Ernst Achenbach

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Achenbach (center) (1972)

Ernst Achenbach (born April 9, 1909 in Siegen , † December 2, 1991 in Essen ) was a German lawyer . Participated in the persecution of the Jews during National Socialism, he later became a politician ( FDP ).

family

Achenbach was born as the son of the principal Karl Ernst Achenbach and his wife Maria Jung. On March 16, 1937, he married the American Margaret Goodell. With her he had two sons and a daughter.

Life and work

Telegram of February 15, 1943 from Paris to the Foreign Office in Berlin, signed by Achenbach

Paris, February 15, 1943 - 10:30 p.m.
Arrival: February 15, 1943 - 11:25 p.m.

No. 1701 from February 15
CITTISIME!


On February 13, 1943 at around 9.10 p.m., Lieutenant Colonel Winkler and Major Dr. Nussbaum from Luftwaffenkommando III staff on the way from their office to their accommodation in Paris, Hotel Louvre, shot from behind shortly after passing the Louvre passage on the Seine. Lieutenant Colonel Winkler was replaced by 3 and Major Dr. Nussbaum injured by 2 shots. Both died the night after they were taken to a hospital. 7 cases, cal. 7.65mm, which presumably come from the same weapon, were found at the crime scene. The investigation against the perpetrator (s) is still ongoing.
As a temporary measure of atonement, it is planned to arrest 2,000 Jews and take them to the East.


Achenbach
Beate Klarsfeld with the telegram signed by Achenbach from February 15, 1943 to the Berlin Foreign Ministry

Achenbach, who was Protestant , attended the secondary school in Gelsenkirchen , where he passed the Abitur in 1927 . He then studied in Paris , Berlin , Hamburg and Bonn law . In Hamburg he was an assistant to Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy . After the first state examination in 1931 and his doctorate in 1932, he had been in the judicial service since October 4, 1932 and took the assessor examination on May 9, 1936. He was a member of the German national military association Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten until its dissolution in 1933/34; After the entry ban, which came into force in 1933, he joined the NSDAP in 1937 . Achenbach was a member of the National Socialist Lawyers' Association . In 1937 he married the American citizen Margaret Goodell, which is why he, according to him, retired on September 28, 1944 as "internationally bound" and was drafted into the military. This process, as well as the dispute between Abetz and Undersecretary Martin Luther about a sharper course against Vichy France , he tried in 1947 in interrogations by the US prosecutor Robert Kempner to assert as evidence of resistance against National Socialism .

Achenbach joined the Foreign Service in March 1936 and was attaché at the German Embassy in Paris from November 1936 until the beginning of the Second World War. During the German occupation in France (1940-1944) he was from June 1940 to the end of April 1943 (first as legation secretary , then as legation counselor) as head of the political department of the embassy and a close associate of the German ambassador Otto Abetz . Among other things, he was concerned with "Jewish affairs". As part of this activity, Achenbach was also jointly responsible for carrying out the deportations of Jews from France . After an action by the French resistance in February 1943, for example, he was involved in the retaliatory deportations of a four-digit number of Jews to Auschwitz . When details became known in 1970, the then Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt issued him a “ clean bill of health ” and declared that he had known Achenbach for a long time. Achenbach was also supported by his "Protector Walter Scheel ".

He was a soldier in 1944/45 and was released from Soviet captivity on October 16, 1945 . After the end of the Nazi regime, he tried to portray the German embassy in France to American investigators as a hotbed of the conspiracy against Hitler and claimed that Jews were deported, hostage shootings and the like. Ä. not having known anything.

Achenbach played a key role in founding the Rassemblement national populaire , RNP, under Marcel Déat . With the help of the RNP, he wanted to bring the Vichy regime to a more ideological-fascist, Nazi-friendly line than the regime already represented.

Achenbach worked as a lawyer in Essen from 1946. In 1947/48 he worked as a defender in the IG Farben trial , where he defended Fritz Gajewski . In the Wilhelmstrasse Trial , he defended Ernst Wilhelm Bohle . He also acted as legal representative in denazification proceedings . Together with the former SS-Obergruppenführer from the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) and Lieutenant General in the military administration in France Werner Best , he was one of those who wanted to enforce a general amnesty for Nazi perpetrators in the early 1950s . After his release from Danish custody, Best steered his initiatives for the protection and release of Nazi and war criminals from Achenbach's office; he was considered Achenbach's "amnesty-political alter ego ". Best and Achenbach exerted considerable influence on the creation of the Law on Exemption from Punishment of 1954. Anneliese von Ribbentrop was Achenbach's client when she was denazified.

The plan to make Achenbach Commissioner of the European Economic Community in 1970 failed due to public pressure. Achenbach's stance on the question of the conviction of German war criminals had led to a scandal.

Despite his past, Achenbach managed to continue his career as a lawyer and FDP politician well into the 1970s. In 1974 Beate Klarsfeld , who together with her husband Serge Klarsfeld had uncovered Achenbach's involvement in the Holocaust, vehemently demanded resignation.

Career in the FDP

Achenbach joined the FDP after the war, and was its foreign policy spokesman until April 1953. Within the FDP of North Rhine-Westphalia , he was considered the right-hand man of the state chairman Friedrich Middelhauve , was responsible for soliciting industrial donations and was extremely successful at this. So he made sure that Hugo Stinnes jr. the NRW-FDP financed the employee Heinz Wilke , a former full-time Hitler Youth leader, whose task was the selection of the so-called foreign managers at district and district level. As a result, almost all of these positions were filled with former National Socialists. Achenbach also selected Middelhauve's personal advisor Wolfgang Diewerge , among others the holder of the golden NSDAP party badge and the blood order .

At the beginning of the 1950s, Achenbach and Middelhauve were among the authors of the German-national “German Program”; this was not passed by the FDP federal party conference in 1952 . In the FDP NRW there were plans to appoint Achenbach as Minister of Economics after the state election in 1950 . Middelhauve stuck to him despite harsh criticism from other state associations. The Hamburg state chairman Willy Max Rademacher , referring to a memorandum by the French High Commissioner , which stated Achenbach's complicity in the deportations of Jews, demanded that Achenbach's appointment as minister be waived. Only the failure of the coalition negotiations prevented the appointment as minister. From 1953 to 1959 Achenbach was chairman of the FDP district association Ruhr and from 1970 to 1973 of the district association Ruhr-West. He was also a member of the state executive committee of the FDP NRW for several years.

In 1953 Achenbach was the key figure in relations with a group of former NSDAP party members, the so-called Naumann district , which the FDP tried to infiltrate in North Rhine-Westphalia . Achenbach practically encouraged Werner Naumann to make this attempt. After Naumann and five other colleagues were arrested by the British in 1953 and imprisoned in Werl , Achenbach took over Naumann's defense for a short time. The investigative commission of the FDP federal party, consisting of Fritz Neumayer , Thomas Dehler and Alfred Onnen , recommended that Achenbach be excluded from the FDP because "according to his basic attitude, he had never belonged to us". This recommendation was not implemented by the FDP NRW. Achenbach was dismissed from his position as chairman of the FDP's foreign policy committee on April 26, 1953 by the FDP federal executive committee.

MP

From 1950 to July 12, 1958, Achenbach was first a member of the state parliament in North Rhine-Westphalia , where he was deputy chairman of the FDP parliamentary group from 1955. From 1957 to 1976 he was a member of the German Bundestag . From December 7, 1971 to 1972 Achenbach was deputy chairman of the FDP parliamentary group. From 1961 to 1965 Achenbach headed the working group Foreign Policy and Defense and from 1969 to 1976 the working group Foreign, Germany and Security Policy of the FDP parliamentary group.

From October 16, 1964 to January 19, 1977 Achenbach was also a member of the European Parliament , where he was chairman of the Committee on Relations with African Countries and Madagascar from 1969 to 1974, and then of the Committee on Development and Cooperation until 1976. At times he was also deputy chairman of the Liberal Group in the European Parliament.

As rapporteur for the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag (until 1976), Achenbach was responsible for the German-French supplementary agreement to the transition agreement (signed in 1971), which he successfully prevented from ratifying until 1974. This treaty was supposed to make it possible to try those German Nazi criminals who had already been convicted in absentia in France. A real scandal broke out, and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt finally promised the French government an immediate ratification of the treaty; the agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the French government on the prosecution of certain crimes was ratified on January 30, 1975 and entered into force on April 15, 1975. Because of Achenbach's blockades, only three central actors in the persecution of Jews in France, namely Kurt Lischka , Ernst Heinrichsohn and Herbert M. Hagen , could be brought to justice in Cologne in 1979 .

Honors

Publications

  • with Otto Abetz : The open problem , Greven-Verlag, Cologne 1951
  • with Georg Tolges, Ed .: Honest efforts for peace and reunification. Foreign policy speeches and essays [by Ernst Achenbach]. Leske , Darmstadt 1961.

literature

Films, film contributions

  • Gerolf Karwath: Hitler's elites after 1945. Part 4: Jurists - acquittal on their own behalf. Director: Holger Hillesheim. Südwestrundfunk (SWR, 2002).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Regional personal dictionary on National Socialism in the old districts of Siegen and Wittgenstein, article Ernst Achenbach .
  2. ↑ a b c d e conversation (PDF) with Robert Kempner on August 19, 1947.
  3. ↑ Regional personal dictionary on National Socialism in the old districts of Siegen and Wittgenstein, article Ernst Achenbach .
  4. ↑ 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 . Munich 2010, p. 19.
  5. ↑ Wrong done . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 1970, pp. 32 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Such is his statements to US prosecutor Robert Kempner in 1947 according to the interrogation protocol, Nuremberg City Archives, file A6.
  7. ↑ Jean-Paul Cointet: Hitler et la France. Perrin, Paris 2014, p. 164. Cointet describes Achenbach in Paris as a show-off figure and a salon lion in collaboration circles.
  8. ^ 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, p. 10.
  9. ↑ See Norbert Frei: Past Policy. The beginnings of the Federal Republic and the Nazi past , Munich 1996, p. 106 and p. 109 (quote).
  10. ↑ Torben Fischer, Matthias N. Lorenz (Ed.): Lexicon of "Coping with the Past" in Germany. Bielefeld 2007, p. 103.
  11. ↑ Joyful cooperation . In: Der Spiegel 48/2010, p. 44 f.
  12. ↑ See Rademacher's letter to Middelhauve dated September 1, 1950, Hamburg State Archives , FDP / A134 files.
  13. ↑ Naumann wrote on August 26, 1950 in his diary about a conversation with Achenbach: “Using individual examples, he explained how easy it would be to do it. (...) He wants to get me involved as General Secretary! ”Quoted from: Public Record Office / Foreign Office , datachment 1014/610.
  14. ^ Investigation report by Dehler, Neumayer and Onnen on the situation in the state association of North Rhine-Westphalia from June 5, 1953.
  15. ↑ Exhibition on the trial in Cologne ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lischka-prozess.de
  16. ↑ Regional personal dictionary on National Socialism in the old districts of Siegen and Wittgenstein, article Ernst Achenbach .
  17. ^ Kristian Buchna: National collection on the Rhine and Ruhr. Friedrich Middelhauve and the North Rhine-Westphalian FDP 1945–1953 , Munich 2010, p. 201.
  18. ↑ pseudonym or prominent author; According to the Gelsenkirchen District Court, a man with this name "Georg Tolges" was operating as "Attorney and notary in Gelsenkirchen" with the dates: from September 4, 1961 to August 31, 1999.
  19. ^ Verlag des Franz Six ; Achenbach was co-owner and managing director of this publishing house.
personal data
SURNAME Achenbach, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (FDP), MdL, MdB, MdEP
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Wins
DATE OF DEATH 2nd December 1991
Place of death eat