Edouard Calic

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Edouard Calic (originally Eduard Čalić ; born October 14, 1910 in Marčana , Austria-Hungary , † August 29, 2003 in Salzburg ) was a Yugoslav journalist, publicist and historian . He is the father of the historian Marie-Janine Calic .

Live and act

Early life

Calic was born in 1910 to a Croatian family on the Austrian coast . In 1919, as a result of the persecution of the Slavic population there by Italian irregulars from Istria , his family had to flee to the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes . After graduating from high school, he studied law at the University of Zagreb .

After obtaining a state diploma from the University of Zagreb, Calic worked temporarily as a journalist before going to Germany in 1939 on the advice of Albert Bazala , President of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences , to continue his studies. On January 29, 1940, he enrolled at the Philosophical Faculty of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität , where he heard from Emil Dovifat and Jens Jessen , among others . In addition, he worked as a Berlin correspondent in since 1940 Zagreb appearing Yugoslav daily newspaper Novosti . Since Novosti was banned after the German occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Calic has been unemployed since then. He remained nominally enrolled at the university until July 15, 1941.

In the summer of 1942 Calic was arrested by the Gestapo and, after spending several months in the house prison of the Secret State Police Office, transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg in December 1942 . The reason given was that he was suspected of being involved in “ conspiracies similar to foreigners” “as a foreigner and a member of a friendly nation” . He was therefore taken into preventive detention as a risk to the state security.

Since the Berlin State Police delivered him without a protective custody warrant , he was initially not assigned to any of the common prisoner groups (communists, homosexuals, etc.). As an Italian citizen, he was later categorized as a “special prisoner” or “deportation prisoner”. According to the Nazi administrative guidelines, prisoners for deportation were those who were citizens of a friendly state with Germany and were to be extradited to them at the earliest opportunity.

During his stay in Sachsenhausen, Calic worked on foreign assignments for the “ Speer Command ” as well as in the offices of the employment agency and, most recently, since 1944 in the administration of the warehouse's effects room. In 1945 he was sent on the death march of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp prisoners from Sachsenhausen to Schwerin .

post war period

In May 1945 he briefly returned to Berlin, where he claims to have worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross . He then moved to British-controlled Istria. After his hopes of making a political career in the then established Free State of Trieste were dashed, he settled in Paris in 1946.

From 1946 to 1959 Calic lived in Paris , where he worked as a journalist, book author and broadcaster. In 1959 he returned to Berlin, where he initially worked as a correspondent for Combat . In 1962 Calic testified in the proceedings against the concentration camp doctor Heinz Baumkötter before the Münster district court .

In July 1963 Calic was based on a at the Free University of Berlin implemented colloquium on the level of a doctoral examination chaired by Ernst Fraenkel (assessors were Emil Dovifat and Werner Philipp ) from Berlin's Senator for Science and Art Adolf Arndt the academic degree of Dr. phil. awarded. The colloquium discussion was initiated by the university / senate as the completion of a doctoral procedure that Calic had started in 1941 at what was then Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, which, according to his supervisor at the time, Dovifat, he did not have due to the war (or due to his imprisonment) can complete, recognized. Since his dissertation manuscript from the 1940s could no longer be found, the award of the doctoral degree as part of a regular doctorate was not possible, so that Arndt instead issued him a so-called "doctoral replacement certificate" as the basis for entitlement to use his academic degree.

In the 1970s, critics such as Louis de Jong and Hans Mommsen accused Calic of dishonestly obtaining the doctorate by playing off personal relationships, exploiting his status as a former concentration camp inmate and providing false information. Supporters of Calics such as Jürgen Schmädeke , Eugen Kogon , Pierre Grégoire and Karl Dietrich Bracher saw it as a return coach of Calic's opponents in the Reichstag fire controversy. Shortly before, Calic had exposed the sources Fritz Tobias had named for his thesis of the sole perpetrator of Marinus van der Lubbe in a publication as "Nazi supporters of the first hour and beneficiaries of the regime", so that they were witnesses to Tobias' thesis only appeared credible to a limited extent. The Berlin Senator for Art and Science Gerd Löffler refused in 1976 to open a procedure to withdraw the doctorate. The historian and journalist Karl-Heinz Janßen published in 1979 under the title Cabal about the Reichstag fire - an inevitable revelation. Part I of a ZEIT series is a critical dossier on Calic's past and journalistic and scientific work. The then director of the Institute for Contemporary History, Martin Broszat , supported Janßen.

After Calic had been active as a journalist since the 1950s, he emerged in the 1960s through publications on contemporary history, especially on the history of National Socialism. Calic's first major work in this area was the book Himmler et son Empire , published in France in 1966 , an approach to Heinrich Himmler and the SS apparatus, which Calic viewed as the first part of a trilogy of his examination of the power complex SS-Gestapo. The second part he published in 1978 was a research report on the Reichstag fire and the third was a biography of Reinhard Heydrich in 1984 . The Himmler book has not yet been translated into German.

Calic found greater resonance with the source collection Without Mask, which he published in 1968 . Hitler-Breiting secret talks 1931 . This volume contained two hitherto unknown minutes of interviews that the Leipzig journalist Richard Breiting is said to have conducted with Hitler in 1931 and that Calic claims to have found in Breiting's estate. The interviews give an insight into Hitler's political ideas and objectives at the time. The foreword to the book was written by the historian Golo Mann . Translated into numerous languages, the book initially met with a largely positive response. In the 1970s, however, Hugh Trevor-Roper and, above all, Hans Mommsen and Fritz Tobias, expressed doubts about the authenticity of the documents. In later years, criticism of the Breiting book condensed into the accusation that Calic had falsified sources or even made them himself. Calic's defense attorneys countered that minor errors resulted from transcription errors in the deciphering of the handwritten documents. After 1990, the files of the Stasi records authority , in which the monitoring of the Breiting family's correspondence with Calic was found, could also show that Calic had been in contact with Breiting's heirs and had received documents from his estate. The American historian Benjamin Carter Hett sees the Breiting documents in his book Der Reichstagbrand , published by Rowohlt in 2016 . Resumption of proceedings very critical. "Nobody should believe in any kind of source value of the" Breiting "as well as the" Kessel "documents."

The International Committee for Scientific Research into the Causes and Consequences of the Second World War , Luxembourg , or Luxembourg Committee for short , was founded in 1968 with the participation of Calics. He was the driving force behind the foundation. Calic became the committee's general secretary. He managed to “gather around” a select group of personalities from politics and historical research in a board of 25 members. He was able to win over Willy Brandt as honorary chairman , who soon retired, then André Malraux , France's Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, and finally the Luxembourg Parliamentary President Pierre Grégoire . The committee organized scientific symposia and traveling exhibitions on the history and processing of various aspects of the Nazi era. In terms of journalism, the committee stood out primarily through two volumes published in 1972 and 1978, which were supposed to prove that the National Socialists were the sole perpetrators of the Reichstag fire on the basis of newly found documents. The committee's two volumes of documentation and a research report, also published in 1978, written by Calic and edited by Pierre Grégoire, led to a revival of the Reichstag fire controversy. In the following dispute, Calic was attacked in particular, to whom the proponents of the single perpetrator thesis ultimately assumed that he had not found the "new documents" contained in the documentation volumes, but had created them himself. In addition to Fritz Tobias and Hans Mommsen, the main representatives of the single perpetrator thesis, this view was mainly represented by the political scientists Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse in a collection of essays published in 1986. Karl-Heinz Janssen spoke at the time the same operative part of following one of the "most blatant falsifications of history of this century." An action for revocation and an injunction by Calics was dismissed by the Berlin Regional Court at the end of 1982 , because for the "average reader" it was not the alleged fact of a falsification that was in the foreground as a factual assertion, but "the evaluation expressed in it". On the other hand, the Berlin historian Jürgen Schmädeke , among others, rejected the falsification allegations as early as 1979 as unsubstantiated attempts at defamation. Other historians, publicists and personalities such as Robert Kempner and Walther Hofer also took Calic under protection. Furthermore, two brochures (by Gerhard Pletschacher and from the Comité de la Résistance ) tried to refute the allegations made against Calic and the arguments and evidence put forward to justify them.

Today there is a broad consensus among researchers that most of the documents that Calic presented in the context of the Reichstag fire documentation published by Hofer are not authentic. There is still disagreement on the question of whether Calic was its author or whether he got it from a third party and spread it bona fide , i.e. in the belief in its authenticity: Some indications suggest that at least some of Calic's published documents comes from the GDR. Herrsch Fischler raises the possibility that they were made by GDR bodies and then passed on to Calic. The American historian Benjamin Carter Hett concedes in this context that it is possible that Calic himself was a victim of these forgeries and not their originator. On the other hand, he points out that special linguistic characteristics of the documents - the identifiable peculiarities of the Serbo-Croatian language - continue to be a weighty indicator of Calic's authorship (“a large finger [that points] in the direction of Calic”).

Fonts (selection)

As an author

  • The role of the press in the political life of the people of Yugoslavia. 1941/1942. (Dissertation fragment, lost)
  • Le Prophète et L'Atome. Le Réveil de l'Islam vu du Pakistan, du Cachemire, de l'Égypte. Paris 1956.
  • La Chine. Grande Puissance. Paris 1960.
    • The Red Sons of Heaven. Translation from French. Torchbearers, Hannover 1962 (reports in Le Figaro ).
  • Amundsen, le Dernier Viking. Paris s. a.
    • Roald Amundsen. The last viking. Hoch, Düsseldorf 1960.
    • Captain Amundsen. Foreword by Erich Bruns. Hinstorff, Rostock 1961.
  • J'ai vu Vivre la Sibérie. Paris 1962.
  • Bulgarie Pittoresque et Moderne. Sofia 1964.
    • Romantic and modern Bulgaria. Translation of Tschavdar Djugmedshiev. Foreign language publisher, Sofia 1964.
  • Himmler and Son Empire. Paris 1965.
  • Without mask. Hitler-Breiting secret talks 1931. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
  • Le Reichstag Brûle! Paris 1969.
  • L'univers polar.
    • Meeting point Pol. Experiences and impressions in the far north . Revised by Friedrich W. Stöcker. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1965.
  • with Pierre Gregoire: The Reichstag fire. The provocation of the 20th century. Research result. With comments on the historical event of February 27, 1933. Luxembourg 1978.
  • The Second World War and the Genocide. Legends about Hitler and the German people. Commemorative publication for the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of war. Oberhausen 1979. (together with Pierre Grégoire and the Cultural Office of the City of Oberhausen)
  • Reinhard Heydrich. Key figure of the Third Reich. Droste, Düsseldorf 1982, ISBN 3-7700-0584-8 .
  • Hache. Zagreb 1982.
  • Evropska Trilogija. Marseille i Drugi Svjetski Council. Zagreb 1993.
  • Europa Gledana s Balkana. Kritika Koncepcije Globalističkog Revizionizma. Zagreb 2000.
  • Od Hitlera do Bin Ladena. S čovječanstvom k Vječnom Miru. Pula 2002.

In editing

literature

  • Uwe Backes , Karl-Heinz Janßen, Eckhard Jesse, Henning Köhler, Hans Mommsen, Fritz Tobias: Reichstag fire - clearing up a historical legend . Piper, Munich / Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-492-03027-0 .
  • Alexander Bahar , Wilfried Kugel : The Reichstag fire. How history is made . edition q, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-86124-513-2 , pp. 801-820.
  • Comité d'Action de la Resistance: “The time” cabal about the fire in the Reichstag. (= Special issue of La Voix de La Resistance ). 1980. (digitized at IFZ: (PDF) )
  • Marcus Giebeler: The controversy over the Reichstag fire. Source problems and historiographical paradigms . Martin Meidenbauer, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89975-731-6 .
  • Gerhard Pletschacher: "Die Zeit" -Historical manipulation. Documentation. Volume I on the legal dispute between the editors of the Hamburg weekly newspaper "Die Zeit", Countess Dönhoff, Theo Sommer, Diether Stoltze, and the International Committee Luxembourg (IKL). An inevitable exposure of the working methods of "Zeit" and its character assassination attempt on the General Secretary of the ICL, Edouard Calic. The documentary refutation of the slander by Zeit editor Karl-Heinz Janssen. Traunstein 1981, DNB 210112638 .
  • Heinrich Zankl : Strange figure - General Secretary in the twilight . in: Heinrich Zankl: Science in cross-examination . Scientific Book Society Darmstadt. 2012. pp. 22-25. ISBN 9783863123253

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Danko Plevnik: Krunski svjedok 20. stoljeća. In: SDMagazin, September 6, 2003
  2. ↑ Alexander Bahar, Wilfried Kugel: The Reichstag fire: How history is made. Edition q, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-86124-513-2 , p. 840 ( excerpt ).
  3. ↑ Time. 48/1979, p. 43.
  4. ↑ ahriman.com
  5. ↑ Alexander Bahar, Wilfried ball: The Reichstag fire. How history is made . edition q, Berlin 2001, p. 811 ff .; Jürgen Schmädeke, Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel have compiled the articles in various daily and weekly newspapers through which the argument about the allegations against Calic drew: The Reichstag fire in a new light. In: Historical magazine . 269, Heft 3, 1999, p. 603. The compilation is also available online: Excerpt from the article at the Reichstag Fire Forum , see v. a. Footnote 6 .
  6. ^ Reprint of the article by Karl-Heinz Janßen from September 14, 1979 at http://www.zeit.de/1979/38/geschichte-aus-der-dunkelkammer Title: Geschichte aus der Dunkelkammer. In: The time. November 22, 2012.
  7. ↑ Martin Broszat: A swamp was drained. Press release on behalf of the Institute for Contemporary History. In: The time. November 23, 1979, p. 4.
  8. ↑ Benjamin Carter Hett: The Reichstag fire. Retrial. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-498-03029-2 , p. 506., Revised and expanded German version of: Burning the Reichstag. An investigation into the Third Reich's enduring mystery . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-932232-9 .
  9. ↑ Marcus Giebeler: The controversy over the Reichstag fire. Source problems and historiographical paradigms . Martin Meidenbauer, Munich 2010, p. 81 ff.
  10. ↑ Uwe Backes: The International Committee for Scientific Research into the Causes and Consequences of the Second World War. In: Uwe Backes, Karl-Heinz Janßen, Eckhard Jesse, Henning Köhler, Hans Mommsen, Fritz Tobias: Reichstag fire - clearing up a historical legend. Piper, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-492-03027-0 , p. 98.
  11. ↑ Uwe Backes: The International Committee for Scientific Research into the Causes and Consequences of the Second World War. In: Uwe Backes u. a .: Reichstag fire ... Munich 1986, p. 92.
  12. ^ Walther Hofer, Edouard Calic, Karl Stephan, Friedrich Zipfel (eds.): The Reichstag fire. A scientific documentation. Volume 1, Berlin 1972; Walther Hofer, Edouard Calic, Christoph Graf, Karl Stephan, Friedrich Zipfel (eds.): The Reichstag fire. A scientific documentation. Volume 2, Munich 1978.
  13. ↑ Henning Köhler: The "documentary part" of the "documentation" - forgeries churning out. In: Uwe Backes, Karl-Heinz Janßen, Eckhard Jesse, Henning Köhler, Hans Mommsen, Fritz Tobias: Reichstag fire - clearing up a historical legend. Piper 1986, p. 167 (here the quote) - 216.
  14. ^ Heinrich Zankl: The big mistake: where science was wrong. 2004, p. 37.
  15. ↑ On a Berlin court ruling in the Calic case against “DIE ZEIT”. In: History in Science and Education. 35, 1984, p. 860.
  16. ^ Jürgen Schmädeke: Cabal around the Reichstag fire. In: Der Tagesspiegel. October 31, 1979; Ders .: Reichstag fire and “own goals”. In: Der Tagesspiegel. November 30, 1979; Ders .: The Reichstag fire controversy continues - allegations of forgery and documentary facts . In: Reichstag Fire Forum of the Central and State Library Berlin. 1999.
  17. ^ Benjamin Carter Hett: Burning the Reichstag. An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery. New York 2014, p. 316.
  18. ^ Benjamin Carter Hett: Burning the Reichstag. An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery. New York 2014, p. 314.
personal data
SURNAME Calic, Edouard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chialich, Edoardo; Calic, Eduard; Čalić, Eduard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Yugoslav journalist, publicist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Marčana near Pula
DATE OF DEATH August 29, 2003
Place of death Salzburg