Ernst Brauweiler

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Ernst Brauweiler

Ernst Brauweiler (born June 18, 1889 in Elberfeld , † August 3, 1945 ) was a German journalist and civil servant.

Life

Brauweiler was the son of Peter Brauweiler and his wife Maria, née Kaiser. After attending secondary school in his hometown, where he obtained his school-leaving certificate in 1908, Brauweiler studied German in Bonn , Munich and Berlin and graduated in Bonn with a dissertation on Heinrich Heine's prose . The oral exam took place on December 9, 1914.

After his studies, Brauweiler completed a traineeship at the Bergisch-Märkische Zeitung in Elberfeld, where he then joined as an editor. From 1921 Brauweiler worked as an editor for the national liberal Hannoversche Kurier , from 1926 as editor-in-chief. When Franz von Papen became Chancellor of the Reich, Brauweiler resigned after differences with the publisher Dr. Jänecke and was appointed to the rank of government councilor in 1932 as a consultant in the press department of the Reich government. In 1933 he was accepted into the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP).

According to a report by the journalist Bella Fromm , Brauweiler is said to have worked as an employee of Joseph Goebbels in the production of an allegedly false will of the Reich President Paul von Hindenburg .

In 1938, Brauweiler was appointed deputy head of department IVb (department for foreign press) in the RMVP as deputy to Karl Bömer . The task of this department was to capture the foreign press with all available means for the German state and to ensure that the reporting of the foreign press representatives was in the interests of the German government. This was the purpose of the daily press conferences in front of the foreign press representatives, which took place twice a day in the Propaganda Ministry under the direction of the head of the department for the foreign press. From December 1939 to December 1940 he also headed the foreign department of the Propaganda Ministry in personal union. After Boemer's death in 1942, Brauweiler succeeded him in the rank of ministerial director as head of the foreign press department. The enduring testimonies describe him in this office as a "bureaucratic man without imagination": The Swedish journalist Fredborg stated, for example, that the press conferences under his leadership were no longer lively and lively, as they were under Böhmer, but "dreary and colorless" , and that Brauweiler himself was sometimes stubborn as an army pack donkey. Even Joseph Goebbels expressed skepticism in his diaries, so on 20 August 1943, he also [ Otto Dietrich ] is of the opinion that it is necessary to replace Brauweiler in the long run ... The suspicion has not been confirmed that in the foreign press department defeatism was common. The gentlemen in the department are driverless and are therefore sometimes a little susceptible to foreign reports. This is mainly due to Dr. Brauweiler.

According to Boelcke, Brauweiler had in common with most of the other leading Goebbels employees that he came from the Rhineland. Unlike most of these, however, he is said to have leaned more towards national liberalism than national socialism. Until its self-dissolution in 1933, the Catholic belonged to the liberal German People's Party (DVP). Without his own application, Brauweiler was officially granted NSDAP membership in 1937 .

In 1920 Brauweiler married Johanna Schürhoff (1896–1989) and had their daughter Rita-Dorothea, married. Petersen (1925-1999).

Arrested on May 1, 1945 in Berlin, he was sentenced to death by shooting by the SMT of the 5th Shock Army on July 23, 1945 under Art. 58-2 StGB of the RSFSR for war crimes ; the sentence was carried out on August 3, 1945.

Fonts

literature

  • Martin Herzer: Foreign Correspondents and Foreign Press Policy in the Third Reich . Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-412-20859-2 .
  • Martin Sommerfeldt : The Wehrmacht High Command announces. An eyewitness report by the OKW's foreign spokesman. West German publishing and printing company, Mörfelden-Walldorf 1952.
  • Willi A. Boelcke (Ed.): War Propaganda 1939–1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1966.
  • 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. 414 f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bella Fromm: Blood and Banquets. A Berlin Social Diary , 1942, p. 107.
  2. ^ Arvid Fredborg: Behind the Steel Wall. A Swedish Journalist in Berlin, 1941–43 , 1944, p. 5.
  3. ↑ Elke Fröhlich (ed.): The diaries of Joseph Goebbels. KG Saur, Munich, Part II: Dictations 1941–1945. 15 vols. 1993-1996, ISBN 3-598-21920-2 . Volume 9, p. 317, August 20, 1943
  4. ↑ Boelcke: War Propaganda. 1939-1941 , 1966, p. 73.
  5. ↑ Martin Herzer: Foreign Correspondents and Foreign Press Policy in the Third Reich , 2012, pp. 171–175.
  6. ^ Andreas Weigelt, Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944-1947): A historical-biographical study , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, short biographies on the accompanying CD, there p. 69.
personal data
SURNAME Brauweiler, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and civil servant
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Elberfeld
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 1945