Fernand de Brinon

Brinon (center) in 1943 with the buried graves of the two Polish generals Mieczysław Smorawiński and Bronisław Bohatyrewicz, victims of the Katyn massacre

Fernand de Brinon (born August 26, 1885 in Libourne , Gironde department , † April 15, 1947 in Arcueil , Seine department , today Val-de-Marne ) was a French lawyer and journalist . He was one of the architects of the French collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II .

Life

Youth and family

Born into a wealthy, Catholic-conservative aristocratic family that has been documented since the 14th century , Comte Fernand de Brinon first studied law and political science in Paris . Before the beginning of the First World War he started a career as a journalist. In 1934 he married Jeanne Louise Rachel Franck, divorced Ullmann, from a Belgian-Jewish industrial family who brought two sons into the marriage. In 1938 Brinon inherited the Marquis title.

Working life

After the First World War, Brinon wrote mainly for the "Journal des Débats", a newspaper of the ore and steel industrialists de Wendel . After 1918 he went to Germany for interviews with Walther Rathenau , Maximilian Harden , Gustav Stresemann and Fritz Thyssen . I was welcomed by Hugo Stinnes as the only French journalist he wanted to allow entry . He also published articles in "L'Information" and in the 1930s in "Le Matin". In it he repeatedly advocated a compromise with Germany in order to secure lasting peace in Europe. During Heinrich Brüning's tenure , he went to see him on a secret mission on behalf of Prime Minister Pierre Laval .

On September 9, 1933, through the mediation of Joachim von Ribbentrop , Brinon was the first French journalist ever received by Adolf Hitler for a conversation in Berchtesgaden , the content of which he reproduced in an article in Le Matin , which was widely noticed in France . He was told by the German Chancellor: “I am insulted by continuing to claim that I want war. ... The war doesn't regulate anything. It could only make the state of the world worse. ... after the settlement of the Saar question there is nothing ... that could bring Germany and France into opposition. ”The leading NSDAP newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter , however, kept silent about this conversation. Maximilian Scheer is of the opinion that he delayed the Hitler interview by arrangement and placed it in such a way that the stock exchange reacted violently. He thinks that the financial circles behind the newspaper, ultimately the French branch of Royal Dutch Shell and Deterding itself, benefited greatly from these price movements and that this was a lure of the Nazis to French politics and economy, also the way to To strike fascism.

Between 1935 and 1937, Brinon, at that time already one of the core of the “better society” in Paris, was received five more times by Hitler.

politics

In 1935, together with Georges Scapini, a highly decorated war blind and independent member of parliament, Brinon founded the Comité France-Allemagne, which existed until 1940, to deepen intellectual exchange with Germany, both in the academic and political fields, of which he was vice-president. After the defeat of 1940 , Brinon made himself an advocate for a French collaboration with the German Reich . Pierre Laval, now Prime Minister of the Vichy regime , asked him in July 1940 to represent the French government at the German Commander-in-Chief in Paris. Its seat was the confiscated Hôtel de Breteuil in Paris (12 avenue Foch). Brinon benefited from his long acquaintance with the German ambassador Otto Abetz . Marshal Philippe Pétain awarded him the title of State Secretary in 1942. As the successor to the Comité France-Allemagne, Brinon organized the Groupe Collaboration in September 1940, which at times had 38,000 members. In August 1944 he resigned with the Vichy government in Sigmaringen Castle , where in September 1944 he became president of the Vichy government in exile . He was arrested on May 8, 1945 by US soldiers at the Austrian-Swiss border and transferred to France.

In March 1947, Brinon was by the Supreme Court in Versailles because of collaboration with the Germans and "national indignity" sentenced to death on April 15, 1947 Fort de Montrouge firing squad .

literature

• Corinna Franz: Fernand de Brinon and Franco-German relations 1918–1945. Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-416-02907-0 ( online at perspectivia.net).
• Martin Jungius: The Managed Robbery: The "Aryanization" of the French economy from 1940 to 1944 . Thorbecke, Ostfildern 2008, ISBN 978-3-7995-7292-7 .
• Wolfgang Kowalsky: Cultural Revolution? The new right in the new France and its predecessors . Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1991, ISBN 3-8100-0914-8 .
• Roland Ray: Approaching France in the Service of Hitler? Otto Abetz and the German policy on France 1930–1942 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-486-56495-1 .
• Maximilian Scheer: It was like that in Paris. 2nd edition. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1972, pp. 82–84.
• Martin Mauthner, Otto Abetz and His Paris Acolytes. French Writers Who Flirted with Fascism, 1930-1945. Sussex Academic Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-84519-784-1 .

Web links

• Newspaper article about Fernand de Brinon in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris (ms 1223, fol. 644) there are records of a parliamentary advocate Guillaume Brinon who died in 1400.
2. ↑ Paul Kluke: National Socialist European ideology in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte Heft 3/1955, p. 245 (fn. 23) , (PDF; 1.7 MB), accessed on July 11, 2016.
3. ↑ Biography on the website of the French National Assembly , accessed on July 11, 2016.
4. ↑ Thankmar Freiherr von Münchhausen: Paris: History of a City since 1800 . DVA, 2017, ISBN 978-3-641-21430-2 ( google.de [accessed on August 19, 2018]).
5. ^ Fiss, Karen: Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France. , University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 201, ISBN 978-0226252018 .