Edmund von Thermann

Wilhelm Emil Edmund Freiherr von Thermann (born March 6, 1884 in Cologne , † February 27, 1951 in Bonn ) was a German diplomat and SS brigade leader .

Life

He came from the Thermann family, ennobled in 1790, and grew up on the 115 hectare Gollma manor near Landsberg (Saalekreis) in the province of Saxony . His parents were the judge Wilhelm Emil Freiherr von Thermann and his wife Vilma von Thermann. Edmund von Thermann's son Wolfgang died in 1940 in the western campaign .

Thermann studied at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and became active in the Corps Saxo-Borussia Heidelberg in 1904 . He joined the Foreign Service in 1913 and was accredited at the embassies of the German Reich in Paris, Madrid and Brussels. In 1914 he came near Königsberg i. Pr. In Russian captivity . While he was a prisoner of war, he was cared for by the Christian Young Men Association and the American Red Cross .

From 1919 to 1921 he was accredited at the German embassy in Budapest . In 1920 he was promoted to the Legation Council. From November 1921 to March 1922 he was charge d'affaires of the Government Joseph Wirth in the administration of Warren G. Harding . When he arrived in the USA in 1922, he declared that the German people would be happy to be occupied by US troops.

In 1923 he was promoted to Legation Council . In 1924 he became a lecturer in the Legation. From 1925 to November 1932 he was consul general in Danzig . At that time, the German minority in Poland caused difficulties for him and the Foreign Office . At the time of the Reichstag election in March 1933 , he supported the National Socialist German Workers' Party in a dispute with the government of Danzig. Thermann and the Foreign Office quickly coordinated themselves under the Hitler cabinet . On April 9, 1933, the law to restore the civil service was passed in the Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House .

Thermann was a personal friend of the retired General Juan Bautista Molina. In July 1933, at the suggestion of Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow, Thermann was sent to Argentina. On April 1, 1933, Thermann joined the NSDAP (membership number 1.508.059) and applied for membership of the Schutzstaffel , in which Heinrich Himmler personally promoted him to SS-Sturmführer on September 3, 1933 . Before leaving for Argentina, von Thermann paid a visit to the head of the NSDAP / AO , Ernst Wilhelm Bohle . Thermann entered Argentine soil on December 10, 1933 in his SS uniform. In late 1933 the envoy first class Thermann brought his letter of accreditation in a carriage and with cocked hat in the Casa Rosada . In December 1933 he participated in the July - Sonnwendfeier part in a suburb of Buenos Aires NSDAP / AO of Vicente Lopez.

After the pogroms on November 9th , Thermann demanded on November 21st, 1938 the Argentine government to stop the immigration of Jewish refugees to Argentina and claimed he feared for his personal safety. He had a number of NSDAP run-up organizations such as the Comisión de Cooperación Intelectual founded in mid-1936 . Of the approximately 200 German schools in Argentina, seven had declared in 1938 that they were independent of the influence of the German embassy. In 1936 the embassy in Buenos Aires was upgraded to an embassy by Adolf Hitler and Thermann's daughter met Hans Joachim von Hadeln, Heinrich Himmler's adjutant, and married him in 1939. After his death in 1943, she married Fritz Darges on May 16, 1944 .

With the Schutzstaffel he was promoted to SS-Brigadführer.

Eucharistic World Congress

In 1937 Eugenio Pacelli attended the World Eucharistic Congress in Buenos Aires . He invited Thermann and his wife to take part in social tasks and to have a conversation about Germany. When Thermann found out that Pacelli liked to fly, he provided him with a plane for the rest of his stay in Argentina. Pacelli and Santiago Luis Copello made a sightseeing flight and became regular guests at the embassy of the German Reich.

1938 Thermann and took Spruille Braden at the Chaco Peace Conference in part that the Chaco War ended.

At the end of March 1941, von Thermann brought the propaganda film Sieg im West from Svend Noldan to Santiago de Chile , where Ambassador Wilhelm Albrecht von Schoen (son of Wilhelm von Schoen ) welcomed around 300 selected guests including Dr. Eduard Wilhelm Nöbel (father of Wilhelm Nöbel ), Ambassador in Lima and Dr. Ernst Wendler ambassador in La Paz , showed.

The government of Ramón Castillo acknowledged that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a violation of US territory by Japan , but on December 15, 1941, Ramón Castillo Thermann assured Thermann in an audience that the actions of the Italian and German governments were being carried out would not threaten the American continent.

Bolívar

The naval attaché Dietrich Niebuhr supervised the stage service called Bolivar under the diplomatic protection of the embassy . Werner Könnecke was in charge of the administration of Bolivar , Wolf Franczok aka Gustav Utzinger, who was employed by Telefunken in Rio de Janeiro , worked in the Ferreteria Böker y Cia , a boat outfitter headed by Hans Rudolf Leo Harnisch. In August 1941, the press attaché Gottfried Sandstede was recalled to Berlin. His diplomatic status had been revoked by the legal advisor of the Argentine Foreign Ministry because he was employed by an Argentine shipping company .

The Argentine Parliament decided on June 19, 1941 to set up the Comisión Investigadora de Actividades Anti-Argentinas ; this was chaired by MP Raúl Damonte Taborda .

On September 15, 1941, the parliament decided to censor the publications of the German Embassy because it would abuse its diplomatic privileges. Later the number of sentences in diplomatic telegrams was limited.

On the basis of reports from the parliamentary commission of inquiry , Edmund von Thermann was declared a persona non grata by the Argentine government in December 1941 . In 1942, von Thermann was given leave of absence from the Foreign Office to join the Waffen-SS and in 1943 was put into temporary retirement.

File situation

Von Thermann was interviewed extensively by the Office of Strategic Services . Emphasized by Thermann that there is no policy concept of the Ribbentrop gave -Ministry for Argentina, while the Blue Book on Argentina , believed to have been created from files from the Ribbentrop Ministry, a conspiracy of the United Officers' Group with the Axis powers postulated. After the staff had moved to Lisbon , Wilhelm Faupel had the files of the Argentine embassy in Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin brought to the Ibero-American Institute and the embassy building was bombed.

literature

• Foreign Office - Historical Service (Ed.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service, 1871-1945 , Vol. 5, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014, pp. 20-22
• Hans-Jürgen Döscher : The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1987, pp. 110-114 ISBN 3-88680-256-6

Web links

• Edmund von Thermann in the online version of the edition files of the Reich Chancellery. Weimar Republic
• Newspaper article about Edmund von Thermann in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 66 , 1143
2. ↑ ^{a b} Germany sends first envoy here since great war came to end. (PDF; 1.5 MB) In: State College News. December 12, 1921
3. ^ First Berlin envoy here since the war; Baron Edmund von Thermann. In: The New York Times . November 20, 1921, pdf
4. ^ Herbert S. Levine: Hitler's Free City. A History of the Nazi Party in Danzig 1925–1939 after McGaha p. 34.
5. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. Berlin 1987, p. 110ff
6. ↑ Holger M. Meding: La prensa en guerra. (PDF; 2.4 MB) In: Argentina - Alemania. Un recorrido a lo largo de 150 años de relaciones bilaterales. Pp. 73-77, especially p. 75.
7. ^ Ronald C. Newton: The "Nazi menace" in Argentina, 1931-1947. P. 151
8. ^ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: SS and Foreign Office in the "Third Reich". Diplomacy in the shadow of the “final solution”. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-548-33149-1 , p. 112
9. ^ Richard L. McGaha: The Politics of Espionage: Nazi Diplomats and Spies in Argentina, 1933-1945. Dissertation, Ohio University, 2009, p. 60.
10. ^ Chile: A Heavy Suitcase. In: Time . April 7, 1941
11. ^ Robert A. Potash: The Army & Politics in Argentina 1928-1945. Yrigoyen to Perón. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1969, ISBN 0-8047-0683-2 , p. 164 ( digitized version )
12. ^ Argentina: Hunting a Nazi. In: Time. September 8, 1941
13. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives:
14. ↑ Nuremberg Trials (The Donovan Archive) (PDF; 1.7 MB)

predecessor	Office	successor
Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff	German ambassador in Washington 1921–1922	Otto Wiedfeldt
Herbert von Dirksen	German Consul General in Danzig 1925–1932	Otto von Radowitz
Heinrich von Kaufmann-Asser	Ambassador of the German Reich in Buenos Aires 1933–1942	Erich Otto Meynen