Erich Vermehren

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Erich Vermehren

Erich Barward Julius Vermehren , after 1945 Erich Vermeeren de Saventhem or Eric Maria de Saventhem , (born December 23, 1919 in Lübeck , † April 28, 2005 in Bonn ) was a German lawyer and 1943/44 agent of the Abwehr in Istanbul , whose desertion to the British in 1944 the occasion and pretext to break up the defense. He later worked as an insurance broker and was founding president of Una Voce .

Life

Origin and education

Vermehren grew up in a family of lawyers in Lübeck. His grandfather was the Senator Julius Vermehren , his father the lawyer Kurt Vermehren . His mother, the journalist Petra Vermehren , was the daughter of Possehl partner Johannes Schwabroch. Erich was the youngest of three children. His older siblings were the cabaret artist, actress and religious Isa Vermehren and the journalist Michael Vermehren . In 1933 his mother moved with him and his sister to Berlin, where in April 1934, on the recommendation of the Berlin lawyer and friend of the Paul Leverkuehn family, she was the first woman to be employed in the foreign policy department of the Berliner Tageblatt . Erich Vermehren came from Berlin to the boarding school of the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium in Templin , where he passed his Abitur. He then began an apprenticeship in banking and law in Hamburg, but at the same time applied for a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University . In 1938 he was awarded the scholarship, but following an intervention by the Nazi student body that he was not worthy to represent the youth of the Third Reich abroad, his passport was withdrawn, which prevented acceptance of the scholarship.

His sister Isa had now met Countess Elisabeth Plettenberg (1911–2000). Intensive discussions with her led to Isa's conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1938 . Erich Vermehren, who was very impressed by Countess Plettenberg, also converted in 1939 and married her in October 1941 at Hovestadt Castle , her parents' house.

Defense agent

At the beginning of the Second World War, Erich Vermehren was classified as homeland suitable for garrison use because of a long-ago shooting accident which had led to a permanent slight disability . This enabled him to continue his studies and in 1940 he passed the First State Examination in Freiburg and in 1941 his doctorate. jur. to lock. He got a job with the defense and was transferred to Istanbul after a short time in Berlin at the request of Paul Leverkuehn, who had meanwhile become head of the defense unit in Istanbul . In addition, the ambassador to Ankara , Franz von Papen , was a distant relative of his wife.

In mid-December 1943 he succeeded in securing a special commission for church-political research in Turkey for his wife, whom he had had to leave behind in Germany as politically unreliable. Although she was refused entry at the Bulgarian-Turkish border when they both wanted to travel back to Turkey and Erich Vermehren had to travel on alone, Elisabeth Vermehren managed to get to Istanbul via Sofia with a courier from the Foreign Office. .

Desertion

After her friend Otto Carl Kiep was arrested in January 1944 , Vermehrens were ordered back to Berlin to be questioned in connection with this case. Erich Vermehren then intensified his existing contacts with the British secret service and initiated his desertion. To the families from guilt by association to preserve, was one on 27 January 1944 kidnapping staged by the British. The couple were first brought overland via İzmir and Aleppo to Cairo , from there to Gibraltar and finally to London in March 1944 .

Although the Vermehrens brought with them little that could be used by the intelligence service, the impression arose that they had revealed a German secret code. This and the fact that the British press reported on the case with the headline Cousin of Papen deserts on February 10th , led to the fact that the case spread widely in Berlin and found its way into Goebbels' diary of March 4th, 1944: " The Vermehren case in Ankara bothered the Führer a lot. He has now handed over the entire defense service to Himmler and the SD . ” The incident had already caused Hitler on February 18, 1944, to disempower the Abwehr under Admiral Canaris and place it under the supervision of the RSHA .

Various family members from both families were arrested. The Vermehren family was lured to Potsdam under a pretext, where they were first placed under house arrest in a hotel and then sent to the Ravensbrück (Isa Vermehren) and Sachsenhausen (Kurt, Petra and Michael Vermehren) concentration camps .

In England

Erich and Elisabeth Vermehren initially lived in the London borough of South Kensington in the apartment of the mother of double agent Kim Philby as guests of the Foreign Office .

However, since they could not identify with the British policy towards Germany, they asked for clearance, which was also granted. Elisabeth Vermehren found a job at a Catholic school in Worth Priory, and Erich Vermehren was initially quite successful in 1945 with an export company for rationed goods. In 1952 he found a job as an insurance broker. In 1954 he changed his family name to Vermeeren de Saventhem , to Zaventem , the Flemish place of origin of the Vermehren family. The couple then generally used the names Eric Maria and Elisabeth de Saventhem.

Later years

On behalf of the insurance company Lloyd's of London , Erich Vermehren built a subsidiary, Interbroke Ltd., in Zurich from autumn 1952 with growing success . , on. In 1964 he became general representative for all European business and lived in Paris for two years. In 1966 the couple returned to Switzerland and were naturalized here.

In response to the Second Vatican Council , the conservative convert became active in the Catholic traditionalist movement . He was one of the founders of Una Voce and became the first president of this movement for the preservation of the Tridentine Mass .

When Elisabeth Vermehren 's health deteriorated, the couple decided to return to Germany and moved to Bonn, near the monastery of his sister Isa Vermehren. Elisabeth died in the house of her sister Minita Freifrau von Gagern in Cologne on April 7, 2000. Erich Vermehren, who was still able to travel to Rome in 2003 for a meeting of the Una Voce board with the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger , died on April 28, 2005 in Bonn.

Elisabeth and Erich Vermehren are buried in the Poppelsdorf cemetery in Bonn.

Fonts

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ According to Wegner (lit.), p. 111; Date of doctorate: oral examination on October 13, 1941, doctoral certificate is dated December 22, 1988. “Erich Vermehren (1919-2005) had a doctorate file determined from the holdings of the Freiburg University Archives (UAF B 29/1992). The oral examination took place on October 13th, 1941, the doctoral certificate is dated December 22nd, 1988. "(E-Mail from the University Archives of January 14th, 2020)
  2. Ralf Geord Reuth; Joseph Goebbels - Diaries 1924 to 1945. 3rd edition Munich 2003, ISBN 3-492-21415-0 , vol. 5. S. 2011