Edmund Veesenmayer

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Edmund Veesenmayer, 1938

Edmund Veesenmayer (born November 12, 1904 in Bad Kissingen , † December 24, 1977 in Darmstadt ) was a German constitutional lawyer and convicted Nazi politician.

As SS Brigadefuhrer , Envoy First Class and Reich Plenipotentiary for Hungary , he was one of the most important German diplomats when it came to forcing the disintegration of states, especially in Eastern and Southern Europe, to overthrow governments or to install new ones. One of the main concerns of his diplomatic activities in Yugoslavia, Slovakia and Hungary was the deportation of the Jews there to the SS extermination camps .

Life

Veesenmayer was the son of the royal secondary school teacher Franz Xaver Veesenmayer from Oberstaufen near Kempten (Allgäu) . He was transferred to Kempten as early as 1910, so that his son had no connections whatsoever with Bad Kissingen. He studied after leaving school at the Royal Louis Secondary School with commercial department in Kempten 1923-1926 Political Sciences in Munich until 1926 to 1928 when Adolf Weber to Dr. oec. publ. PhD . He then worked as a lecturer at the TH Munich and the business school in Berlin . At the beginning of 1932 he met Hitler's future economic representative Wilhelm Keppler and through him came into contact with the NSDAP , which he joined on February 1, 1932 ( membership number 873.780). In June 1934 he also joined the SS (SS no. 202.122). In the NSDAP, Veesenmayer was initially an economics officer in the liaison staff, and from April 1934 a consultant at Keppler. Through him, Veesenmayer established numerous relationships with influential business circles.

In July 1937, Keppler was entrusted with preparing the connection with Austria. Veesenmayer, as his deputy, played a decisive role in the elimination of the Austrian national leader of the NSDAP, Josef Leopold . Between March and June 1938 he was again a consultant at Keppler, who was now the “Reich Commissioner for Austria”. Veesenmayer was involved in business in Austria and was a partner on the boards of Donauchemie AG in Vienna and Länderbank AG (Vienna) . Then Joachim von Ribbentrop , who was appointed Reich Foreign Minister in February 1938, brought him to the Foreign Office and appointed him envoy . He held this position until 1945.

Ribbentrop sent him several times between November 1938 and March 1939 as an informant and liaison officer to Bratislava . In contrast to Arthur Seyß-Inquart and Josef Bürckel , Veesenmayer made an early plea for Jozef Tiso as the future Slovakian president. In August 1939 Veesenmayer was sent to Danzig to act as an agent provocateur to increase German- Polish tensions. From March 1940 he was charged with planning secret operations to induce the Irish to revolt against Great Britain . He carried out these tasks until the beginning of 1944.

Shortly before the German attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941 Veesenmayer was after Zagreb sent to the Croatian independence to forge ahead. After the German partner of choice, Vladko Maček , failed, Veesenmayer supported the Croatian Ustascha under Ante Pavelić . In 1941 and 1942 he stayed several times in Croatia and Serbia to advise the German legation, among other things, in the dispute with partisans . He vehemently demanded the deportation of Serbian Jews . In 1943 he tried in vain to get Jozef Tiso to resume the deportation of Jews to Slovakia .

Also in 1943 Veesenmayer was in Hungary in the spring and autumn to investigate the political situation. He warned Ribbentrop and Hitler against Hungary's departure from the Axis front and advised them to intervene. In the course of the German occupation of Hungary he was appointed Envoy First Class by Hitler on March 19, 1944, as "Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich" in Hungary and as SS Brigade Leader. In a telegram dated April 15, 1944, Ribbentrop informed the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers , that on April 9, 1944, a conversation between Hitler, Ribbentrop and Veesenmayer about the structure of the treatment of economic matters in Hungary had taken place.

On June 2, 1944, Veesenmayer concluded a payment agreement between Hungary and the German Reich with the Hungarian finance minister Lajos Reményi-Schneller . It stipulated that the Reichskreditkasse Budapest would have to pay 200 million pengő for services of “joint warfare” from March 19 for the months of May, June and July 1944 . There was no provision for this "Hungarian war fund" to be repaid by the German Reich.

In a telegram dated June 13, 1944, Veesenmayer reported to the Foreign Office: "Transporting Jews from the Carpathian region and Transylvania [...] completed with a total of 289 357 Jews in 92 trains of 45 cars each." On June 15, 1944, he informed Ribbentrop in a telegram with the fact that by that day around 340,000 Jews had been handed over to the Reich . He also promised that without traffic disruptions the number of deportations of Jews would double by the end of July 1944. He also announced that after the final settlement of the Jewish question, the number of deported Jews would reach 900,000 .

He also supervised the Hungarian governments ( Döme Sztójay , Géza Lakatos , Ferenc Szálasi , Gábor Vajna ) and Admiral Miklós Horthy . In his capacity as envoy in Hungary, Veesenmayer was subordinate to the Foreign Office. However , he mainly reported about his actions to deport the Hungarian Jews to the head of the RSHA , Ernst Kaltenbrunner . In its research report on Veesenmayer's work, the Independent Commission of Historians - Foreign Office sums it up: "As with no other representative of the Foreign Office, Veesenmayer combines inhuman ideology and ice-cold pragmatism."

Edmund Veesenmayer as a defendant in the Wilhelmstrasse trial in Nuremberg

He left Hungary in March 1945 and surrendered to the US troops near Salzburg in mid-May . In the Wilhelmstrasse trial in Nuremberg (case 11), Veesenmayer was sentenced to 20 years in prison by judgment of April 11, 1949 for crimes against humanity , responsibility for abductions into forced labor ( slave labor ) and his membership in the SS, a criminal organization . With a pardon of January 31, 1951, the US High Commissioner John McCloy reduced numerous sentences, including Veesenmayer's prison sentence to 10 years. In December 1951 he was pardoned and released from the Landsberg War Crimes Prison .

In 1953, the British secret service transmitted information that Veesenmayer had established relationships with the Naumann-Kreis , a right-wing extremist organization around the former State Secretary Werner Naumann , which wanted to infiltrate the FDP under the Nazis. Veesenmayer then worked as the general agent for Germany for Pennel & Flipo , based in Roubaix in northern France . He lived in Darmstadt until his death in 1977.

Ranks

literature

Web links

Commons : Edmund Veesenmayer  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Robert Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 364.
  2. ^ Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl: Lexicon of secret services in the 20th century . Munich 2003, p. 476.
  3. ↑ Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Personenlexikon 1933–1945. Vienna 2003, p. 468.
  4. ↑ Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. Hamburg 2003, p. 714.
  5. ^ Federal Archives (Ed.): Europe under the swastika. Volume 6, Berlin 1992, p. 320.
  6. ^ Federal Archives (Ed.): Europe under the swastika. Volume 6, Berlin 1992, pp. 329-330.
  7. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second, updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 638.
  8. ^ Federal Archives (Ed.): Europe under the swastika. Volume 6, Berlin 1992, p. 331.
  9. ↑ Robert Wistrich: Who was who in the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 365.
  10. ↑ Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes , Moshe Zimmermann : The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Munich 2010, p. 263.
  11. ↑ Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Personenlexikon 1933–1945. Vienna 2003, p. 468.
  12. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 638, source BAK N 1080/273.
personal data
SURNAME Veesenmayer, Edmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION National Socialist war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Kissingen
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 1977
Place of death Darmstadt