Erich Albrecht (lawyer)

Erich Albrecht as a witness at the Nuremberg trials

Adolf Erich Albrecht (born August 8, 1890 in Kronstadt , Transylvania, † February 4, 1949 in Stuttgart ) was a German lawyer and diplomat. He was best known as the head of the legal department of the Foreign Office from 1943 to 1945.

Live and act

Youth and education

Albrecht was the son of the bookseller and printer's owner Adolf Albrecht. After attending secondary schools in Dresden (Easter 1900 to autumn 1905) and Munich (autumn 1905 to June 1907), he completed his last school year in Zittau , where he passed the Abitur exam on March 23, 1908 . Albrecht then studied 1908-1912 jurisprudence in Leipzig (summer term 1908 and spring term 1909) and Berlin (winter semester 1909/1910 until winter semester 1910/1911). He then switched to the University of Bonn as a doctoral student . With an oral examination on February 29, 1912 , he obtained his doctorate with a dissertation supervised by Karl Berbohm on the requisition of private property to become a Dr. jur. He passed the legal traineeship exam on September 29, 1912.

From October 1912 to September 1913 Albrecht was a one-year volunteer in the Prussian Army . He then began his legal preparatory service , which was interrupted by his participation in the First World War from August 1, 1914 to November 28, 1918. After the end of the war, he finished his education, which he completed on November 15, 1920 by passing the Great State Examination in Law .

Career in the judicial service and in the foreign service

Since December 1, 1920, Albrecht worked as a public prosecutor in the public prosecutor's office at Regional Court II in Berlin . From there he moved to the German-English Mixed Arbitration Tribunal in Berlin and London on February 7, 1922 , most recently with the rank of Privy Councilor of Justice.

On July 12, 1928, Albrecht was appointed to the Foreign Service . He took up service in the Foreign Office on October 1, 1928. There he was assigned to Department V (Law) headed by Friedrich Gaus , in which he was employed in the Department for International Legal Protection (Ref. Z). In this capacity he was promoted to Legation Councilor (November 14, 1929), First Class Councilor (August 1, 1931), and Legation Councilor (December 22, 1932). After he had held the position of advisor for international legal protection for almost eight years, Albrecht was appointed advisor to the Foreign Office for international law (Ref. 1) in mid-1936. A year later, in 1937, he was appointed deputy head of the legal department, making him the second highest man in his department after Gaus. On March 10, 1942, in this capacity, he was promoted to envoy 1st class as ministerial conductor.

In 1943 Albrecht was the only acting head of department in the Foreign Office who did not have a party book of the NSDAP . However, in 1939, 1941 and 1943 he had made a total of three applications for membership in the NSDAP, which the party bureaucracy rejected.

In March 1943 or October 1, 1943, Albrecht was appointed as Gaus's successor as head of the legal department of the Foreign Office. When, in June 1941, 600 Dutch Jews were arrested as the alleged perpetrators of unrest in the Netherlands and deported to camps within the Reich, the Swedish envoy, in his capacity as representative of Sweden as the protective power of the Netherlands, presented to the Foreign Office and asked for a To enable a visit to the prisoners who are still alive. In the course of the rejection of this request and in order to avoid future foreign policy problems due to the persecution of Jews, Albrecht, as head of the legal department, recommended to his State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker on July 31, 1941:

"To check whether it is necessary that the police continue to provide the interested parties with material from which they can authentically determine the result of the measures taken [...] If it is inevitable to accommodate the Dutch Jews outside the Netherlands, it would be useful if the police did not let any information about the place of accommodation or any deaths reach the outside world. "

In the final phase of the war, after the majority of the office's employees had been evacuated from Berlin to alternative quarters, Albrecht was entrusted with the management of the Berlin Foreign Office and the staff who remained there.

End of the war and the Nuremberg trials

When the war ended Albrecht was near the Austrian Fuschl am See taken up by the 7th US Army and fell into Allied captivity . As a result, during the Nuremberg Trials , he was interrogated as a witness to numerous crimes of the Nazi state in the field of foreign policy and the role that the Foreign Office and its staff played in these: Among other things, the commissioner orders and hostage shootings were political Retaliation in partisan struggle and the shooting of 50 British prisoners of war who had managed to escape from an Luftstalag in 1944 . Even today, Albrecht's statements on the deportation and murder of large parts of European Jews in the German-occupied areas of Eastern Europe between 1942 and 1945 receive greater attention . For the so-called Wilhelmstrasse trial against members of the Foreign Office (AA) and other ministries, however, Albrecht was up to August 1947 as a defendant before he, like a number of other diplomats of the AA, was deleted from the list of those to be accused of the AA, which was originally reduced from fifteen to eight.

Fonts

• About requisitions of neutral private property, especially of ships , Breslau 1912. (Dissertation)

literature

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Historical Service (Ed.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945, A – F , Volume 1. Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, ISBN 978-3-506-71840-2 , p. 19.
• Johannes Hürter (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871 - 1945. 5. T - Z, supplements. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 5: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-71844-0 , p. 466
• Eckart Conze / Norbert Frei / Peter Hayes / Moshe Zimmermann : The Office and the Past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Blessing, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 .
• Hans-Jürgen Döscher : The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. Siedler, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-88680-256-6 .
• Gerhard Stuby : From "Crown Lawyer" to "Crown Witness". Friedrich Wilhelm Gaus. A life in the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse , VSA, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-89965-284-0 .

Web links

• Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin: Witness literature online. ZS 803, Albrecht, Erich (PDF; 5.1 MB). Protocols of Albrecht's interrogations in 1947.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. Berlin 1987, p. 194, note 14.
2. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 339 f.
3. ↑ Eckart Conze u. a .: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 336.
4. ↑ Eckart Conze u. a .: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 389 ff.

predecessor	Office	successor
Friedrich Gaus	Head of the Legal Department of the Foreign Office (1943 to 1945)	Office canceled (end of war)