Eugene Budde

Eugen Budde (born October 15, 1901 in Lüdenscheid ; † February 19, 1984 in Munich ) was a German lawyer and diplomat . After he had been in the diplomatic service from 1925 to 1939 and had worked part-time in the private sector, Budde worked in Switzerland and Italy as an economic advisor and general director until 1945 . Back in Germany, he made a name for himself as a critic of the dismantling and the Allied occupation policy. In particular, he advocated the thesis that the occupation policy violated international law . From 1950 he worked as General Secretary of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime . Together with Peter Lütsches , he represented a decidedly anti-communist conception of resistance against National Socialism .

Live and act

Budde studied law and political science in Marburg , Munich and Cologne from 1920 to 1923 . During his student days he joined the Association of German Students (VDSt). After the exam , he completed his legal clerkship in the Prussian judicial service on August 30, 1923 . In 1923/24 he also worked as a consultant for Mayweg und Co. Metallwaren and his father’s business. At the same time he published under the pseudonym Dr. Friedrich Carl Westphal in newspapers and on the radio. He also worked for the Working Committee of German Associations and the Reich Central Office for Homeland Service . In July 1925 he received his doctorate under Gotthold Bohne at the law faculty of the University of Cologne on the subject of "Control of Public Opinion in Politics".

On June 18, 1925, Budde was called up as an attaché in the Foreign Service . He initially performed his duties in Department IV (Culture). In 1926 he moved to Department III (British Empire, America, Orient) and in September 1926 to Department II (Western and Southeastern Europe). In 1928 he was promoted to legation secretary. As an adviser to the head of Department II, Gerhard Köpke , Budde is said to have worked on the Locarno Treaty and the Briand-Kellogg Pact . At this time Budde was politically close to the DNVP and the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten .

From 1934 to 1937 Budde worked at the German Embassy at the Holy See . From June 1935 he was a member of the supervisory board of Mühlenbau und Industrie AG ( MIAG ) in Braunschweig . He later became deputy chairman of the supervisory board. From March 1937 Budde was assigned to the German embassy in Bern as a delegation councilor . In March 1939 he was given leave of absence and removed from office in April 1939. He stayed in Switzerland , where he worked as a business advisor. In 1941 he became general director of the international mill cartel and a machine factory in Monza . In the literature there is information that Budde was a legation counselor in France , the Netherlands , Italy and Switzerland until 1938 and then emigrated to Switzerland . According to the International Biographical Archive ( Munzinger Archive ) as of August 30, 1948, Budde was excluded from the diplomatic service under Joachim von Ribbentrop and has since lived in exile in Switzerland and Italy. The news magazine Der Spiegel reported in 1949 that Budde had resigned from diplomatic service in 1935/36 after the Gestapo had found Budde's advice on foreign exchange law for an industrialist friend.

After returning to Germany in 1945, Budde was recognized as a victim of the Nazi regime. He settled in Bad Godesberg and became a member of the CDU and the foreign policy committee of the CDU in the British zone . He was committed to occupation policy and a possible peace treaty . He had been in contact with Konrad Adenauer , whom he advised on these issues, at least since the summer of 1946, possibly since the spring of 1946 . In newspaper articles, among other things, Budde took the view that the military government violated international law in its relations with the Germans .

Budde was a member of the zone advisory board and was supposed to represent the British zone in the country council, but this could not be realized. In 1947, at the request of Hermann Pünders, he became head of the “Peace Department” of the main office of the German Association of Cities in Bad Godesberg. Under his guidance, materials for a “Peace Manual for German Cities” should be collected in order to prepare a peace treaty. In his publication Is there still German foreign policy? he stylized most of the dealings between German authorities and the occupying powers as an “act of foreign policy”.

The Berliner Tagesspiegel characterized Budde's memoranda as “nationalistic excessiveness” and called politicians who argued against the Allied military authorities with the Hague Land Warfare Regulations and the Geneva Convention “Buddhists”. With reference to international law, Budde campaigned prominently for a refusal to dismantle . Although politicians informally advised him to exercise moderation, he was also invited to appropriate meetings by business representatives. However, his remarks were no longer acceptable when, from 1948 onwards, he started attacking state government representatives in the German-British committees as traitors and threatening them with "sharp reckoning". In January 1949 he caused a stir when he defended six workers who had refused to work on dismantling at the Bochumer Verein.

In August 1949, Budde demanded in a memorandum that the inclusion of the Federal Republic in the ERP contract program had to become the "great revision platform", "from which the political and economic efforts to keep down, especially France and Great Britain , should be systematically counteracted". These considerations were very different from the publicly exercised political restraint, but were supported by Budde's former superior Köpke.

After the CDU politician Peter Lütsches founded a Bund of Victims of the Nazi Regime as a decidedly anti-communist split from the VVN in February 1950 , Budde became Secretary General of the Bund. Together with Lütsches, he published the book Truth on July 20 in 1952 , which was intended on the one hand to reject the collective guilt thesis, and on the other to exclude communist resistance to National Socialism .

Fonts

• Dismantling, patents, international law. Lecture… September 23, 1947 in the large conference room of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Frankfurt aM , SL 1947.
• Is there still a German foreign policy? Reflections on the politics and diplomacy of a defeated state. by Hugo, Hamburg 1947.
• Expert opinion on the question of whether and in which case the destruction or removal of former Krupp armaments factories in Germany is permissible under international law. Rohden, Essen 1947.
• and Peter Lütsches: The European resistance fighters for the Schuman Plan and for Europe. A survey by Peter Lütsches and Eugen Budde. "The Free Word", Düsseldorf-Gerresheim 1951.
• and Peter Lütsches (ed.): The truth about July 20. Raven, Düsseldorf 1952.
• How do I justify my application for compensation for Nazi persecution? Detailed explanations with d. Wording d. Federal Compensation Act f. Victim d. National Socialist Persecution. Experience from d. Litigation practice d. Restitution right with sample applications. Notes on special discounts f. Victim d. National Socialist persecution in tax law. Stollfuss, Bonn 1953.

literature

• Maria Keipert, Peter Grupp, Historical Service of the Foreign Office (ed.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945 . Vol. 1: A – F (arranged by: Johannes Hürter , Martin Kröger, Rolf Messerschmidt, Christiane Scheidemann). Publisher FerdinandSchöningh. Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-71840-1 , p. 316 f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marc Zirlewagen: Biographies of the clubs German Students: Volume 1 - Members A-L . BoD, Norderstedt 2014, p. 114.
2. ^ ^{A b c} Maria Keipert, Peter Grupp, Historical Service of the Foreign Office (ed.): Biographical Manual of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945 . Vol. 1: A – F (arranged by: Johannes Hürter , Martin Kröger, Rolf Messerschmidt, Christiane Scheidemann). Publisher Ferdinand Schöningh. Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-71840-1 , p. 316 f.
3. ↑ Christoph Cobet (Ed.): Germany's Renewal, 1945–1950. Bio-bibliographical documentation with 433 texts , Antiquariat Cobet, 1985, np
4. ↑ ^{a b} Ursula Büttner, Angelika Voss-Louis (ed.): New beginning on rubble. The diaries of Bremen's Mayor Theodor Spitta, 1945–1947 . Oldenbourg, Munich 1992, p. 349, note 496.
5. ^ Petra Weber (edit.): The SPD parliamentary group in the German Bundestag. Minutes of meetings 1949–1957 . Vol. 1, Droste, Düsseldorf 1993, p. 427.
6. ↑ International Biographical Archive 37/1948 of August 30, 1948.
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Would you like to sit down, please . In: Der Spiegel 7/1949, February 12, 1949, p. 4. ( PDF ).
8. ^ Bernhard Diestelkamp : Legal history as contemporary history. Historical considerations on the development and implementation of the theory of the continued existence of the German Reich as a state after 1945 . In: ZNR 7 (1985), pp. 181-207, here p. 188.
9. ^ Kurt Koszyk: Press Policy for Germans 1945-1949. (History of the German Press, No. 4; Treatises and Materials on Journalism, No. 10.) . Colloquium, Berlin 1986, p. 70.
10. ^ Martina Köchling: dismantling policy and reconstruction in North Rhine-Westphalia . Klartext, Essen 1995 ( Düsseldorfer Schriften zur Neueren Landesgeschichte and the history of North Rhine-Westphalia 40), p. 124.
11. ^ Werner Bührer: West Germany in the OEEC. Integration, crisis, probation 1947–1961 . R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1997 ( sources and representations on contemporary history 32), p. 162 f.
12. ^ Jan Eckel : Hans Rothfels. An intellectual biography in the 20th century . Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, p. 260.
13. ↑ Regina Holler: July 20, 1944, Legacy or Alibi ?: How historians, politicians and journalists deal with the German resistance against National Socialism . KG Saur, Munich 1994, p. 84.