Eduard Schulte (industrialist)

Eduard Reinhold Karl Schulte (born January 4, 1891 in Düsseldorf , † January 6, 1966 in Zurich ) was a German industrialist. He was general director of the largest German zinc producer Georg von Giesche's heirs and an opponent of National Socialism , who in July 1942 passed on information to England and the United States about the murder of European Jews in Nazi extermination camps .

Training and professional development

Historical photo of the Kopalnia Węgla Kamiennego Wieczorek Gieschegrube , around 1915

Schulte was born into an upper-class Düsseldorf family. After graduating from high school, he studied law in Bonn , Cologne and Erlangen , received his doctorate in 1912 and began his professional career in 1913 as a business lawyer in the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft , at that time one of the largest German banks. During the First World War , in 1916, he was in the procurement office of the War Ministry responsible for the war-essential production of fats and thus also for German soap production . These contacts were useful for him to become managing director of Sunlicht-Seifenfabrik AG in Mannheim in 1921 , a forerunner of the Unilever group.

In 1925, at the age of 35, Schulte became general director of the mining consortium "Bergwerksgesellschaft Georg von Giesche's Erben" with 30,000 employees. According to the "New York Times", the Giesche works were one of the "most valuable companies in Europe".

In 1926, US investors around W. Averell Harriman and the private bank Brown Brothers Harriman took over the "Giesche Company" together with the mining trust Anaconda Copper Mining . With the takeover, the company was registered as the “Silesian-American Corporation” in Delaware , and Prescott Bush became the managing director . Between the two world wars, Giesche operated one of the largest zinc mines in Europe and mined 40 percent of all Polish zinc, was one of the largest coal miners with an annual output of 3,500,000 tons and owned ironworks, rolling mills and other industrial plants as well as extensive agricultural and forestry areas. The production manager was Otto Fitzner , a veteran of the NSDAP and close acquaintance of Karl Hanke , one of the leading National Socialists in Silesia . With the occupation of Poland by the German Reich, the consortium was placed under German administration in 1940. A general manager of the US interest group sat in Switzerland. The business offices of the Giesche Company were located near Birkenau, the location of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

The main business was the extraction of zinc , a raw material essential to warfare. In 1933 Schulte met for the first time with leaders of National Socialist Germany, including Adolf Hitler , and turned, at least inwardly, from their politics. He was a participant in the secret meeting of February 20, 1933 , at which Hitler presented his political goals to leading business representatives. Schulte's role in the production of goods essential to the war effort led to his appointment as military economic leader .

Resistance to National Socialism

Professionally, Eduard Schulte traveled a lot between the company's headquarters in Breslau and Zurich, where financial transactions were carried out, including past the Polish government. From 1939 onwards, through a Polish agent, he became an important informant for Jewish organizations, Switzerland and the Allied secret services . Because of his work, he was familiar with the structure of the German war economy, including the forced labor system and the concentration camps . Schulte received secret information from his deputy Otto Fitzner , a fanatical National Socialist and friend of the Silesian Gauleiter Karl Hanke , as well as his cousin Hermann, who worked for the German defense ; as early as April 1941 he had knowledge of the planned attack on the Soviet Union , which took place on June 22 of the same year.

In 1942 Eduard Schulte found out about the intended “ final solution to the Jewish question ” after Fitzner had attended a meeting of the Upper Silesian NSDAP Gau leadership with Heinrich Himmler on July 17, 1942 . Through a business partner, Isidor Koppelmann, and Benjamin Sagalowitz , a Jewish journalist who had set up the information and press office of the Jewish News in Switzerland , Eduard Schulte gave Gerhart the information about the beginning of the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany in July 1942 M. Riegner , then representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland.

The Riegner Telegram, the decisive evidence that the Western Allies knew early on of Hitler's murder intentions.

Riegner passed the message on to the relevant Allied authorities. It contained the alarming news that “the plan had been discussed and considered at the Fuehrer's headquarters to exterminate all Jews in German-occupied and controlled countries, a number of 3½ to 4 million, after deportation and concentration in the east, in order to exterminate once and for all to solve the Jewish question in Europe Stop (...) Hydrocyanic acid in discussion Stop (...) ”.

The telegram arrived at the United States Department of State and the British Foreign Office a. The US State Department diplomats did not pass it on - the whole thing was just "a wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears," said the misjudgment by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the secret service of the US War Department . The reference to hydrogen cyanide in particular was classified as implausible. Zyklon B , the gas that was used in the extermination camp for mass murder, was hydrocyanic acid in granulate form. Riegner already suspected anti-Semitic motives behind the disinterest of the diplomats contacted. A later investigation confirmed his suspicion. It was thanks to Sydney Silverman , a Jewish Member of Parliament of the Labor Party, that Shulte's message finally got through to Stephen Wise , founder and president of the World Jewish Congress, despite the US State Department's blockade of information .

In November 1942, the Silesian American Corporation came under US government control. The Seizure Warrant under the Enemy Trade Act described the Silesian-American Company as a "US Holding Company with German and Polish Subsidiaries" that controlled large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. It also stated that these properties had been under the control of the Nazi regime since September 1939 (when Hitler started World War II), which had put them in the service of the war. It was not until December 1942 that the Allies published a declaration against the German policy of exterminating the Jews.

Schulte also undertook to warn a Jewish entrepreneur he was friends with in good time and supported him so that he and his family could get to safety.

Schulte almost paid for his efforts with his life: he was betrayed at the end of 1943, but was able to flee from Breslau to Switzerland in time after he was warned of the threat of arrest. He stayed in Zurich, financially supported by business friends and bankers there. He worked here with Allen Dulles , who worked for the OSS , and drafted plans for the economic development of Germany after the Second World War .

After the war

Schulte grave , sculptor Friedrich Kühn , Düsseldorf North Cemetery

In August 1945 Schulte went to Berlin as an advisor to the American military government, but despite his services he was not included in the closer decision-making circles in the reconstruction of Germany. Therefore he left Germany again in 1946 and returned to Switzerland. As a military economist, he was denied a compensation for his losses to the Georg von Giesche heirs . He subsequently lived in seclusion in Switzerland and died in Zurich at the beginning of 1966, two days after he had turned 75. When his widow applied for state compensation for the losses in the East, the judges in the Federal Republic of Germany refused to pass on information to the Allies, which they considered a criminal offense, i.e. as treason .

Eduard Schulte was buried in the family grave at Nordfriedhof in Düsseldorf .

Honor

That Schulte was the source of the information for the famous Riegner Telegram remained a little-known secret until it was unearthed by historians in the late 1970s. In 1986 the historians Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman drew a detailed portrait of Schultes in their book Breaking The Silence .

In Schulte's birthplace, Düsseldorf, a small street has been named after him since May 18, 1993. The local association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime - Bund der Antifaschisteninnen and Antifaschisten had applied for such an honor.

In Bernward Dörner's view , Schulte was “probably the most important individual from whom the international public learned that Hitler actually wanted to physically exterminate all European Jews in his domain”.

literature

• Walter Laqueur , Richard Breitman: Breaking the silence. The Story of Eduard Schulte, the German industrialist who risked everything to oppose the Nazis. Simon & Schuster, New York 1986, ISBN 0-671-54694-5 .
  • German: The man who broke the silence. How the world found out about the Holocaust. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1986, ISBN 3-550-06408-X ; ibid. 1988, ISBN 3-54833092-4 .
    • Review by Hans-Otto Eglau : Neither a leftist nor a radical democrat. The authors have tried to shed light on the person of this great stranger. In: The time . No. 20, May 8, 1987.
• Gerhart M. Riegner : Ne jamais désespérer. Soixante années au service du peuple juif et des droits de l'homme. Les Éditions du Cerf, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-204-06133-6 .
  • German: Never despair. 60 years for the Jewish people and human rights . Bleicher, Gerlingen 2001, ISBN 3-88350-669-9 .
• Monty Noam Penkower: The Mysterious Messenger. In: Commentary . January 1984.
• Günter Schubert : The stain on Uncle Sam's white vest. America and the Jewish Refugees 1938–1945. Campus, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-593-37275-4 .
• Angela Genger : “Break the silence.” Eduard Schulte's example and the present. In: "Moment." Reports, information and documents from the Düsseldorf Memorial . No. 7, 1995, ISSN  1434-3606 , pp. 1–5 (detailed curriculum vitae; with photos).
• Robert Melvin Spector: World without Civilization. Mass Murder and the Holocaust. History and Analysis. UP of America Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD (Maryland) 2004, ISBN 0-76182963-6 (readable online, Google or Internet trade) p. 474 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Eduard Schulte in the catalog of the German National Library
• Klaus Wiegrefe : "The will to save was missing" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 2001 ( online - October 29, 2001 , interview with Gerhart Riegner about Schulte's role).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Also: Giesches heirs zinc and mining operations; or: Giesches Mining.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Christoph Gunkel: Holocaust: Eduard Schulte - the forgotten whistleblower against Adolf Hitler. In: Spiegel online . July 27, 2017.
3. ^ ^{A b} Bernward Dörner: The Germans and the Holocaust. What nobody wanted to know, but everyone could know. Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-549-07315-5 , p. 279.
4. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe: "The will to save was missing" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 2001 ( online - October 29, 2001 ).
5. ↑ Robert von Rimscha : The Bushs - world power as a family heritage. 2004, p. 25.
6. ^ Eduard Schulte. In: encyclopedia.ushmm.org. The Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed December 6, 2019.
7. ↑ ^{a b In} this letter to the editor, the New York historian claims that he had come across Schulte as the key informant in archive studies at the end of the 1970s and that he published this in several places in 1983, which Breitman et al. a. was picked up in her book.