Emil von Rintelen

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Emil Otto Paul von Rintelen (born January 10, 1897 in Stettin , † June 24, 1981 in Düsseldorf ) was a German diplomat and ambassador .

Life

He came from an old Herford council family and was the son of the royal Prussian lieutenant general Wilhelm Rintelen (1855-1938), who was raised to the Prussian hereditary nobility in 1913 with all descendants , and Hedwig Russell (1865-1953).

Rintelen entered the diplomatic service in 1921 . In 1923 he became Legation Secretary at the German Embassy in Paris , in 1929 Legation Councilor in Warsaw and in 1936 Legation Councilor in the Foreign Office . In 1940 he became a member of the NSDAP , envoy and ministerial conductor in the political department. From 1941 to March 1943 he was on the personal staff of the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop . On August 19, 1942, he forwarded a telegram to the traveling staff from Ribbentrop to Berlin, which dealt with the planned deportation and murder of the Romanian Jews: “It is planned to send the Jews from Romania, beginning around September 10, 1942, in to spend ongoing transports to the Lublin district , where the workable part is assigned to work [sic!], the rest is to be subjected to special treatment. ” In the written grounds for judgment in the Wilhelmstrasse trial of April 1949, he was incorrectly named as the author, although the file itself clearly shows the facts of the mere forwarding, which should also serve to hinder this process of the SS.

In 1943 he was appointed "Ambassador for Special Use" (e.g. V.).

As early as 1954, Paul Seabury, who evaluates documents from the Wilhelmstrasse Trial , called Ribbentrop's “special advisor”, who, in parallel with Fritz Berber and Paul Karl Schmidt, was supposed to “collect and process material for planning the future new order of Europe ” in three separate teams . Hans Heinrich Lammers from the Foreign Office was sometimes allowed to be there.

Rintelen joined the NSDAP in 1940 for career reasons. At the end of 1944 he prepared an expert report on the work areas of the Foreign Office.

With its organization and structure, the AA is set up in such a way that it is available to the Foreign Minister as a compact, uniform instrument and enables him to exercise his ... duties: 1. To keep him informed of all political developments abroad. .. so that he can at any time give the Fiihrer a reliable picture of the diplomatic situation; 2. The administration of an apparatus which guarantees the rapid implementation of all political plans and intentions of the Führer.

The background was a possible downsizing in favor of war missions. Rintelen emphasized in detail the value of fulfilling the tasks of the traditional areas, while marginally assuming that the areas occupied by the National Socialists "Inland I" and "Inland II", which among other things worked in the persecution of the Jews, only had a kind of liaison service character.

Because of this, he felt the anger of the leading Nazi representative Eberhard von Thadden in the Foreign Office.

Rintelen was interned by the USA after the end of the war, but they only used him as a witness after he himself was not incriminated. He then worked as a consultant to the industrialist Günther Henle .

Rintelen married on June 26, 1926 in Königswinter Margarete Schulte Moenting (* December 23, 1898 in Cologne , † May 3, 1969 in Düsseldorf), the daughter of the industrialist Ernst Schulte Moenting and Maria Pickhardt . The couple had four sons.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the 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. 498.
  2. ↑ The presentation by Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 498, quoted there from Léon Poliakov and Joseph Wulf : Das Third Reich und seine Diener. Foreign Office, Justice and Wehrmacht , Wiesbaden 1989 is wrong with naming Rintelen as the author, in Poliakov / Wulf, however, the context of the forwarding is recognizable on p. 66. After a first edition of the book from 1956, the Araniverlag had to correct the facts, which were also abbreviated at the beginning, following a lawsuit from Rintelen. In addition to the successful lawsuit (judgment of the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court of March 12, 1957), the daily newspapers Die Welt , Tagesspiegel and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published counter-statements on January 12 and 13, 1957. See also the book review in the Tagesspiegel on February 5, 1957, with a clear reference to the errors mentioned in the judgment text in Nuremberg and the corresponding presentation in the book. There is only Rintelen's self-testimony in his memoirs on the motive behind the disability of the SS, see the Discussion section.
  3. ^ Seabury, p. 182.
  4. ↑ Report of Interrogation - P / W: Von Rintelen, Emil , Vernehmungsunterlagen, October 24, 1945 (English; pdf; 22.21 MB).
  5. ↑ Seabury, p. 215. Seabury calls Rintelen an "adjutant" Ribbentrops at this time.
  6. ↑ See Hans-Jürgen Döscher : The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Berlin 1987 , p. 289 ff., And Hermann Weiß : Biographisches Lexikon zum Third Reich , p. 378 f. This is done by Rainer Sieb: The NSDAP's Access to Music. On the establishment of organizational structures for music work in the divisions of the party , dissertation (p. 92), Department of Education and Cultural Studies of the University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück 2007, incorrectly quoted, which is why it can be read exactly the opposite that Rintelen was still in 1944 Nazi positions should have defended.
personal data
SURNAME Rintelen, Emil von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rintelen, Emil Otto Paul von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat and ambassador
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH June 24, 1981
Place of death Dusseldorf