Eduard Bruecklmeier

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Eduard Brücklmeier (1936)

Eduard Robert Wolfgang Brücklmeier (born June 8, 1903 in Munich , † October 20, 1944 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German lawyer and diplomat . From 1927 to 1940 he held various posts in Tehran, Baghdad, Colombo, Katowice, London and Berlin, most recently as Legation Councilor , for the Foreign Office . He was close friends with Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld , Count Yorck von Wartenburg , von Wussow and von Kessel and was sentenced to death by the People's Court in connection with the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 .

Life

Origin and law degree

Brücklmeier as a corps student in Munich (1923)

Eduard Brücklmeier comes from a middle-class background. He was born in Munich in 1903 as the third of five siblings of the Justice Council and attorney Bruno Brücklmeier (1872-1943) and his wife Albina Brücklmeier, a daughter of the court chamber singer Franz Innozenz Nachbaur . However, he grew up in Leipzig , where his father was appointed to the Imperial Court of Justice as the youngest Bavarian lawyer at the age of 35 . One of his brothers was the later director Erich-Fritz Brücklmeier (born 1907). Eduard Brücklmeier visited the III. From 1908 to 1915. Higher citizen school and the humanistic Thomas School in Leipzig . He played the violin in his youth and was interested in history. At his father's request, he was originally supposed to become a career officer and from 1915 to 1923 he attended the Prussian cadet institutes in Karlsruhe and Naumburg (Saale) as well as the main cadet institute in Groß-Lichterfelde .

After graduating from high school (1923) at the State Educational Institute (STABILA) in Berlin-Lichterfelde , however, due to his rejection of the military drill, he began studying law and economics at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . He continued this from 1925 to 1927 at the University of Leipzig , the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg and the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). During his studies in Munich, under pressure from his father, like his brothers, he joined the dutiful and color-bearing Corps Bavaria . He saw himself politically as a national conservative and was a member of the Saxon party executive of the German National People's Party (DNVP). In 1927 he passed the legal traineeship (first state examination) in Würzburg. That same year he was at the Law Faculty of the University of Würzburg Dr. iur. PhD. From May 1927 he began the three-year legal preparatory service at the headquarters of the Foreign Office in Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, together with the later resistance fighters Gottfried von Nostitz-Drzewiecky and Albrecht von Kessel . In 1928 he became an attaché in Department V (Law). A year later he finally passed the diplomatic-consular examination .

Activity as a diplomat

Stations in Baghdad, Tehran, Colombo and Katowice

After his examination, he worked briefly in Department VI (Culture) in Berlin. He then worked as a diplomat in German missions abroad. So he began in May 1930 in the consulate in Tehran . From June to December 1930 he was acting vice-consul in the Baghdad consulate . Then he was reappointed to the Tehran Embassy, ​​this time as attaché and acting head. His superior was u. a. the later resistance fighter Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg . His successor Wipert von Blücher later wrote about Brücklmeier: “He approaches everything with a certain freshness and has the ability to make decisions. He is a determined rider, a good polo player and an excellent skier and alpinist. Through these sporting interests and his amiable, open manner, he created an excellent position for himself with his peers in the diplomatic corps and was particularly popular with all English people. ”From July 1932 to April 1933 he was Vice Consul at the Consulate in Colombo ( Ceylon ) or acting head. He then came to the Consulate General in Katowice in Poland as Vice Consul . In April 1934 he was appointed Secretary of the Legation . In Katowice he had u. a. To deal with emigration issues, arrests and legal advice for the German minority in Poland . Since he did not want to misuse financial resources from a black fund for the private purposes of the minorities, he was defeated in November 1935 by officials of the National Socialist Young German Party (JdP) at the NSDAP foreign organization (NSDAP / AO. ) On charges of improper use of resources ) denounced in Breslau-Carlowitz . The then Consul General Raban Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden and the head of the NSDAP / AO Otto Bene considered him to be suitable in character despite these circumstances and Brücklmeier was able to continue his career.

German Embassy in London

Professional station at the German Embassy in London

In January 1936 he was appointed to the German Embassy in London , whose management passed from Ambassador Leopold von Hoesch to the future Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in October . It was there that he worked on questions about the occupation of the Rhineland by the German Wehrmacht. In addition, in 1936 Brücklmeier was the German representative on the Committee for Non-Interference in Spanish Affairs . He met his wife Klothilde (Amschy) von Obermayer-Marnach, a daughter of the Austrian officer Kurt von Obermayer-Marnach , in London, whom he married in March 1937 in Zagreb . With her he was to have a daughter named Monika (* 1939). She later married the Austrian industrialist Fritz Mandl . On December 1, 1937, Brücklmeier was accepted into the NSDAP ( membership number 4,789,475), where his application for membership had been running since 1934, but was not approved because of the membership ban of the NSDAP . This step was welcomed by higher-ranking diplomats when the National Socialists came to power. Nonetheless, his German superiors were particularly suspicious of his Anglophile behavior and leisure activities. Because Brücklmeier spoke fluent English, for example, and moved almost perfectly in the English upper class. At that time he hoped in vain that the planned war, as the State Secretary of the Foreign Office Ernst von Weizsäcker was striving for, could be prevented through cooperation between the German opposition and the British government under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain . Winston Churchill later ended Britain 's policy of appeasement .

Foreign ministers office in Berlin

Last post in the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin

In August 1938, Brücklmeier was temporarily transferred to his office in Berlin, headed by Erich Kordt , against his will - he originally wanted to be transferred to the embassy in Cairo or Athens - by von Ribbentrop, who had meanwhile been appointed Foreign Minister and who valued him as an eloquent diplomat . From July 1938 he worked in the Political Department, Division I / League of Nations and for military and armaments issues as well as in the ministerial office. In September 1938 he was appointed Legation Councilor II class. At the request of Ribbentrops, he was admitted to the SS (SS-No. 310.351) as SS-Obersturmführer , registered with the staff of the SS-Hauptamt (SS-HA), retrospectively for December 31, 1937, without his intervention . A later complaint to SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz was unsuccessful. He was then promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer . Von Ribbentrop took him with him on trips abroad to Vienna, Paris and Moscow. After the outbreak of the Second World War , he was denounced by the same doctor, SS-Hauptsturmführer Fritz Karnitschnig , and briefly arrested by the Gestapo for making defeatist statements . He was personally interrogated on October 10, 1939 by the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) Reinhard Heydrich . Von Ribbentrop initiated disciplinary proceedings against Brücklmeier, at the end of which he was dismissed from the Foreign Service on May 26, 1940 and retired while maintaining his salary.

Professional activity after his dismissal

Brücklmeier was drafted in October 1940 as a 37-year-old private for military service in the Wehrmacht in the Châlons-sur-Marne region in occupied France . According to his own statements, he took over cleaning work on looted material. From January 1941 he worked as a Wehrmacht employee at the foreign letter inspection center in Berlin and then as a war administrator in the Army Administration Office (Administrative Office Ag VIII) of the Army High Command (OKH). He was responsible for the procurement of frozen food. On November 7, 1941, after the Gestapo and SS had checked the files again, he was released from the SS and in October 1942 from administrative service at the OKH. In November 1942 he was to be drafted into the Landesschützen Battalion with marching orders to the Eastern Front . Thanks to the intervention of General Friedrich Olbricht , the resistance fighter and head of the General Army Office in the Army High Command, however, he was uk -gestellt, d. H. released as indispensable for the home front. After a long and unsuccessful search, he found a job at Nordsee GmbH in Berlin in 1943 with the help of the commercial director Wilhelm Roloff , his superior in the Army Administration Office .

Resistance to National Socialism

Brücklmeier was one of the resistance fighters of July 20, 1944 . Just as important, however, is that he was actively working on a conspiracy against Hitler as early as 1938 and 1939 . In private circles, he referred to the Führer as "would-be putschists" and "back room strategists". Brücklmeier used his opportunities at all times and tied a large number of threads in the network of those who wanted to actively eliminate the Nazi regime. During his work at the German embassy in Tehran in 1930/31 Brücklmeier met Ambassador Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg , and he put him in touch with the main protagonists of the resistance in his apartment in Potsdam . In 1943 he also arranged a large number of meetings in the resistance, in which he brought together the national conservatives Ulrich von Hassell and Carl Friedrich Goerdeler , whom he knew through his father, with the Social Democrats Wilhelm Leuschner and Hermann Maaß in his Potsdam apartment. In addition, he was close friends with the resistance fighters Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld , Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg , Botho von Wussow and Albrecht von Kessel.

It was also Brücklmeier who introduced Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg to Leuschner. The Nazi judiciary accused him of having drafted a declaration of surrender by the Reich after an overthrow, but the document in question has not yet been found. In a shadow cabinet of Beck / Goerdeler , Brücklmeier was supposed to be State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry, but he asked to be allowed to be Personnel Manager there instead, because he wanted to remove the hated National Socialists from the Foreign Office himself. In July 1944 he was in Austria and was summoned to Berlin twice, on the 11th and 15th, because of the planned assassination attempts on Hitler, and he drove there each time. At the crucial moment, however, he learned nothing about the postponement of the action to July 20th. In any case, he was hardly an option for carrying out the assassination attempt, as firstly he was not a military man and secondly he was not in any other function.

After July 20, 1944, Brücklmeier's co-conspiracy was evident. He was arrested on July 27, 1944 in Prague , where he was about to settle legal guardianship matters for his nephew. He had previously refused to hide in Prague and to flee to Switzerland through personal contacts, as he did not want to abandon his family and friends. On September 28 and 29, 1944, the trial against him took place before the 1st Senate of the People's Court . Together with the professional officers Joachim Meichßner and Otto Herfurth , chairman Roland Freisler sentenced him to death by hanging on September 29th as a perpetrator and confidante (Ref .: OJ 6/44 and venn. OJ 9/44). This described his work for the resistance as "shabby and mean". In the verdict, after reading out the name, Freisler added “... a very special slacker”. Brücklmeier then waited for several days in the Gestapo cell prison in Lehrter Strasse . On October 20, 1944, the sentence was carried out in Berlin-Plötzensee . In order to escape the clan confinement, his wife and child fled to the Schliersee near Munich, where they found shelter with friends.

Real estate litigation

On the intervention of State Secretary and SS Group Leader Wilhelm Keppler , the Villa Anna Mautner in the Grundlsee municipality in Styria was acquired by Klothilde Brücklmeier for 27,000 Reichsmarks in 1939 and thereby Aryanized . In 1947 the original owner reclaimed her property under the Third Restitution Act of 1947. Brücklmeier's widow refused on the grounds that she was a single parent and that she had applied for a victim welfare card. The ÖVP national councilor Frieda Mikola campaigned for her unsuccessfully at the provincial government of Upper Austria . Mautner, on the other hand, argued: "At that time I was the outlawed and ostracized Jew [...] and she was the respected wife of a legation councilor in Berlin, who was politically the opposite of 'politically persecuted'." But since Brücklmeier still pay a refugee tax for Mautner had to, the conflict ended in an out-of-court settlement, as a result of which Brücklmeier could take recourse against the state of Upper Austria .

After the Second World War, the Brücklmeier family also lost their real estate in Prague, consisting of two houses on the Old Town Square , due to the application of the Beneš decrees by the joint Czech-Slovak state . Brücklmeier's daughter Monika Oppenheimer (later married Antonelli) sued for the return of the property. The District Court in Prague 1 , however, dismissed the restitution suit in 2004 and stated in the grounds of the judgment: Eduard Brücklmeier had “undoubtedly participated in the fight against Hitler, but it has not been proven that the attack on Hitler's life was motivated by the efforts of the subjugated peoples to free". The daughter's appeal to the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic in 2006 was unsuccessful.

Posthumous honors

  • In 1953, a street in the Hasenbergl district of Munich was named after him: Brücklmeierstraße .
  • In 2005, a memorial plaque was attached to his apartment in the north of Potsdam, at Leiblstrasse 5 (formerly Markgrafenstrasse 5). Resistance fighter Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld (executed 1944) lived as a neighbor in the same house.
  • Foundation of the non-profit Brücklmeier Association for Research on Corporation and Resistance eV
  • Brücklmeier is one of the executed corps students who were honored at the Plötzensee memorial 70 and 75 years after the attack . The following spoke: Wolfgang von der Groeben (2014) and Rüdiger Döhler (2019).

literature

Anthologies

  • Ines Reich-Hilweg: Potsdam and July 20, 1944. On the trail of the resistance against National Socialism. Accompanying document to the exhibition of the Military History Research Office and the Potsdam Museum . Rombach Verlag, Freiburg 1994, ISBN 3-7930-0697-2 , p. 66 f.
  • Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The young generation in the German resistance . Piper Verlag, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-492-03358-X , p. 453.
  • Detlef Graf von Schwerin: The boys of July 20, 1944. Brücklmeier, Kessel, Schulenburg, Schwerin, Wussow, Yorck . Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-373-00469-1 , pp. 30–34.
  • Sebastian Sigler : Brücklmeier. Man of July 20th . In: Sebastian Sigler (ed.): Friendship and tolerance. 200 years of Corps Bavaria in Landshut and Munich . Akademischer Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-932965-86-8 .
  • Sebastian Sigler: Eduard Brücklmeier (Corps Bavaria Munich). A man of the resistance on July 20, 1944 . In: Hans Peter Hümmer (Ed.): Once and Now. Yearbook of the Association for Corpsstudentische Geschichtsforschung eV Volume 52, Association for Corpsstudentische Geschichtsforschung, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-87707-690-3 , pp. 313–334.
  • Sebastian Sigler: Eduard Brücklmeier - Networks against Hitler , in: ders., Corps students in the resistance against Hitler , Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-428-14319-1 , 2nd edition Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3- 428-14498-3 , pp. 91-114.

Lexicons and manuals

  • Foreign Office , Historical Service (Ed.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945 . Volume 1: A-F. Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-71840-1 , pp. 300-301.
  • Peter Steinbach (Ed.): Lexicon of Resistance 1933–1945 . 2nd edition, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-43861-X , p. 36. (= Beck'sche series , 1061)

Web links

Commons : Eduard Brücklmeier  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Sebastian Sigler: The Unknown Man of July 20th . In: Bayerische Staatszeitung , July 21, 2006, p. 3.
  2. ↑ a b Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you hang. The young generation in the German resistance , p. 24.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Foreign Office, Historical Service (ed.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945 , p. 300.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you hang. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 453.
  5. ↑ Kösener Korps-Lists 1960, 104 , 1528
  6. ^ Martin Pabst: Couleur and brown shirt. German students in the Weimar Republic and in the “Third Reich” . Verlags-Gemeinschaft Anarche, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-927317-88-8 , p. 91.
  7. ↑ Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The young generation in the German resistance , p. 25.
  8. ↑ Dissertation: The historical development of consular jurisdiction and its legal structure for Germany following the World War .
  9. ↑ a b c d e Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes : The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . E-books by the Random House GmbH publishing group, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-641-05091-7 , p. 297.
  10. ↑ Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The young generation in the German resistance , p. 80.
  11. ↑ a b Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you hang. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 83.
  12. ↑ Albrecht von Kessel, Peter Steinbach (Ed.): Verborgene Saat. Records from the resistance 1933 to 1945 . Ullstein, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-550-07209-0 , p. 26.
  13. ↑ a b Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you hang. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 87.
  14. ↑ Sophie Lillie : What Once Was. Handbook of the expropriated art collections of Vienna . Czernin, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-7076-0049-1 , p. 744.
  15. ↑ a b Brün Meyer (Ed.): List of seniority of the NSDAP (SS) protection staff . Unchanged reprint of the 1938 edition, Biblio-Verlag, Osnabrück 1996, ISBN 3-7648-2487-5 , p. 234.
  16. ↑ Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 89.
  17. ↑ a b Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you hang. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 90.
  18. ↑ Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 188.
  19. ↑ Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 454.
  20. ↑ Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 214.
  21. ↑ Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 124.
  22. ^ Walter Wagner: The People's Court in the National Socialist State . 2nd edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-54491-6 , p. 739.
  23. ↑ Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you have. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 428.
  24. ↑ a b Leiblstrasse 5. Meeting point for the conspirators. CDU honored Schwerin and Brücklmeier . In: Potsdamer Neuste Nachrichten , July 20, 2005, 10.
  25. ↑ a b Detlef Graf von Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you hang. The Young Generation in the German Resistance , p. 414.
  26. ↑ Ines Reich-Hilweg: Potsdam and July 20, 1944 , p. 67.
  27. ↑ Bengt von zur Mühlen (ed.): The defendants of July 20 before the People's Court . Chronos, Berlin-Kleinmachnow 2001, ISBN 3-931054-06-3 , p. 136.
  28. ↑ Barbara Orth: Gestapo in the operating room. Report from hospital doctor Charlotte Pommer . Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86732-126-6 , p. 8. (= studies and documents on everyday life, persecution and resistance under National Socialism , volume 2)
  29. ^ Daniela Ellmauer, Michael John and Regine Thumser: "Aryanizations", confiscated assets, provisions and compensation in Upper Austria . Oldenbourg, Vienna [a. a.] 2004, ISBN 3-7029-0521-9 , p. 432.
  30. ^ Daniela Ellmauer, Michael John and Regine Thumser: "Aryanizations", confiscated assets, provisions and compensation in Upper Austria . Oldenbourg, Vienna [a. a.] 2004, ISBN 3-7029-0521-9 , p. 433.
  31. ^ A b Daniela Ellmauer, Michael John and Regine Thumser: "Aryanizations", confiscated assets, provisions and compensation in Upper Austria . Oldenbourg, Vienna [a. a.] 2004, ISBN 3-7029-0521-9 , p. 434.
  32. ^ Fritz H. Schmachtel: Benes Decrees. Charter of vigilante justice . Hess, Bad Schussenried 2007, ISBN 978-3-87336-343-4 , p. 123.
  33. ↑ Brücklmeier subsidiary loses trial . In: Trierischer Volksfreund , May 23, 2006.
  34. ↑ Corpszeitung der Marburger Teutonen 4/2019, No. 781, pp. 23-29.
personal data
SURNAME Brücklmeier, Eduard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brücklmeier, Eduard Robert Wolfgang (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH October 20, 1944
Place of death Berlin-Plötzensee