Erwin Respondek

Erwin Respondek

Erwin Respondek (born October 26, 1894 in Königshütte , Upper Silesia , † December 17, 1971 in Berlin ) (code name "Ralph") was a German economist , politician ( center ), resistance fighter against National Socialism and agent .

Live and act

Origin and early years (1894 to 1919)

Erwin Respondek was the son of a middle-class Catholic family from Upper Silesia . His ancestors, the Réponds, came from the French port city of Cherbourg and, as religiously persecuted Huguenots, emigrated to Prussia during the tolerant rule of Frederick the Great , where they settled in Silesia. The Réponds later converted to Catholicism and had their name changed to Respondek.

Respondek's father Wilhelm Respondek was a merchant in Königshütte, while his mother Valeska Habisch was a housewife. Respondek lived with his parents and three brothers - Georg, Max, Wilhelm - in his hometown until 1908, where he also went through the first years of his school career. From 1908 to 1911 he attended the Goetheschule, a grammar school in Deutsch-Wilmersdorf near Berlin, where one first became aware of Respondek's extraordinary mathematical talent.

From 1914 Respondek completed an apprenticeship at a Berlin bank. At the same time, he attended business school, which he graduated from. From 1915 he took part in the First World War as a member of a reporting unit (signal unit) . After suffering from pleurisy and pneumonia, he was finally transferred to Darmstadt. From there he was sent to the Prussian War Ministry in Berlin because of his economic expertise . In the war ministry he was employed in the war raw materials department headed by Walther Rathenau . In 1916 Respondek was appointed as an expert in the Reich Treasury (from 1919 Reich Ministry of Finance ), where he dealt with budget and tax legislation. Parallel to his work in the ministry, he attended business lectures at the Berlin Friedrich Wilhelms University . In 1917 he also submitted his dissertation, which was devoted to the French war economy from 1914 to 1916.

In 1918 he met Charlotte Neumann (* 1899), the sister of a friend who died in the war, whom he married in December 1920, six months after the birth of their first child. The marriage resulted in two more children. Another daughter came from a later marriage of Respondeks after the Second World War.

In the Weimar Republic (1919–32)

The wider public was Respondek 1919 known as it is in a widespread pamphlet against the "folly" of the British and French in the Treaty of Versailles stipulated reparations turned. The politics of the British and French are superficial and naive and only aim to break the backbone of the Germans. In addition to his work in the Reich Ministry of Finance, he began that year to give economic lectures at Berlin University.

In 1921 Respondek left the Reich Ministry of Finance and moved to the Foreign Office . There he formulated the texts of trade agreements and submitted reports on questions of reparations policy, on the economic aspects of the League of Nations and on the subject of political economy. At the end of 1923 Respondek was awarded the title of Honorary Consul for his services. Parallel to his work in the Foreign Office, Respondek maintained close contacts with the leaders of the German economy - such as Carl Friedrich von Siemens , Robert and Carl Bosch , Wilhelm Kalle and Carl Duisberg , who were often guests in his house in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Hermann Büchler finally made Respondek his assistant when he, Büchler, was appointed chairman of the Association of German Industry. He subsequently took on official advisory positions, among others for IG Farben , where he had a very good relationship with Kalle. In the winter semester of 1927/28 he was made an honorary member of the KStV Semnonia Berlin in the Cartel Association on the recommendation of Josef Wirmer . He headed this student union from 1931 to 1933 as a Philistine senior.

Parliamentary activity and Nazi period (1932–45)

From 1932 to 1933 Respondek was a member of the German Reichstag for the center , in which he represented constituency 9 (Oppeln). As a Catholic and close confidante of Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning , he rejected the rising National Socialist movement. In 1933 he nevertheless voted for the Enabling Act , according to his biographer van Dippel, in the hope that the Enabling Act would throw the Nazis "the rope by which they would ultimately hang themselves".

Before the Sudeten crisis of 1938 Respondek came into contact with the resistance against National Socialism . In particular, through his friend, the Jesuit Hermann Muckermann , he made connections with the Army Chief of Staff, Franz Halder . Respondek's biographer van Dippel also claims that he helped "dozen" Jews to flee Germany after 1933. During the Second World War Respondek was commissioned as a financial expert to produce the currency for the German-occupied territories of Russia. Through this activity and through his contacts with Halder, he learned of Hitler's plans to attack the Soviet Union in mid-1941 as early as August 1940 .

In January 1941 Respondek informed Sam E. Woods , the commercial attaché at the American embassy in Berlin, with whom he had been in contact for a long time, about the German plans to attack the Soviet Union. A report written by Respondek on the strategic, political and economic plans of the German Reich leadership was forwarded by Woods to the State Department in Washington, which thus became aware of the German invasion plans ( "Operation Barbarossa" ). After an authentication of Respondek (whom Woods always referred to as "Ralph" in his documents for security reasons) as a reliable man by his former party friend, the ex-Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who was living in exile in the United States at the time and as a professor at Harvard University , Respondek has been rated a trusted source by the State Department. The American Secretary of State Cordell Hull reported in his 1948 memoir that the warning from “Wood's anonymous friend Ralph” provided “good grounds for believing that Hitler would attack Russia” (“provided excellent reason to believe Hitler would attack Russia”) and formed the "basis of the American warning to the Soviet Union" (that a German invasion was imminent).

Historians William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason later ruled that Respondek's report was "of truly staggering import" as it provided clear evidence that Hitler's operational directives on an attack aimed at the Soviet Union.

In the years that followed, Respondek continued its informational work for the Americans and regularly sent them through his liaison man Woods with reports containing secret information he had obtained. Among other things, he informed the USA about the progress made in German nuclear weapons research and about his contacts with Kalle von German Zyklon B developments.

After the American entry into the war and the temporary internment of Woods by the German government at the end of 1941 (he was later released in exchange for German diplomats in the United States via Lisbon), Respondek's reports were conveyed via the American consulate in Zurich, where Woods had been since 1942 was active. Respondek's true identity was known only to a handful of top officials, even in the US State Department.

Respondek and “Ralph” in historical research

The identity of Respondek with the spy “Ralph” remained unknown for a long time after the war: Hull spoke of Respondek in his memoirs only using his alias and Respondek himself never commented on her - probably because it was in large parts of the German society in the first post-war decades had rather negative repute and was interpreted as treason for having been a resistance fighter.

The first researcher who managed to prove that Ralph was none other than Respondek was the American William E. Griffith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Griffith claimed to have met Respondek in 1945/1946 and to have learned from him that he, Respondek, Woods had already given a German occupation banknote for the East in 1940 (a 1000 ruble note). With reference to a report by Woods in which he claims to have received a 1000 ruble note from "Ralph", Griffith interpreted this as evidence of the identity of both men. In addition, Griffith pointed out parallels between the description of Ralph in a memorandum Woods with the résumé of Respondeks in the handbook of the Reichstag members for the year 1932.

In 1983 the historian Walter Laqueur characterized Respondek as “ a figure about whom [hardly anything] […] is known ” and stated that he could only find out through Respondek that he was born in 1894, studied economics and belonged to the Reichstag.

In the early 1990s, the American John van Dippel finally managed to come to terms with Respondek's life story. A decisive prerequisite for his book Two Against Hitler - a double biography of Respondeks and Woods - was that Dippel succeeded in locating surviving witnesses, including the widow Woods and two of Respondek's children, who could give him previously undocumented information. Secondly, Dippel Respondek was able to find original reports in Heinrich Brüning's estate and, after the opening of numerous archives in East Germany, Russia and Poland after the end of the Cold War, numerous Western researchers sifted through previously inaccessible material. Dippel described Respondek as a "lone wolf" who was successful as a spy because he had few friends and trusted few people in his life. It was thanks to his caution not to allow himself to be integrated into the anti-Hitler networks of the German resistance that he escaped the wave of persecution by the Gestapo after July 20, 1944 . He was always at the center of big events, but was invisible in them: "A man who made history without becoming a figure on its stage."

Respondek's partner Woods felt compelled to write a report to the State Department a few years after the end of the war: “ It is a bitter humiliation to me [...] that his services to our country have never been recognized or even acknowledged. "

Late life (1945-71)

In the early 1950s Respondek was a member of the federal executive committee of the All-German People's Party (GVP) founded by Gustav Heinemann in 1952 . Together with Heinemann, Respondek strongly opposed Konrad Adenauer's policies in the 1950s . For Heinemann, he acted in particular as a liaison to the Soviet military headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst , with which he had good connections. In later years Respondek lived a secluded life in Berlin, where he died of a heart attack in 1971. Unknown to the general public and even forgotten by the American government, only a few people attended Respondek's funeral at the Friedrichsfelde central cemetery in Berlin.

Fonts

• France's banking and finance during the war (Aug 1914 to Aug 1916) , 1917.
• Taxation and Borrowing Policy in France During the War , 1918. (Dissertation)
• War Compensation: Claims of Our Opponents , 1919.
• The Reich finances due to the reform of 1919/20 , 1921.
• Basics and criticism of the reparations report (1st expert report) , 1924.
• Course and result of the International Economic Conference of ... 1927.
• Economic cooperation between Germany and France , 1929.
• Trade policy reorganization of Europe. Most favored nation treatment and system of preferences , 1931.
• The importance of monetary gold in the current global economic crisis , 1931.
• Broad guidelines of European trade policy , 1933.

literature

• John Van Houten Dippel: Two Against Hitler. Stealing the Nazis' Best-Kept Secrets , 1992. (Double biography about Respondek and Woods)
• 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. 458 f.
• Siegfried Mielke (Ed.) With the collaboration of Marion Goers, Stefan Heinz , Matthias Oden, Sebastian Bödecker: Unique - Lecturers, students and representatives of the German University of Politics (1920-1933) in the resistance against National Socialism. Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-032-0 , p. 62 ff.

Web links

• Literature by and about Erwin Respondek in the catalog of the German National Library
• Erwin Respondek in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ^ Cordell Hull: The Memoirs of Cordell Hull , Vol. 2, 1948, p. 967.
2. ^ Undeclared War, 1940-1941, New York 1953, p. 336.
3. ↑ Patricia Hachten Wee: World War II in Literature for Youth. A Guide and Resource Book , 2004, p. 56.
4. ^ In 2010, Egmont R. Koch and Scott Christianson processed Respondek's agent activity during the Second World War in the documentary The Spy from Pariser Platz - How the Americans found out about Hitler's poison gas .
5. ↑ conversion value 100 Reichsmark [1]
6. ↑ Barton Whaley: Codeword Barbarossa, 1973, pp. 38 and 277. Master's thesis supervised by Griffith
7. ^ Walter Laqueur: America, Europe and the Soviet Union. Selected Essays , 1983, p. 151.
8. ↑ In the original it says: “A maker of history but not a figure upon its stage.” With a view to Respondek's lonely death and his oblivion in posterity, he adds: “In life his great skill at deftly concealing his tracks would serve him well, but in death it would be his undoing. "