584-521-8 , p. 138.
personal data
SURNAME Klaus, Edgar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION agent
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1945 or 1946