Ernst Paraquin

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Ernst Paraquin (born March 2, 1876 in Saargemünd , † September 23, 1957 ) was a German officer and lieutenant colonel in the Turkish army .

Life

Ernst Paraquin was born in the Lorraine district town of Saargemünd, which belonged to the realm of Alsace-Lorraine from 1871 (until 1918) . The father, Emil Paraquin, was appointed imperial railway builder (civil engineer) of the Reichsbahnen by the royal Bavarian engineer assistant in 1872 and transferred to Saargemünd; In 1873 he married Elise Ritter from Bad Kissingen . After the father's death in 1882, the mother and son moved to Munich, where he attended the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich from 1885 to 1894 (Abitur) .

He then joined the 1st Bavarian Infantry Regiment as an officer candidate . In 1896 he was promoted to second lieutenant. His transfer to the 1st Sea Battalion and his return to the Bavarian 1st Infantry Regiment in 1900 was recorded on November 27, 1896 ; a lieutenant Paraquin is named as a member of the 1st Sea Battalion of the Imperial Marine Infantry, deployed during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Paraquin was regimental adjudant in 1903, promoted to first lieutenant in 1907 and assigned to the war academy until 1910 , then with the rank of major for one year to the central office of the General Staff in Munich.

During the First World War Paraquin was a major ( Rittmeister ) on the Eastern as well as on the Western Front: In 1915 he was deployed in Galicia under the "Korps Marschall", which was composed of Austrian and German troops under the command of General Wolf Marschall von Altengottern among other things was visited on December 6, 1915 by Kaiser Wilhelm II at the Tarnopol site . In September 1916 he was ordered to the Western Front as General Staff Officer until April 1917 and assigned to the 5th Division under Lieutenant General Nikolaus von Endres .

He was then transferred to Friedrich Kreß von Kressenstein , who in June 1918 had taken over command of the German Caucasus Expedition in the southern Caucasus region with the rank of major general . As part of the cooperation between the Supreme Army Command of the German Reich and the allied Ottoman Empire , in December 1917 he took over the position of Imperial Turkish Lieutenant Colonel as Chief of Staff of the 6th Turkish Army of Army Group East under the command of Halil Pascha . As such, he made operational proposals to prepare for the Turkish attack on what is now the Azerbaijani port city of Baku , seat of the Baku Commune , which was occupied by Soviet troops and their nationalist Armenian allies. The city was captured on September 16 and 17, 1918.

In his report to Hans von Seeckt , the German adviser to the Ottoman army , Paraquin reports that after the fall of the city, there were massacres of the civilian population, but also of members of European countries. While the Turks were holding a feast on the outskirts of the city, it was mainly the Azeri soldiers who murdered around 15,000 Armenians after more than 30,000 had fled. But also “the Turkish soldiers took part in the looting and desecration ”. A copy of the report is in the files of the Foreign Office. It can be seen from it that the preparation for the attack on Baku was essentially based on Paraquin's proposals, who, however, acted in the belief that they would correspond to the ideas of the Supreme Command. In any case, he intervened personally and in sharp form with the Turkish commander on the spot. As a result, Paraquin was dismissed and returned to Germany via Constantinople.

After the end of the war Paraquin lived in Munich, where he studied political science at the university and was put up for disposal as a major in 1919 . He published a summary of his personal and thoroughly critical assessment of German-Turkish relations during the First World War under the title Politics in the Orient in January 1920 in the Berliner Tageblatt .

Awards

Fonts

Literature (selection)

  • Wolf-Dieter Bihl: The Caucasus Policy of the Central Powers, Part II. The time of the attempted Caucasian statehood (1917–1918) . Böhlau-Verlag, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 1992, ISBN 3-205-05517-9 , pp. 199, 120, 121, p. 361, notes 49, 51.
  • Israel W. Charny (Ed.): The Widening Circle of Genocide (= Genocide. A Bibliographic Review Vol. 3). New Brunswick / London 1994, p. 191.
  • Ayhan Aktar: Debating the Armenian Massacres in the Last Ottoman Parliament In: History Workshop Journal 64, 2007, pp. 240–270, here pp.?.
  • Rolf Hosfeld: Death in the Desert. The Armenian Genocide . CH Beck, Munich 2015, p.?.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 6, No. 47, November 23, 1872, p. 386.
  2. ↑ among others with Jussuf Ibrahim , Fritz Bühlmann , Max Edelmann , Ludwig Merzbacher and Michael Ostheimer
  3. ↑ Annual report on the K. Maximilians-Gymnasium in Munich for the school year 1884/85 to 1893/94 .
  4. ^ Police registration documents in the Munich city archive.
  5. ↑ [1] .
  6. ^ Rudolf Mothes: Memories . P. 40 .
  7. ↑ Turkish Yarbay, see ranks of the Turkish armed forces .
  8. ↑ Paraquin's letter to Seeckt “ Events in Baku after the capture on September 16 and 17, 1918 ”, from September 23, 1918. Bavarian Main State Archives-War Archive Munich, MKr. 1782/2, in: Winfried Baumgart: The "Kaspi Company" - Ludendorff's megalomania or routine planning by the German General Staff? First part. A critical review of the German military intervention in the Caucasus at the end of the First World War In: Yearbooks for the history of Eastern Europe . NF Vol. 18, H. 2 (1970), pp. 47-126 and 231-278. - PDF format: Document 1.pdf (9.459 KB), p. 205, notes 297, 672 and a.
  9. ↑ Document 1.pdf, note 673.
  10. ↑ Headcount of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich for the summer semester of 1919 . Lindauer and Rieger, Munich 1919, p.? ( Digitized version): "Ernst Paraquin, student of the state economy from Saargemünd, Römerstr. 11/2, born March 2, 1876, major in the General Staff ”.
  11. ^ Politics in the Orient I.
personal data
SURNAME Paraquin, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Paraquin, Ernst Julius (Christian name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Royal Bavarian, German and Turkish officer
DATE OF BIRTH March 2, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Sarreguemines
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1957