Felix Gaerte
Felix Otto Gaerte (born June 2, 1918 in Birnbaum ; † June 6, 2013 in Düsseldorf ) was a German diplomat. The legal dispute he started about the treatment of his Nazi past in the book The Office and the Past caused a stir .
life and career
His father Alfons was already active in the foreign service . Felix attended grammar school in Basel , where he founded the first youth group as the Hitler Youth , which he led until 1934. In 1937 he graduated from high school in Potsdam, joined the NSDAP ( membership number 4,910,278) in the spring and completed his compulsory time in the Reich Labor Service from April to October of that year . He then studied law. After his first state examination in 1940, Gaerte volunteered for the parachute force in May of that year , until he was released from the Air Force as a reserve lieutenant in October 1944 and assigned to the headquarters company of the Waffen SS at the Reich Security Main Office .
After the war, Gaerte first worked as a lawyer at the Balingen district office in the French-occupied Württemberg . In 1950/1, Gaerte completed the first course for candidates for the higher foreign service. In 1961 he was transferred to the Consulate General in Bombay and three years later promoted to Legation Councilor First Class at the headquarters of the Foreign Office (Department of Disarmament and Security). From 1967 to 1972 Gaerte headed the Consulate General in Melbourne .
In 2001 Gaerte published his memories under the title Also in the West Whistle of the Wind with Leopold Stocker Verlag in Graz , which also publishes right-wing extremist authors such as David Irving and Friedrich Romig .
Legal dispute about Gaerte's Nazi past
In 2011, Gaerte took legal action against the "false factual assertion" of the Independent Historians' Commission - the Foreign Office in its publication The Office and the Past , he had already joined the SS in 1937 for reasons of his career , had reached the rank of Untersturmführer and after the end of the Second World War " having been re-employed with false personal data in the AA ”. In March 2011, the Hamburg Regional Court initially prohibited the distribution of future editions of the book in an unchanged form by means of an injunction . The Karl Blessing Verlag refers contrast to the file location, around the Gaertes "SS clan Act", which Gaerte before his marriage in 1944 to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler asked permission. In his 2018 study, the historian Hans-Jürgen Döscher shows that Gaerte used the erroneous designation "SS-Untersturmbannführer" (there was no such rank) in The Office and the Past instead of what it should have been correctly called SS-Untersturmführer , as the actual was put on record, took the opportunity to assert counterfactually that he was never a member of the SS.
Gaerte's Nazi past had already been publicly discussed in the 1950s. As part of a five-part series of articles on the involvement of many diplomats in the Nazi regime from September 1951, the Frankfurter Rundschau raised the first allegations. As a result of the GDR's campaign against "war and Nazi criminals" in the FRG, the historian Kurt Rheindorf carried out investigations on behalf of the AA, which confirmed Gaerte's membership of the NSDAP and SS and led to a ban on promotion of several years because Gaerte was also on suspicion of his Held allegations.
Publications
- The wind whistles in the west too. From paratrooper to diplomat in the hot and cold war . Leopold Stocker, Graz 2001.
Web links
- Literature by and about Felix Gaerte in the catalog of the German National Library
- Hans-Jürgen Döscher : The Gaerte case. In: The time . March 10, 2011, accessed March 24, 2011 .
- Temporary injunction against “The Office and the Past” - but only effective for future conditions. Interview with the legal advisor of the Blessing publishing house Rainer Dresen. In: buchmarkt.de . March 3, 2011, accessed March 24, 2011 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: Focal points of contemporary history. Careers before and after 1945 . Osnabrück 2018, ISBN 978-1-977-00149-8 , pp. 20-23.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gardens, Felix |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gaerte, Felix Otto (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German diplomat |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 2, 1918 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | pear tree |
| DATE OF DEATH | 6th June 2013 |
| Place of death | Dusseldorf |